Random, Disjointed Thoughts on a wet Saturday Afternoon

I recently came across this web page.

I don't consider my self a tea-partier or a Ron Paul supporter or any sort of conspiracy theorist. However, I am very proudly Old School and I do like this guy's points.

Even though I flunked out of a liberal arts college, I did spend enough time there to piece together what many call the Great Conversation or what the writer calls the Classical Education.

All that you learn at a liberal arts college is that the world is a messy, ambiguous place that constantly changes and can never be truly known. The classical education attempts to instill within a student a set of questions and a perspective to wrestle with this world. To make at least partial sense of what seems a very senseless place and to take meaning from his existence in it.

The writer of this piece notes one of the backbones of the Great Conversation, the Trivium, and then decries the devolution of society, where we have simply been reduced to the very simplest flight-or-fight response:

We have been purposely devolved into emotionally observing, mostly through fear, and following a predetermined solution. The Elite call it Problem-Reaction-Solution. They create problems they wait for the blind emotional reaction of their slaves whom they have programmed to react on fear and ignorance and then offer a predetermined solution. This is why things never change. Those that do the real logical thinking are getting what they want, which is more for them and less for you.

Or putting this Problem-Reaction-Solution another way from another source:

Humans are definitely not the most complex animal on earth. Where it counts, humans are as simple as the lowly squid.

The illusion of humanity’s complexity arises when you try to map human behavior to some kind of two-dimensional grid or continuum. When you focus on how humans decide, they’re extremely simple and, therefore, easily controlled. Humans compare what they see to what they expected and react accordingly. You can control how humans react by controlling either what they see, what they expect or both.

I, like the writer, am tired of being nudged, tired of being thought of as a pliable rat in a box. I want to question and examine and not be told to do. To simply be and to enjoy my existence and not be required to react.

I very much like the writer's quote of the man who was known as the founder the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy:

“Between stimulus and response, there is a space, and in that space, is our freedom.” --Viktor Frankl

And in that space, for the briefest moment, one can simply BE.