There’s doing and there’s talking

Those who can’t do — talk

Obviously

 

But

There’s the necessary talking

Necessary thinking

The talking and thinking we do — to decide what to DO

 

Therefore politicians exist

Journalists exist

Writers exist

Sociologists exist

Philosophers exist

Professors exist

etc

 

That too can be done more seriously or less

One can speak very precisely

And hold himself accountable to all he has ever claimed

 

Or

This can be done purely instrumentally

To achieve some end

(but without doing anything, only manipulating. If one could do it without manipulating — he would have)

 

Then

Then there’s you and me

And our great opinions!

 

Who knows if we would care about opinions so much,

if we were actually busy doing something amazing

genuinely doing something amazing, that we loved

 

Maybe we would be

Maybe we would have memetically acquired that desire

Maybe we would have believed that HAVING OPINIONS is so important

If you believe it’s important — then it is important

Therefore you have opinions

Maybe you’ve more opinions than you’ve things going on, in your life

 

Now,

I think this was ever a problem

We don’t think about thinking, about having opinions

We don’t think which of our thoughts are useful, are what we want — and which we only think are useful

This was already a problem

 

But I think it got worse

It got worse as we got MORE information

MORE opinions

MORE ideas

MORE problems

And

of course we believed them

 

This was ever a double-edged sword: the KNOWING

The philosophy the history the culture the ideas the beliefs the concepts

Always a double-edged sword

It’s what makes our societies work

It’s what inspires us to explore this wonderful world of ideas and culture

AND

And it’s what drives us insane

Distracts us from living

Convinces us that ideas are real, and our life is not

That our life is an idea to bring to a certain state

Rather than what is actually happening right here right now

 

AND THEN it got worse

Then we got more ideas

 

AND THEN IT GOT WORSE

I think today we finally even lost our reverence for ideas

Time was it was the bumpkin, the ignoramous, the philistine — who despised ideas…

for perhaps he actually LIVED in the present,

shit as it was

Today

Today everyone is a mean ignorant who HATES ideas — but also LOVES ideas, LOVES to be indulged by ideas

The difference being: we utterly democratised ideas

And DEBASED ideas

Utterly debased ideas,

Gave the ideas to the ignorant and the fool and the bumpkin and the philistine

They all got an idea

We told them: Go grab an idea

We told them: You need to have an opinion

And if they didn’t like any — we MADE them something special

Something controversial

Or angry

Or conspiratorial

Or lewd

Or violent

We found for them an idea to indulge and entertain themselves with

And told them to HATE those other ideas too

That they had nothing to be ashamed of

That those were bad ideas, if they thought so

Just go grab some ideas, any deas

Just go consume ideas

 

And here we are today

Fools are even more stupid than ever

Liars and frauds don’t exist because everything you disagree with is a lie, and everything you agree with is THE truth

The left is further left and the right is further right

The smart are more likely to be deranged

They try to be the mad genius, end up just mad

 

The normal has became the king again

Because you can’t trust no one with the abnormal

He will not be able to tell apart the good normal from the bad normal

Nor will he think twice — because there are no more consequences for being a clown and being wrong. Being abnormal is no longer a risk to take — we normalised being abnormal, in a bad way

Except we didn’t — because it’s not you as an individual who is so brave to have different views

It’s the entire group that is so deranged so as to believe this is the new reality

The normalisation of the abnormal and extreme and fringe is the consolidation of it into subcultures and groups and entire channels and spheres and webs

It’s not an individual pursuit of ideas — it’s tribalisation of the society, with same tribal collective derangement, and none of the positive tribal, societal cohesion

 

This is what we get for commodifying ideas even further

This is what we get for commodifying opinions even further

 

The pendulum must swing in the other direction again

The bumpkin must know he’s a bumpkin

The ignorant must know he’s a ignorant

The fool must know he’s a fool

And the expert must earn his expertise

And a public person must earn our trust

And an opinion must become a thing of value again

And an idea must become a thing of value again

 

Until this process is reversed,

We will continue to become more deranged

More confused

More conflicted

More fragmented

More mad

 

Sell your ideas

Sell ideas you got from others

Let’s collapse the value of those false ideas, all this garbage outrage and misinformation and nonsense

So that the landscapes clears a little,

The air purifies

Focus on actually doing something useful, in the meantime

And return only when it’s more clean

Once we rebuilt but a modicum of self-respect and seriousness

This is no environment to hear good ideas, they are drowned out by the noise of nonsense and lies

Let’s all get some quiet

And return when we are ready to talk

And no taste for the extreme, the polarising, the contentious, the vulgar