A new essay in Jacobin explores how declining literacy rates may reshape political thought, drawing on Soviet neuropsychologist Alexander Luria's landmark 1931 research. Luria traveled to the Alai Mountains between Uzbekistan and Kirghizia to study how literacy affects cognition among previously illiterate peasants and herders being forced into Soviet collective farms. His findings revealed striking cognitive differences between literate and non-literate populations.

In Luria's experiments, subjects with even basic literacy could easily solve abstract reasoning tasks—sorting geometric shapes by type and completing syllogisms about distant places. Illiterate participants consistently refused, insisting they couldn't answer questions about places they'd never visited or scenarios contradicting reality. One villager refused to solve a math problem because Fergana was actually closer than Vuadil. Luria noted these people weren't stupid; they simply lived in a world bounded by direct sensory experience.

The implications extend to modern concerns. US literacy peaked around 2014 and has declined since, with 40% of fourth-graders now reading at "below basic" levels. The essay argues that transformative politics requires abstract thinking—imagining alternatives to current conditions—which depends on text-shaped cognition. Without literacy, only rumors and prejudice remain.