Where did the thinking people go? They were there it seems just a moment ago, and then when I looked around, they were gone.
You remember thinking, don't you? That exercise where you took disparate elements and bounced them around in your mind; testing one thesis against another; comparing one with the other; looking at alternative views? You say, you don't remember? Perhaps that is because we have evolved beyond thought.
What happened to thought? Where did it go? It was nothing less, dear reader, than murder most foul. Yes, thought has died, and we are the perpetrators of this most heinous crime. We have killed it, and left it to lie bleached and dessicated under the blazing sun, on the barren sands of greed and selfishness. We murdered thought when we surrendered our free will to the panderers of partisan wrangling and sound bite discourse.
Our obsession with instant gratification and the inability to take the time for patient analysis had already sapped thought of much of its vitality, rendering it vulnerable and weak. It was knocked to its knees by our reckless pursuit of short term profits and instant solutions.
Our educational system, with its focus on tests without intellectual content, was an unindicted conspirator in the slaying. Fear of lawsuits and anger from parents who wanted little Faith to pass whether or not she could read or count to ten without letting her conceptualize whatever she was saying. Schools that pushed millions of barely literate 'graduates' out into the world were the scenes of the crime.
A legal system that aided and abetted development of a culture of blaming others for whatever goes wrong, and never accepting personal responsibility played a critical role in the death of thought. We quit thinking for ourselves; the system was there to do this on our behalf. Like the fish that lives in darkness and finally evolves into a creature without eyes, we are rapidly becoming organisms who only need our brains to perform the necessary functions that keep us alive, like eating, breathing and heartbeat.
Thought is dead. One can only hope and pray that, like Lazarus, it can be brought back to life before it is too late.
You remember thinking, don't you? That exercise where you took disparate elements and bounced them around in your mind; testing one thesis against another; comparing one with the other; looking at alternative views? You say, you don't remember? Perhaps that is because we have evolved beyond thought.
Our obsession with instant gratification and the inability to take the time for patient analysis had already sapped thought of much of its vitality, rendering it vulnerable and weak. It was knocked to its knees by our reckless pursuit of short term profits and instant solutions.
Our educational system, with its focus on tests without intellectual content, was an unindicted conspirator in the slaying. Fear of lawsuits and anger from parents who wanted little Faith to pass whether or not she could read or count to ten without letting her conceptualize whatever she was saying. Schools that pushed millions of barely literate 'graduates' out into the world were the scenes of the crime.
A legal system that aided and abetted development of a culture of blaming others for whatever goes wrong, and never accepting personal responsibility played a critical role in the death of thought. We quit thinking for ourselves; the system was there to do this on our behalf. Like the fish that lives in darkness and finally evolves into a creature without eyes, we are rapidly becoming organisms who only need our brains to perform the necessary functions that keep us alive, like eating, breathing and heartbeat.
Thought is dead. One can only hope and pray that, like Lazarus, it can be brought back to life before it is too late.
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