If you care about what others think, you become their slave.
A slave blindly follows his master. If the opinion of another person — or others in general — is your master, then you might as well have no mind.
It’s worse than that. If you surrender your mind to the mind of another person, you’re giving up on reason. And rationality. And objective reality. And intelligence. Science, freedom — they both go by the wayside if you don’t think rationally, critically and independently.
It has nothing to do with level of intelligence or degrees. It has everything to do with what makes us human.
When you surrender to what “others think”, you’re giving up on everything that makes human beings — yourself, or others — civilized, decent or credible.
Ironically, the “others” to whom you surrender your views and decisions are doing the exact same thing you’re doing. It’s absurd.
Look at today’s culture. If we can all agree on one thing, it’s that culture is going down the toilet.
Culture goes down the toilet because the spokespersons for a culture — the ones who rise to the top in government, media, sports and the arts — are full of crap.
If you want a barometer of today’s culture, turn on The View. “Full of crap” is a polite term to apply to the creatures who cackle banal obscenities to millions of viewers every day, for what seems like centuries now. Yet this — and so much else — is what passes for culture in a society going down the toilet. As recently as the 1980s, it would have been a satire skit on a “Saturday Night Live” episode. Today, it’s where a lot of people get their news and opinion. It’s too hideous to contemplate for very long!
But crap only rises to the top because most people give up on reason, intelligence, rationality and the one thing that makes them possible: INDEPENDENCE.
Independence is the answer. Millions of us had a once-in-a-century opportunity to practice independence in the last couple of years, when we were told to do things that made no sense. The great majority of us — two-thirds or more — blew it.
A culture, like an individual — since a culture consists of people — must learn from its mistakes. It’s the only way to pick ourselves up, reverse from our destructive course, and become the people we’re capable of being. And NOT who most of us have recently been.
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