••can ye pass the acid test?••

ye who enter here be afraid, but do what ye must -- to defeat your fear ye must defy it.

& defeat it ye must, for only then can we begin to realize liberty & justice for all.

time bomb tick tock? nervous tic talk? war on war?

or just a blog crying in the wilderness, trying to make sense of it all, terror-fried by hate radio and FOX, the number of whose name is 666??? (coincidence?)

Thursday, September 08, 2005

i used to be a cynic, but...


...not too many months ago, i changed.

i was watching some right-winger ranting on tv. i don't even recall who it was, but from his body language and tone of voice i suddenly realized he sincerely believed what he wanted was best for the country.

he was wrong, of course. his grasp of history, fundamental american political theory, and the strategy of terror was grievously flawed, but he truly thought he knew whereof he spoke.

up till then i often assumed men like him just want to wield power, and that their particular agenda is calculatedly chosen to further that end. for example, they often choose conventional "wisdom" over a well-reasoned position on an issue, apparently because the commonplace appeals to a broader constituency, so conventionality automatically brings support (thus, power).

partly as a result of such behavior, common sense has gotten a bad name among otherwise right-minded people. once when i said our leaders should use it, two people said common sense isn't a good thing: people used to think earth was flat because of it.

no. flat earth was a commonplace idea, never a common sense one. common sense means looking around and observing moving objects appear and disappear over the horizon. it tells you right away that the surface must be curved. yet millions believed otherwise, because they unthinkingly accepted the commonplace, aka conventional "wisdom."

cynicism is the belief that people are motivated only by selfishness and are therefore insincere in their motives and actions.

i've come to believe that—tho there may be some real hypocrites around—GIGO is at least as widespread as selfishness, and murphy's law spreads it further every day.

i still think the "right" spreads phobias thru behavior modification (conditioning by association and repetition) via media, but i don't think they do it intentionally or mean-spiritedly. it's just that they're phobic too, and their phobias are contagious—in part—BECAUSE they're sincere.

No comments:

Post a Comment