The Day Thinking Stopped...

Like all things that you know intuitively, and not necessarily intellectually, it strikes a chord when you hear it chime in from a tangential direction – or, at least, that’s my vain hope. Sometimes, when things are put in a way it was never framed before, suddenly, a ray of light is cast on it that you never glimpsed before. And, we’ll be talking about “frames” and context here, because I’ll be discussing something that is sorely lacking in human activity today, namely, THINKING.  

Most folks believe they think. They believe that because they have opinions, a perspective they’ve adopted, that because they believe certain precepts, or because certain ideas appear to them as clear and “right,” that they must therefore think. They believe they have these ideas that they’ve captured or comprehended due to their own efforts, their own capacity to think (as an act of the will). But this is a gross delusion.

Thinking is much more complex a process, more difficult an effort than most people imagine. If thinking were simply akin to formulating some complex mathematical formula, then by that long process of formulation, we’d only arrive at the cusp of thinking. Abstractions, such as mathematical formulas, are still a fairly low-wattage, low-level form of thought.

I always believed that mathematics (esp. advanced mathematics) was what required the most thinking – it certainly required the most effort on my part, when I was in school. But now I understand that that effort, which was an obstacle to my understanding of mathematics, and getting passing grades in the subject matter, was not one related to my ability to think, but rather to my ability to concentrate, to memorize, to visualize abstract formulations. And, that is why I say, that mathematical gyrations are really only the beginning of thinking – not the ultimate in thinking, as is supposed.

What is thinking anyway? Although it may be difficult to grasp, when it requires physical effort, then it’s not thinking! Endurance, perseverance, they’re not thinking... Thinking is not “intelligence” per se either. In a way, it’s the other way around, you are intelligent if you think, but you can be “intelligent,” and even extremely clever, without resort to true thinking. You can do clever things by rote... like a computer, or a robot, and yet these machines do not think. Likewise, a chimpanzee’s actions we can interpret as clever, when they are, as far as the chimp is concerned, not only not clever, but rather instinctive. As a species, as far as true thinking is concerned, we’re closer to the chimps...

I can certainly vouch that mathematics was very difficult for me, and I believed that the more I thought the better I’d become at it (didn’t work out that way). Like any art, mathematics requires certain skills that are independent of thought itself. One needs to know how to count, for instance, to compare, etc. These skills can be acquired, of course, with sufficient patience and endeavor, but these “skills” have nothing to do with thought, or the quality of thinking that one does. And, this is only the beginning of the problem at hand. So, we can see that thinking is not even what we generally use the term “thinking” for. This gives us an idea of how far we are from pure thought, to thoughts unattached to anything concrete and “manifest.” Thinking in mathematical terms is very hard, but it’s also very abstract, and that’s barely the beginning of the process.

How many of us can fill a blackboard with complex mathematical formulas every morning, before breakfast? Very few of us do this, and today, I would venture to guess that none do – not even the professional mathematicians. They have computers for the purpose. And, how difficult is it to fill a blackboard a day with analytical mathematics? It would depend on how original and unique the problem being solved is, or how original the formulas are... Naturally, mathematicians use their noggins a lot, yet not quite at the heights that we need to reach to be truly thinking.

Why folks don’t think depends on two overarching factors. One of the reasons has to do with the human being, as an individual, a microcosm within the macrocosm. The other has to do with the milieu, the environment in which we live, or speaking loosely, with the macrocosm. As individuals we curtail our own thinking by being lazy and taking all our ideas from the immediate environment (i.e., by capturing what we’ve heard, seen, or read). These are not actual, living thoughts, however, only trite, repetitive ideas that have been around for ages and we have simply accepted as “true,” correct, etc. By hewing closely to ideas and thoughts that are dependent strictly on sense-based perceptions or ideas, we’re not yet at the lowest level of thinking.

As a result, the combination of inertia and laziness makes the “hard work” involved in coming up with an original thought nearly impossible. Likewise, the general environment that bombards us with repetitive, worn-out, dead ideas, suppress our ability to think (especially independently, freely, analytically or critically).

