Thursday 14 November 2013

Who is running your mind?

This is for the practical men. The ones who reject theory, the ones who deny thought. Those who claim to live and think only by their experience and feel of reality. They dismiss logics and reason for some intuitive derivation, it's right because they feel it. These are the men that say to be immune to intellectual influence. It's a fatal conceit, the absolute lack of method and the presumptuous attitude towards knowledge make them a potential deadly threat to others.



"Those who ignore history are bound to repeat it." 
- George Santayana

Like with history, those who ignore philosophy are doomed to have their minds enslaved. How so? I'll let the words of Ayn Rand expand this claim: 


“As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation - or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind's wings should have grown.”
- Ayn Rand


Indeed, we live in a world that breathes ideology. There are ideas everywhere, we cannot avoid them. We think and we act, so it is implied that we must have a methodology to execute these operations (even the case of the methodology of no methodology). These ways to think and act are a product of Philosophy, they have been created, debated and documented over the centuries; just because one doesn't know what's his, it doesn't mean he doesn't have one.

There's some sort of a red pill question I'm going to present to you: "Who is running your mind?" - If you operate by ideas, and these ideas were most likely created by famous thinkers, some or a long time ago, do you know who they are? Do you know their work? Are you aware of the implications of such ideas to yourself and to ones around you?
There are serious risks in following intuitively what we hear here and there. Philosophy matters, it provides several tools to dissect ideas and concepts. It is one self's responsibility to decide the complete ownership of its own mind. To conclude, there is a quote by a famous economist that would be very suited for this occasion:

“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”
- J. M. Keynes