We increasingly witness a society which is being governed by emotional and political qualms despite their stark contradictions with reality.
In many senses, we are today dealing in a world of protests against organic phenomena or sheer human preference, as if we encountered a collapsing tree or a runaway train and dared to stand in front of it and pronounce it wrong or incorrect.
Despite our opinions on those two scenarios, the tree will likely only continue to fall until it reaches the ground, just as the train is likely to proceed right through the impassioned shouts of of caffeinated protestors.
Standing in front of the train or in the path of the falling tree is just as foolish as condemning the properties of this world and attempting to redefine them to better resemble the world of one’s dreams.
In this sense, we bear witness to a host of excitable chatterboxes who deal in an ill-defined world wholly separate from reality, where fashionable suppositions and emotional appeals popularly triumph over the unwavering laws of physics and the complex and steadfast phenomena which endure despite popular redefinitions of terms.
The inspired realist, then, thrusts himself into the unceasing battle against social inertia, which grows only more intense and more insurmountable with every motion picture, every social media post and viral video, and every utterance from the grandstanding demagogue who stands to gain so little (in comparison) by honestly admitting his or her faults and the limits of his or her understanding, a deficit which is commonly ignored, circumvented or offset by enthusiastic delivery, the latter of which serves as a highly-marketable knock-off in the marketplace of ideas, where unwitting and impressionable consumers line up to latch onto easily-digestible epigrams and wondrous one-liners.
Unfortunately, this brings us no nearer to understanding this world, nor any closer to any semblance of the truth.
Of course, this is seldom the agenda of those who wish to sell ideas which inherently bear little to no extractable value until a greater fool (or set of fools) has accepted or endorsed them. Even then, the ideas serve only to defraud the unsuspecting intellectual of the wealth he has accumulated through a substantive value-adding enterprise.
In this case, we witness a form of learning which is more precisely aligned with fantasy or entertainment, an ersatz substitute for the real thing.
However, this appears to be the way of the Western world today, where possessions and even values and connections have become more superficial and more dispensable than ever, where excuses have become as valuable as (or more valuable than) experience, where feelings rival facts, where instant gratification has triumphed over patience and diligence, where some are born with responsibilities and others with entitlements, and where diversity is measured no deeper than the surface of the skin.
We are left staring at a banner, relishing its representation of a free world which exists only in text books or in the sleepy minds of hopeless romantics.
And so a cohort of perfectly-dogmatic idealists propagates a whitewashed history while delusional dreamers tax the public to pave the primrose path toward an ever-elusive utopia everywhere at the expense of the liberties which once made life relatively exceptional (or at least customizable) in the first place.
In many senses, we are today dealing in a world of protests against organic phenomena or sheer human preference, as if we encountered a collapsing tree or a runaway train and dared to stand in front of it and pronounce it wrong or incorrect.
Despite our opinions on those two scenarios, the tree will likely only continue to fall until it reaches the ground, just as the train is likely to proceed right through the impassioned shouts of of caffeinated protestors.
Standing in front of the train or in the path of the falling tree is just as foolish as condemning the properties of this world and attempting to redefine them to better resemble the world of one’s dreams.
In this sense, we bear witness to a host of excitable chatterboxes who deal in an ill-defined world wholly separate from reality, where fashionable suppositions and emotional appeals popularly triumph over the unwavering laws of physics and the complex and steadfast phenomena which endure despite popular redefinitions of terms.
The inspired realist, then, thrusts himself into the unceasing battle against social inertia, which grows only more intense and more insurmountable with every motion picture, every social media post and viral video, and every utterance from the grandstanding demagogue who stands to gain so little (in comparison) by honestly admitting his or her faults and the limits of his or her understanding, a deficit which is commonly ignored, circumvented or offset by enthusiastic delivery, the latter of which serves as a highly-marketable knock-off in the marketplace of ideas, where unwitting and impressionable consumers line up to latch onto easily-digestible epigrams and wondrous one-liners.
Unfortunately, this brings us no nearer to understanding this world, nor any closer to any semblance of the truth.
Of course, this is seldom the agenda of those who wish to sell ideas which inherently bear little to no extractable value until a greater fool (or set of fools) has accepted or endorsed them. Even then, the ideas serve only to defraud the unsuspecting intellectual of the wealth he has accumulated through a substantive value-adding enterprise.
In this case, we witness a form of learning which is more precisely aligned with fantasy or entertainment, an ersatz substitute for the real thing.
However, this appears to be the way of the Western world today, where possessions and even values and connections have become more superficial and more dispensable than ever, where excuses have become as valuable as (or more valuable than) experience, where feelings rival facts, where instant gratification has triumphed over patience and diligence, where some are born with responsibilities and others with entitlements, and where diversity is measured no deeper than the surface of the skin.
We are left staring at a banner, relishing its representation of a free world which exists only in text books or in the sleepy minds of hopeless romantics.
And so a cohort of perfectly-dogmatic idealists propagates a whitewashed history while delusional dreamers tax the public to pave the primrose path toward an ever-elusive utopia everywhere at the expense of the liberties which once made life relatively exceptional (or at least customizable) in the first place.
Comments
Post a Comment