Error Paradigm
We are a society built around avoiding the truth.
How can that be though? We live in a world with more progress than anyone can manage to find in the collective history of humanity's archives. Don't we, especially those of us most closely aligned with the "Western Tradition", have more power, capacity and freedom than the most powerful despots of only a few centuries ago?
Certainly we live in a world of great peril. But anyone who questions our superior status with respect to those of ages past must certainly come to the only viable conclusion available. Namely, that we've arrived. No incarnation of any vestige of civilization has closer to the threshold of transcendence than we have.
Yet I still proclaim--We are a society built around avoiding the truth.
Look anywhere and you will see a society that is always ensuring that it's aim is just short of truth. Our schools train up those who can either fit into irrelevant presets that we hope are some indicators of capacity. All they really are, however, are simple indicators of those who can figure out a system and work themselves into it sufficiently to get by. When our education attempts are not having our pupils focus on obtaining and maintaining a status quo they are setting them on courses of achievements that are designed primarily for the obtainment of either praise, entertainment, or misdirected force and resources.
It brings to mind a wise English teacher who knew to teach more than English. After a short story we could scarcely understand in it's many meanings he brought up the question about institutions. He asked us if we could name any of the institutions in the world that had lost it’s meaning or original intent. We were all so brain-dead to the idea. Our 'education' had never even thought to teach us the application of critical thinking to anything beyond what we were taught to be critical of. We'd all been raised by our culture so as to limit ourselves to paradigm shifts only along certain axes. We couldn't even conceptualize a dimensional shift, or any other shift or change that would bring us to question the very moorings that our paradigm shifting had been engrained in and revolved about.
So what does any of this matter? If my view of the current report detailing the helplessness of many college students is even near correct then the hope of us even being able to reach a sliver of the populace needed to effect change would be daunting to say the least. Especially since the odds of them reading and trying to understand what I'm really trying to say, and then having these words entice them to progressive action, are so close to nothing.
I suppose I best get started in at least making some suggestions to people so that perhaps, just maybe, they might have the capacity to, at the very least, encourage the coming generation to do what so few in society have ever had the cognitive capacities, developed from and through their environment, to do.
First off. Do all you can to make learning enticing for everyone around you. Tell some little kid the intricacies of something in a manner simple enough for them to understand but complex enough that they'll feel excited when they realize they've grasped something far more complex than they thought they ever could.
If that's not available to you then try and teach a kid how to use an unabridged dictionary and how fun it can be to learn about words and their origins. Find funny words. Absurdly long words. Words you probably can't correctly pronounce until several references to the phonetic guides. If you don't know how to do all that with a dictionary try and teach such to yourself.
Words are the basic units of our communications. They are like the most basic building blocks of our awareness. The more we have the more exacting and precise our self-awareness can be.
As long as we do not get lost in excessive wordiness or change complex rhetoric into a tool for vanity we should be much better off. And even with that as a risk I say we'd be far better off with the risk of more formidable demagogues who can be held to a higher bar for their crimes at the true judgment bar of God, or karma, or whatever cause and effect set-up you give heed to. For good to prevail the overall intelligence absorbed and used must continue to climb. Even in spite of our society’s endemically flawed aim.
--Find the Hive
How can that be though? We live in a world with more progress than anyone can manage to find in the collective history of humanity's archives. Don't we, especially those of us most closely aligned with the "Western Tradition", have more power, capacity and freedom than the most powerful despots of only a few centuries ago?
Certainly we live in a world of great peril. But anyone who questions our superior status with respect to those of ages past must certainly come to the only viable conclusion available. Namely, that we've arrived. No incarnation of any vestige of civilization has closer to the threshold of transcendence than we have.
Yet I still proclaim--We are a society built around avoiding the truth.
Look anywhere and you will see a society that is always ensuring that it's aim is just short of truth. Our schools train up those who can either fit into irrelevant presets that we hope are some indicators of capacity. All they really are, however, are simple indicators of those who can figure out a system and work themselves into it sufficiently to get by. When our education attempts are not having our pupils focus on obtaining and maintaining a status quo they are setting them on courses of achievements that are designed primarily for the obtainment of either praise, entertainment, or misdirected force and resources.
It brings to mind a wise English teacher who knew to teach more than English. After a short story we could scarcely understand in it's many meanings he brought up the question about institutions. He asked us if we could name any of the institutions in the world that had lost it’s meaning or original intent. We were all so brain-dead to the idea. Our 'education' had never even thought to teach us the application of critical thinking to anything beyond what we were taught to be critical of. We'd all been raised by our culture so as to limit ourselves to paradigm shifts only along certain axes. We couldn't even conceptualize a dimensional shift, or any other shift or change that would bring us to question the very moorings that our paradigm shifting had been engrained in and revolved about.
So what does any of this matter? If my view of the current report detailing the helplessness of many college students is even near correct then the hope of us even being able to reach a sliver of the populace needed to effect change would be daunting to say the least. Especially since the odds of them reading and trying to understand what I'm really trying to say, and then having these words entice them to progressive action, are so close to nothing.
I suppose I best get started in at least making some suggestions to people so that perhaps, just maybe, they might have the capacity to, at the very least, encourage the coming generation to do what so few in society have ever had the cognitive capacities, developed from and through their environment, to do.
First off. Do all you can to make learning enticing for everyone around you. Tell some little kid the intricacies of something in a manner simple enough for them to understand but complex enough that they'll feel excited when they realize they've grasped something far more complex than they thought they ever could.
If that's not available to you then try and teach a kid how to use an unabridged dictionary and how fun it can be to learn about words and their origins. Find funny words. Absurdly long words. Words you probably can't correctly pronounce until several references to the phonetic guides. If you don't know how to do all that with a dictionary try and teach such to yourself.
Words are the basic units of our communications. They are like the most basic building blocks of our awareness. The more we have the more exacting and precise our self-awareness can be.
As long as we do not get lost in excessive wordiness or change complex rhetoric into a tool for vanity we should be much better off. And even with that as a risk I say we'd be far better off with the risk of more formidable demagogues who can be held to a higher bar for their crimes at the true judgment bar of God, or karma, or whatever cause and effect set-up you give heed to. For good to prevail the overall intelligence absorbed and used must continue to climb. Even in spite of our society’s endemically flawed aim.
--Find the Hive
posted by HiveRadical | 10:52 PM
1 Comments:
Hi there
I wanted to email you privately but couldn't find anywhere to do so, so I will try just commenting on one of your old posts! I came across some old banter you had on an athiest's website back in 07 and just wanted to commend you on how you handled yourself. In amongst the rhetoric you made this statement...
"In short it's the nature of debate. Rarely in a bona fide debate where each side believes their way is any of the actual participants going to be much swayed. It's often the audience, those reading, the unobserved regions of the debate, where things can happen.
I read that, and thought wow, he is so right and he has no idea that I am the audience, and I am the one where things are happening. I won't go into it too much more, since this is so public, but thank you SO much for pretty much re-converting my heart to the gospel. You answered a lot of questions I had in my mind.
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