Piter's got a bit of a harsh negative view on society today. When looked at from an
anthropological perspective, the sense of '
magic' people have concerning everyday events makes a lot of sense.
According to
post-modern anthropological theory, there are three types of culture, defined by levels of complexity. Briefly, the first,
small-scale culture consists of people living in small 'bands', with their primary concerns being nourishment and leisure. Moving up, in
large-scale culture, '
specialists' begin to emerge to service the new ruling class. Tax collectors, priests, and the like. These specialists know things that others don't. In effect, they know things so that the rest of society doesn't have to know them and can continue on with their work.
In our current
global-scale culture, things have gotten very complex. There is way too much stuff out there for everyone to know. Basically everyone has become a
specialist in some fashion. In
small-scale culture, you or your mate or parents fetches the food. In
large-scale culture you buy food from the farmer's market. In
global-scale culture you buy the food from a giant chain which handles transporting it from far flung regions of the earth (farmed by people being paid
peanuts). The knowledge of how to obtain food is
abstracted away from people's lives.
My point is, if everyone knew how to make a cool
bagel or fix
computers and a
zillion different things, their brains would be filled up with this mundane knowledge instead of some cool specailized knowledge.