When Ignorance is Bliss

Saw Breda's link to the story about the Occupy Folk and their problems organizing a society. At first of course, I laughed at their dilemma. Who wouldn't? But then I realized theirs is the problem of every age. And at the risk of sounding faux-philosophical, we all struggle to come up with a framework to explain the world we live in.

It is no small task - the consequences of where to live, where to work, whether to have children, and every other decision, accrue from our ability to establish a reasonably accurate mental map of our world. Nobody wants to be the one who spent a lifetime learning to captain a whaling ship - just as the world switched to gaslight.

The protestors are in that position. To judge by the number of them who demand student loan forgiveness, these spiritual descendents of the campus radicals of the sixties have gone deeply into debt to buy the magic beans offered by the education industry. But, where their forebears were at least exposed to the greatness of western intellectual achievement before consciously deciding to piss it all away, these poor fools have been steeped in nothing but empty platitudes tarted up as learning. This leaves them with nothing - they may reject the rejection-ism they have been indoctrinated with, but that is not the same as creating. Old ways of thinking cannot be abandoned if there are no alternatives available.

This is a generation which has been led into the wilderness and abandoned - I pity them and I fear for them.