The “environmental” aspect is much stronger than most of us would give credit to. The social, cultural, and “external” perceptions and perspectives we have come to accept as members of a group, class, or even a race, immediately delimits the thinking we’re willing to do. If you doubt this, consider if you can think as someone who is your “opposite” – opposite to your social class, race, economic situation, political inclination, even your sex. Unless you’re a novelist, you probably would find that exercise more than difficult, even uncomfortable, or unpleasant, and would soon give up on it. Funny, because only after keeping that up for a period of time would you even be getting close to any kind of thinking...

My own take is that the “external” factors, such as I’ve enumerated above, are already a nearly insurmountable obstacle to thinking. Who’s going to be writing out a blackboard full of equations and then passing themselves off a the “opposite” person than they are, and thinking their way through the day in that guise? Not even the most accomplished actors get away with that level of “immersion”.

In all of the History of humankind, the internal and external factors I’m mention have never been as acute as they are today. Said another way, never has thought been so curtailed and “administered” in small droplets as it is at present. You can go as far back as you want... You can conjure all of the Hollywood tropes, especially those of how primitive and “coercive” ancient civilizations were of their individual members (the extreme individuality and egotism of today didn’t exist 5,000 years ago, but no matter, why let facts get in the way of a prejudice or a priori judgment?).

It’s so easy to claim, such a cliché, to allege how “unfree” people were in the past, how the whip or the manacles forced them to “toe the line” (into slavery even). But you would search in vain for a culture, a society, as corseted, as unfree, as the one we are presently all living in.

We live in a secular world of lies and deceit at every level of intellectual endeavor. No wonder we’re confused about what is up and what is down. This lack of clarity is due to our lack of thinking. Opinions are more highly placed than facts (not that there are any facts, as Freddie pointed out, just interpretations, which, like “perspectives,” are mere opinions). The reversal of values, the “the upside down” rationale for the perpetuation of immoral acts, are the hallmark of the Age of Kali Yuga – the Age of Darkness – which is where we are in the great scheme of things (I’ll get deeper into Kali Yuga and its significance in an upcoming blog).

Suffice it to say, we’re not sitting pretty, despite what our minders are insistent on making us believe through the 24x7 bombardment of blatant lies, fake news, and alternative facts, etc. In fact, they’re so insistent upon these “tools” and so intent on convincing us that we’re at the “apex” of human evolution, that it just gives me the willies – such blanket affirmations sound like hubris to me. Pride, and even bluster, comes before the fall, they say. A definite red flag in my book! Given the state of affairs, the more THEY sing the high praises of the status quo, the more I begin to feel like a cornered rat on the deck of the Titanic. It sounds to me like it’s time to leave the boat, especially when the water laps up against my tail.

Opinions Are Conclusions, Not Thinking

Perspective is everything... or so they say... Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD) is credited with stating the obvious (aren’t all emperors, both ancient and modern, credited with more than what they have actually said or done?), namely: “Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”

I could have hardly said it better... In every facet of “modern” life we deal with opinions, for these are all that matter these days. Even in materialistic science, as far as our oh-so-modern herd animals are concerned, opinions trump facts, truth, moral considerations, or conscience.

I understand why... If the human being were taken as something complete, the fulcrum at the center of the universe (or the “measure of all things,” as the Greeks and all the ancients did before us), then our medicine, chemistry, and biology, are laughable attempts at describing the least important aspect of humanity’s full spectrum. If we were real human beings that would not bode well for the Insurance or Pharma industry, now would it?

The wonderful thing about opinions is that it obviates the necessity to think, much less prove anything empirically. Opinions are the forerunners of denial, mostly, the inveterate negation of reality. This “liberates” people of their temporary lethargy, so that they can wallow in it full-time (no half-assed laziness here!). 

Since opinions are only superficial assumptions, ready-made conclusions, they don’t require any “heavy lifting” on the part of those who utter the first thing that pops up into their alleged minds. If the larynxes of chimps were slightly altered in their form, their vocal cords arranged slightly different, they could also spew out what we generally consider “thoughtful opinions.”

