Sunday, December 23, 2012

The Good Fight

The Good Fight*

What it is & how to fight it.
*an opinion piece.



Oh my friend, why do you who are a citizen of the great and mighty and wise city of Athens, care so much about laying up the greatest amount of money and honor and reputation, and so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul, which you never regard or head at all? Are you not ashamed of this?”
-Socrates, in Plato's Apology circa 399 BC

   This paper is a call to arms, a beacon of light through the fog of apathy, aimed towards the fortunate and educated populous of all able countries. I am not asking you to sacrifice your complete essence for the betterment of this demoralizing world, merely a plea for self observation, and due action as follows. Too often are we influenced by our peers into a state obliviousness, unheeding any thought to our actions or existence. We must first try to understand ourselves before we can attempt to have our influence on this world be a conscious one.
   Why do you suppose it is that things like money, material objects, social status, drama, and television, more often than not, hold precedence over wisdom and knowledge? My claim is that a genus of societal illness is spreading like a cancer, and we must acknowledge its presence before we can seek to destroy it. This cancer, so to speak, is a tremendous ignorance of the self; not what you want or what you do, but rather who you are, your understanding of life, and why you make the decisions you do. This “cancer” has come to consist of swag, Kim Kardashian, iPhones, Mercedes Benz, Bud light, Marlboro, jocks, nerds, gays, straights, republicans, democrats, liberals, conservatives, Muslims, Christians, atheists, and every preconceived notion of what your life should be. Break free of all the intangible shackles restricting you from exposing your personal axioms. Why does Human kind dabble in such petty follies as reality TV and drama? Why does it let mass opinion so easily sway the individual? Are we not brave enough to venture on our own, to seek truth despite consequence? Is the meek entity complacent with the mundane due to some certitude in a higher power and an eternal bliss? If so I beg of them to set aside your intuition, which is as feasible as any other, and acknowledge that that is all it is; an intuition- a perception of truth, and that no living being, despite any claim, posses knowledge of anything otherwise.
   For most of history, the delusions and ignorance preventing the progress of mankind were mainly due to a lack of education and inaccessibility to information. With the advancements made so far on the matters of the foundations for basic living and accessibility to technology and information, it is no longer money or education that is the authoritative figure in distinguishing learned minds from lesser, rather it is the level of interest of man, and his ability to escape his environment mentally. Sadly, most are often drowned in complacence by the luxury of technology, and absorbed into false realities where social networking sites and reality TV shows rule the entirety of ones interests, and no consideration is given whatsoever to ones own existence. We must not despair, rather persevere, carrying our torches through the darkness, fighting the good fight.