external can change our internal ability to be aware, to appreciate, to
live, to feel.
Once we are initially convinced that not just money, but an idea of
morality, education, and yes, general wealth, parlay into
contentment, we become rats on a spinning wheel and we’ll spend
the rest of our lives there if we aren’t careful.
If you’ve never heard of it before, we all seem to be suffering from
a sort of Diderot Effect. Denis Diderot was a philosopher during the
Enlightenment, author of the fictional essay “Regrets
On Parting
With My Old Dressing Gown.” As the story goes, he lived a very
simple life and was happy until a friend gave him a gift, a gorgeous
scarlet dressing gown. The more he wore his gown around his small
apartment, the more the simplicity of his life seemed…out of place.
He then desired new furnishings, as one with a dressing gown as
beautiful as his shouldn’t be living in a lowly home. He then wanted
to replace his other clothes, his wall hangings, and so on. He wound
up in debt and toiling his life away trying to maintain the glamour of
his surroundings—an elusive, endless task.
Because modern, daily life keeps us consistently dipping our toes
and dousing our senses in ads and “success stories” that are born of
luxury and married to materialism, it is almost impossible to take a
step back and see the system objectively. So most don’t.
I don’t know about you, but I have never seen a god so worshipped
and adored as a dollar bill. Never so much faith put into systems
designed to maintain power and serve the ego. The most insidiously
effective governors are the ones that do not tell you they are
controlling you, and they are the ones who have programmed your
need
to keep running on the wheel, staring at the illusory screen,
thinking you’re heading to that end goal. Behind the cage, what you
cannot see is that the wheel you are running on endlessly powers
their monopoly.
And because of this predisposed, collective mindset (that is very
evidently not serving us) we believe in a variety of “goods.” Be
educated. Be a “good person.” Have money. Be attractive. Work out.
Have a great job. Buy a house. And onward.
It ignites the interest of our senses,
our base instincts, our egoic
selves. But how often do we question the “good” that has been
imposed on us, how often do we really stop and question how much
faith we have in a system that has us convinced our natural state,
our simple lives, our inner joys…are not good enough?
The next time you make a choice because you are trying to be a
“good person,” I implore you to consider that those who commit
suicide terrorism believe they are being “good people”—martyrs for
their god.
The next time you equate a degree to an education, consider the
state of really any aspect of our society—we are absolutely starved
for knowledge, and yet the premium on education these days seems
to be limitless. There is no amount of debt, disinterest, or complete
disregard for actual learning that will stand in the way of people
getting degrees and believing their education
is complete for their
lifetime.
I often look around at older people and wonder how we’ve
confused “respecting your elders” with allowing them to believe it’s
okay to stop learning after age 23 and let them sit and fester in the
prejudices of the generation in which they were raised.
So we’re handing out empty degrees like candy—degrees that
promise success at a steep, suffocating cost—and placating bias
and prejudice with a laugh and sigh, because that’s what we’re
instructed is “right.”
I’m not saying there’s no value in education; I’m saying it’s the only
thing of real value, and we’re falling cripplingly short of actually
giving that to the masses. I dream of a day that college grads leave
school not believing that their education is only the leg-power to latch
themselves on a corporate treadmill for the better parts of their lives,
but rather something that has given them the context, the history, the
perspective, and the opportunity to learn what makes them tick and
flow, how to question everything and discuss anything objectively, to
choose the life they want, not adhere to the life that was chosen for
them.
Neither Hobbes nor Plato nor Spinoza
nor Hume nor Locke nor
Nietzsche nor Jobs nor Wintour nor Descartes nor Beethoven nor
Zuckerberg nor Lincoln nor Rockefeller nor Edison nor Disney nor
countless other game-changing, culture-shifting, brilliant-minded
individuals were academics. The pattern
is enough of a trend to
make you wonder whether or not a component of their (exceptional)
success was that they were never conditioned to believe one thing
was “good.” Their ideas were never edited or tailored to the liking of
someone else’s. They never had to quell their real opinions in lieu of
a grade, and they never compiled other people’s ideas for years and
called it “research.”
In Plato’s
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