Like parrots, we parrot, nothing more. Parrots are known to have the size of a brain worthy of Homer J. Simpson, and they do what most human herd-animals do, which is to simply echo what is heard as opinions as if they were a slab of stone up a cliffside... well, that’s not thinking either.

The Tube, the Internet, they all provide ready-made opinions for anything, and the media is the greatest reinforcer of opinions (everyone is very opinionated these days). As a result, there’s no need to “dig” to get down to the “background” matters that lie behind these fallow sentiments and a priori judgments. Regurgitating trite opinions requires less “work,” naturally. And today, work, any kind of mental exertion, is to be avoided at all cost. Today’s weakened, anemic herd-animals, tire themselves simply lounging on the couch. We don’t want them getting a brain cramp pondering their fate... The natural inertia of the brain, even the physical threshold of thought, is difficult to surmount, and this works wonders for our minders, who benefit from our laziness to no end, believe me.

Here’s my “opinion” then: Human beings today are incapable of thinking.

Mark Your Calendars... Since the Beginning of the 20^th Century, Humans Have, For All Intents and Purposes, Stopped Thinking.

Pray tell, when did this thinking among humans actually stop? Because, to be honest, I missed it! I hate to disappoint, but I don’t have an exact date... It could have been anywhere after 1899, the cusp of the 20^th Century, or it could have spilled into the first years of that century... Precision in such matters is a feckless, false frame, since the universe isn’t on Daylight Savings Time either. The interesting thing is that it does appear, from the historical evidence to have occurred rather suddenly, but probably not within a given 24-hour period.

Moreover, to my way of looking at things, it’d be far more interesting to learn HOW it happened, but I’ll get to that eventually...

The stoppage, the damming up of thought and thinking itself is a purely modern phenomenon, that we know. We also know it has gone completely unnoticed by, well, nearly everyone... Mind you, I include myself in the group of humans unable to think, so I’m not ranting and raving here, or being “holier than thou”.

Personally, as far as my innate powers go, I can’t think my way out of a paper bag. I dare anyone to try though... Even those who purport to have triple digit IQs (talk about intellectual inflation – sort of like grade inflation in Academia!) are incapable of it. If any one of them can think their way out of a paper bag, it would be an astonishing feat.

Let’s face it; thinking is just not our thing. Name a herd-animal that thinks. Nah, chimps are not herd animals, and they can’t think either. See what I mean? And, the utter lack of any thinking going on in modern society is so blatantly obvious when we simply take our blinders off – or curb our acute capacity for immediate, knee-jerk denial of anything and everything that we don’t like.

Regarding it objectively, by simply observing how modern institutions are now arranged, managed, and maintained (as if on life-support only), gives us a clue as to how deep in the doo-doo we really are. It bears repeating – we fail miserably when it comes to conjuring up thoughts. This is a new development, you can say. But not wholly unexpected given the trends since WW II (when the highest number of victims were the thinking ones, how can you expect “improvements”?).

What is the real purpose of war? To cull the thinking herd-animals...

After WW II, more thinking people have been killed than during the conflict itself. By then the gene pool was already threadbare, and now, well now, we know why there’s no more thinking going on! These millions of dead culled from the herd were (and still are) invariably the “smart” ones – the only ones capable of real thought. Usually, this is due to the fact that the intelligent ones are the ones that figure out what’s actually going on, and when they do, they resent it, and then try to do something foolish, like righting the injustice! This makes them the easiest of targets...

One more devastating blow for natural selection... not that it was a good theory as we have modernly interpreted it, so no great loss...

The dimming of thought in human beings took some doing, it took some time. Thinking diminished over the eons of the various Yugas, so no worries. Outside of thinking harder, trust me, there was damn little you could have done about it.

It’s not always apparent because History, among other baroque cultural tinsels and gilded decorations, gives us a false view of how this phenomenon “developed.” Thinking is a powerful thing, Historically, from about the Renaissance onward, there was a great flowering of it, especially of the materialistic, intellectual kind. All over the world, at the same time, in all kinds of cultures and societies, intellectuality and critical thinking took off. Yes, some cultures, like the European, being more materialistic than the rest, expressed it in the advances in technology and the expansion of “urbanism” as against the “countryside,” that modern herd-animals are so proud of. Yet, the fact remains that it was a nearly universal, ubiquitous development. And no, it was NOT Gutenberg’s little toy that did it – it was the other way around! The printing press was a by-product of this intellectual explosion.

