If You Don't Go In...

America's absurdist present is the result of her prosperous past.

In today's times, most people make decisions based on that which they THINK they know rather than what they actually do know.

That's not really new, but what is new in America is the lack of curiosity to truly go far enough to find out.

Americans were once explorers, seekers of truth - and were willing to go to extreme ends to find it.

Now people search for reality behind a $3800 set of “augmented” VR goggles from Apple.

Because it is easier than a real search for meaning.

Some of it has to do with confirmation bias, some emotional reasoning - but when you look at history, absurdity takes hold during cycles of relative prosperity. Prosperity is the insulation between bad ideas and reality. Prosperity places distance between the human mind and the savagery of nature.

Driving God and love of country out of society has left so many empty people searching for meaning. Without those two things, empty, ungrounded, Quixotic minds invent dragons to go slay. The nice thing about that is if you invent the problem, you get to invent the solution.

Prosperity is generally great, but in the empty mind and heart, it prevents the absurdist from ever needing to put his ideas to the test.

Thomas Sowell once wrote that we have lost the ability to think:

"It is always amazing how many serious issues are not discussed seriously, but instead simply generate assertions and counter-assertions. On television talk shows, people on opposite sides often just try to shout each other down.

There is a remarkable range of ways of seeming to argue without actually producing any coherent argument.

Decades of dumbed-down education no doubt have something to do with this, but there is more to it than that. Education is not merely neglected in many of our schools today, but is replaced to a great extent by ideological indoctrination. Moreover, it is largely indoctrination based on the same set of underlying and unexamined assumptions among teachers and institutions.

If our educational institutions – from the schools to the universities – were as interested in a diversity of ideas as they are obsessed with racial diversity, students would at least gain experience in seeing the assumptions behind different visions and the role of logic and evidence in debating those differences.

Instead, a student can go all the way from elementary school to a Ph.D. without encountering any fundamentally different vision of the world from that of the prevailing political correctness.

Moreover, the moral perspective that goes with this prevailing ideological view is all too often that of people who see themselves as being on the side of the angels against the forces of evil – whether the particular issue at hand is gun control, environmentalism, race or whatever."

A good friend of mine gave me an expressionist print about 30 years ago that hangs in my office today. The somewhat lengthy title of it is:

"The irony is this – if you don’t go in…you can’t find out."

I’ve always been intrigued by that statement – because it is so true.

You have to be willing to go in to find out…and sometimes that is painful. There are too many on both sides who are not willing to see the things that simply don’t agree with their perception of the truth because it hurts.

I believe that is why so few are willing to do it today.