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.