See? Non-thinkers always want to put the cart before the horse.

From this “big bang” of intellectualism during the 15^th Century, we slowly, but surely, began the process of entropy in thinking. Several centuries of apparent “progress,” such as the Enlightenment, etc., followed this profusion of intellectuality, until it invaded every nook and cranny of our Civilization. The last great gasps of it were the scientific breakthroughs at the end of the 19^th and the earliest years of the 20^th Century. Einstein, Planck, Bohr, were this last spasmodic episode before rigor mortis set in.

Since these thinkers have passed on, there has been no “new” or original idea out there, mainly because there has not been a replenishing “new generation” of thinkers to replace them. (There were great thinkers during this late 19^th Century period in other fields of human endeavor than Science, of course, but I’m keen on being brief).

Again, non-thinkers jump to conclusions – this is their hallmark. Additionally, they confuse “cause and effect.” When shallow-thinking and opinions are involved, they vehemently claim all the wonderful “innovations” that came out starting in the mid-20^th Century as proof of our modern capacity to “think better” than our ancestors. Unfortunately, none of these “modern products” were the result of modern, or contemporaneous non-thinking.

On the contrary, all those oh-so-modern wonders of silicon and plastic were due to very ancient thinking – our most ancient thinking of all! Even the transistor came from Aristotle, who at least gave things some thought. The rest was mere “application,” at best (application is what the bear does with the stick to get at the honey – it’s not the honey). The “application” went through the hoops of those who were thinking in the 17^th Century, like Pascal (to name only one). No contemporaneous, original thinking was required to make a personal computer, for example – every thought or idea in it came long before the motherboard was heated and the piece of junk was pressed into a mold and sold to you for $2,500 retail, back in 1981.

Thinking Just Gets In The Way...

To enjoy our wonderfully vacuous consumer existence, we don’t need to think – or even make the right choices. Today, we’re so “free” that we are free to make the worse choices. Isn’t “freedom” just grand? We’re even induced to make bad choices in every facet of our lives, especially with respect to what we consume (if it were otherwise, thinking might resurface, and we don’t want any of that going on).

This jettisoning of thinking as a human trait didn’t happen overnight. Although it seemed like it, since we all slept through the process. To achieve this level of decadence across cultures separated by oceans and languages, required the gutting and undermining of long-standing institutions that were the bulwark of Civilization itself. This all took place while we slept, while some dreamed idly of a “better world,” and other nonsense of that ilk. Self-satisfaction – like having too much money – kills all thinking instantly. Affluence, therefore, is a definite sign that thinking has ceased, that decadence has set in.

As I said above, we know all this intuitively... we don’t know this necessarily intellectually, because that would require thinking about it, which we’re not wont to do. While we were growing up, while we were being lied to, while we slept unmolested upon a mattress feathered and laid by the achievements of our fathers and mothers, and the long line of ancestors that preceded them (each successive generation contributing less and less to actual progress, naturally), we were robbed. Robbed of what? Of Thinking itself... so, never let something you valuable go unused for too long, or keep it locked away and out of your sight... just common-sense advice.

It began with Religion being eviscerated (bad management a likely cause). It seemed like a good idea at the time, since religion itself was as corrupt and decadent as modernity itself. But it soon turned to its stepchild – Education. By the end of the 19^th Century, it was as corrupt and anemic as Religion was. Education had no vital force left, since it had been reduced, like its progenitor, to an absolutely idiotic, mechanical process, as dead as a doornail...

This lack of any vitality in Education only served to put children to sleep at the tenderest age – right in the classroom! Children are now forced into prison, err, schools at 2 or 3 years of age (before they’ve learned to cry). Their handed their little electronic devices so they’ll shut up and go to sleep. Right on their desks!

