Stop Thinking

A fit of passion.

Author’s Note: I don’t know if this post makes sense or is good advice. It was written quickly in a fit of passion and not in my normal mode of writing. Maybe it’s worth something, maybe not. I can’t tell. I asked Mother Mary to inspire me and this is what came. JMJ. Blessed be.

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Nietzsche told a parable, I think it was in “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, about a diminutive little man with one enormous ear. He was no more than two, maybe three feet tall, and the ear, the man’s most prominent feature, was most of the mass of his body. Zarathustra describes the rest of the man as little more than a stalk, a shrunken, shriveled bit of human beneath this enormous fleshly auditory apparatus. A body with a tiny head that nonetheless wore a smirk. The creature with the enormous ear believed he was special, better than other men because of the great acuity of his hearing. What’s more, other people believed it too. “There!” They screamed, pointing at The Ear. “There goes a man of greatness! A man of genius!”

…

“I could never believe it,” spoke Zarathustra. “I hold to my belief that it was a reversed cripple, who had too little of everything, and too much of one thing.”

Yes.

Modern Men are reverse cripples.

Modern Women too.

The Age of Enlightenment and Reason has reached its apogee, and we here at the end of its ascent value only our thinking minds. We begin school as early as two or three and stay there sometimes into our thirties. We believe “status” to be more or less synonymous with “education” and rank and order the occupations and salaries of our citizens based on who has more degrees. We require “a study” to tell us everything, and will disbelieve the facts of our own eyes if refuted by a man with accreditations and a white coat. The most insane positions, the wildest perversions of instinct and nature, all of them are permissible if only we think about them enough. If only we exercise our Reason to delude ourselves. If only we make Black white and White black by changing the definitions of the words. “I have a degree in X” says the serious person, and by this you are to know they ought be taken seriously. The entire society nothing but one giant game of one-upmanship. Everyone trying to tell everybody else, “I’m smarter. Therefore, I’m better.”

And yet we are miserable.

The shrunken man with the giant brain is like the shrunken man with the giant ear. He is no genius. He is merely malformed. Like Rain Man we may be able to perform clever tricks, instantly counting the number of toothpicks in a pile or having a greater knowledge of calculus than our grandfathers. We may be more well versed in ancient Assyrian history or have read more Jane Austen novels.

But what have we built?

What have we made?

Our forefathers, with their sixth-grade educations and hand-me-down copies of Shakespeare, connected the continent with railroads. They bridged the Oceans via the Panama Canal. They created families eight to nine children thick, they invented cars, flying machines. They discovered X-rays to probe the body and its interior.

Faraday’s seminal paper, which described for the first time electromagnetic fields… contained no math. He barely went to school at all. He didn’t even know trigonometry. He intuited the nature of reality, visually, with pictures that he could feel. James Joule, likewise, the man from whom we get the name for the unit of energy, was untrained. He was brewer of beer. A yeoman with nothing but muscle and curiosity. And Oliver Heaviside, the wood carver and telegraph operator who formalized Maxwell’s Equations, advanced calculus, and predicted the ionosphere… he did so without a certificate.

What do we make now?

What do we discover?

All this education, all the billions of dollars and millions of hours poured into The Brain.

What has it gotten us?

Where are the new cures for diseases? Where are the new modes of transportation? Where are the colonies on The Moon or cities under the sea? Who has figured out Gravity? Who has solved the mysteries of fusion? Why have lifespans not increased? Where are the new materials and new sources of energy?

The best we seem to be able to do is Wind.

Hmm. Windmills.

A technology from 900 years ago.

Outside of Tech, of computers, there has been…