November 21, 2003
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This post was inspired by a post on AutumnAsh84‘s blog. My 2 cents was more like 25 cents, so I decided to post it here instead. You can read his post here. My “reply” is below.
People do say honesty is the best policy, but in this day and age, honesty is more likely to get you ostracized. People’s skins are too thin of late. We’ve grown so far away from enlightened discussion of ideas and even satire, that any poetically dissident statement becomes a personal attack on one’s ethics and beliefs -precisely because the words have been thought out.
We have evolved from self-expressive creatures who learn about ourselves by interaction with others to a mind-blind species who find the path to self-enlightenment through thirty second tv commercials. We don’t know who we are; we’re told who we are. And those few who can still think for themselves and discover who they are for themselves are deemed not properly socialized. Obviously, any thinkers in today’s world have not learned how to conform to society’s expected level of mediocrity.
I think it all started when they made Socrates drink the hemlock. That’s when the world turned against thinkers. Thinkers corrupt the young with free thought after all. We can’t have young folk thinking for themselves. Who would fight the wars? Who would blindly follow the religious “right”? Why, if people started thinking instead of following, religious differences, wars, corrupt politics… Why, the hallmarks of civilization would crumble in a matter of decades!
Anarchy!!
So remember kids, thinking is ba-aa-aah-d.
Comments (3)
Thanks for the free advertising
. Like I said in my post, I’m not self-righteous about all this – in fact, I’m not sure of any of it. Because I’m constantly plauged by the question: if we dispel the Judeo-Christian notion of an overarching moral imperative, from whence cometh the moral imperative to think rather than to live in blissful ignorance? In fact, by being disdainful of other people’s ignorant hedonism, I in some ways come close to being one of those Christian moralists insisting on “reason” and “truth”, and that is the last thing I want to do. So I don’t know. Actually, if I could live in blissful ignorance I would, but since I am already not ignorant (or so I like to think), I cannot make the choice to become thus. Think of The Matrix – you can be perfectly happy living there and being fed experiences that you think are real, and if you never found out, it would make absolutely no difference in your life. But once you take the blue (or red?) pill that shows you the truth, you can never be satisfied within the Matrix again, because you know that it’s fake, and you must completely concentrate on the much more difficult, painful life in the ‘real’ world. I think I’m going to have to write another entry on this.
mr. ash, your very words (references more like) prove such a fallen culture to be true…
to be blunt, if a hollywood movie can become a vessel for a discussion on the ‘right way to live, the good life’ , then yeah we are far from thinking ‘freely’…. and as for moral imperatives, lets remove the judeo-christian(neo-platonic) readings of ancient philosophy, i mean lets go all da way back yo, to da homie P (plato)… i mean moral imperatives cannot be understood through its temporal value… or else it would not be a moral imperative in the larger ‘maxim’ sense….our moral imperative of thinking rationally through philosophizing…. perhaps
short from making/attempting any sort of unfulfillnig incomplete argument,
i bid you young man to continue to pose questions/inquire, its maybe the best we can do…ignorance is not bliss, its just a misunderstanding of what hapiness is…
keep up the good work guys, harmony0stars and ashhh…. maybe we then jesus will love us… DAMMIT my hidden agenda has been revealed… no im kidding..
oh and heres the rest of my change (apx. 3 cents)… i think all was lost when the jurymen of athenians opted for death for socrates… it ended there, and thats when we began to bleed the wrong way
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