Modern Education – The Destroyer of Thought

From the 19^th Century it was beatings, torture, and incarceration for children. Fortunately, most got a good seven years of “childhood” before they were inducted into school hell – or factory hell – there was, at least, some choice then. None of the torture could keep a child awake through the infernal process, however, so school hours were lengthened, and children further traumatized (they wanted to keep children in prison as long as possible – to acclimate them to their future environment – it was considered a good career choice then – and still is today). Standardized education (whether public or private) became the preferred way to dehumanize the population early.

Education instead of giving life to the child so they could become thinking, feeling, willing human beings (truly useful members of society), became a narcotic, intended to “dumb-down” any potential Einstein in the making. And all this continues to this day without signs of abatement.

Why don’t we have child prodigies anymore? Why no Mozarts? Why no Schweitzers? You name the hero...

The main reason is that we wouldn’t know a prodigy if we tripped over them. Why? Because we sincerely are of the opinion that because a chimp uses a stick to get at some food, the chimp is “reasoning,” or intellectually thinking, or doing “problem-solving,” or some such malarkey. With that level of thinking, is it any wonder we have no geniuses? A genius would have to be able to think, wouldn’t he or she? But how can that be possible in our day and age, when thinking is no longer extant?

Children are born curious, and this curiosity had to be stifled, it had to be extirpated from the very soul of the child. Children are natural thinkers – they come equipped that way from beyond the womb. This natural thinking takes place in imaginations, for thinking is not what we believe it is – thinking is imagination in action. Imagination had to be killed. Otherwise, how could a dead Civilization appear as its opposite?

What good is a child that’s awake in a dead, mechanistic world? Or today, in a dead, digital world? (As humans, we can’t even make machines anymore – machines do that for us). What good is wakefulness in a world asleep? We know the answer to that one... Once asleep, like Sleeping Beauty, nothing was going to awaken that child’s desire to return to the arduous work – the tremendous act of will involved in real thinking.

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions... and, never more so than today. And, it was just about 50 years ago that things could have turned around, but Education was assailed by a series of attacks upon it from the usual quarter – from modern, dead science and their minders in the economic-political-social sphere – and all healthy impulses that were being introduced into the educational process were soon abolished, especially from “the curriculum.” Nothing human, vibrant, and alive was allowed to remain... children, after all, were staying awake in the classroom (they even wanted to go to school – God forbid!).

Some schools didn’t even have classrooms... that’s how advanced some experiments had gone on at the time that’s euphemistically called the “Counterrevolution” of the ‘60s (it was a real Revolution, but none now want to admit to it, they’ve been shamed, due to the failure of the enterprise). It’s part of the TINA process (There Is No Alternative) that our handlers are hell bent on – otherwise, given a choice – no one would do what they’re doing right now. No worries, it’ll all happen again, real soon... stay awake this time!

Stripping Art and physical education from the curriculum was absolutely necessary (two things that lead to the stimulation of independent thinking, of the worst kind). Now they bemoan the obesity and stupidity that is rampant in the population, when it was perpetrated to sicken the population in the first place (illness and disease impede thinking). The bad news is, of course, that failure to think leads directly to illness and death – keep that in mind when you extol “modern virtues” and modern institutions.

To turn children into herd-animals – into automata – so that they may graze in the “fields” of the digital miasma that’s spread around the world is the plan. What did you expect from sleeping through that? To wake up to healthy children? A healthy natural environment?

To be able to adapt to the netherworld of confusion and lies that is preponderant now, necessitated turning education into the anti-human activity which it has become. To become this decadent required many other areas of human life and culture to become inhospitable to human beings (toxic even). To make education fully “utilitarian” and subservient to the Corporate “machinery” required the members of these institutions to focus on the purely materialistic, on the lowest common denominator, on turning humans into herd-animals. They succeeded in doing so to the highest degree. We are left then, with only creatures that ruminate, who graze like sheep, and which are controlled by the wolf packs that only chase the greenback!

Obviously, once you remove the veil from your eyes, take away all the tinsel and shiny accessories that hang around you like obstructions, once one stops romanticizing, what we’re doing here is reproducing uncounted masses of non-thinking human beings, and basically turning them into something less than animals. We’ve been rather good at it, haven’t we? Maybe too damn good...