It seems as though the world expects people to self-advocate, to be independent agents, functioning autonomously. Ironically, most people who do so are considered to be renegades, out of touch with "reality." From what I have gathered from the media (always a trustworthy source of factual information), Ron Paul is that kind of a political candidate. He is not saying what the two major political parties advocate for their platforms so he is being marginalized by them. What I also gather is that his message is starting to get through the forest of electronic noise. Put another way, the prisoners looking at Plato's cave wall are seeing a new, distinct shadow, but is it just another amorphous mirage? They'll get back to each other on that.
This is not a political blog, though. The question is: How much is the average person really a self-advocate? Is the majority of what we believe we are choosing just pre-packaged realities others want us to accept for ourselves? If we step too far outside of those choices, are we in grave danger? For example, did the deaths of Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, and the Kennedy brothers guarantee that the rest of us would stay in line from now on? Will there ever be such heroic people again? Are there already such heroic people around us today?
Do you have thoughts, or do your thoughts have you?
Memes, a term coined by Richard Dawkins, consist of bits of information - some small, some large - that are encoded in various forms - written, auditory, symbolic, etc. - and then replicated by other machines or organisms. To put it more simply, memes are pieces of information that exist in one place and are copied to another place, such as from one mind to another. This is why we can finish corporate jingles once someone has begun them. If I write "My bologna has a first name," many 30-plus adults will follow it with, "it's O-S-C-A-R." If I write "You deserve a break today," those same adults will frequently say or sing, "at McDonald's." Corporate jingles, manufactured decades ago are still encoded in the neurochemistry of our minds.
This becomes a problem when our minds become fragmented by the meme viruses that are roaming around their neural playgrounds and causing psychic entropy. This leads to an unfocused, even chaotic state of mind in which it is working very hard on nothing in particular because the incoming stimuli are overwhelming it.
"Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity." I have to chuckle a bit when I think of Henry David Thoreau in the 1840s as he escaped the chaos of his life to go off to Walden Pond and solitude. He was concerned, even then, about how much people were getting disconnected from their humanity by the minutiae of (then) modern life and the burgeoning Industrial Revolution. What would he say now? His concerns occurred well before deluge of memes called the Internet, well before television and the telephone, and even the telegraph was in sparse use during his time. He used to grouse about the fact that he stopped reading the newspaper because, once you had read about one theft, one murder, one war, you knew about pretty much every theft, murder or war after that. To him, the news got old.
I recognize the irony of writing this entry and posting it online. I am sending out yet another school of memes into the ocean of electronic ideas. Think of this set of memes, though, as a potential defragmentation program. Log off the computer; click off the cable TV; give your thumbs a rest. Calm the sea of troubles that has saturated your mind by learning how not to think, not to puzzle, not to worry about minutiae. Put your brain in sleep mode every once in awhile....
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