Silly Ideas & Silly Words
May 21, 2009 | Filed Under Small Talk
I recently read an article written by an old acquaintance that was just pure nonsense. I could hardly help feeling bad for the guy.
The article argued that every act is an act of love. If someone kisses you, punches you, writes you a letter, cooks you a meal, smashes your car window in with a bat, moons you, gives you a flower, looks at you, smiles at you, frowns at you…. it means they love you.
Seriously. The sad thing is that this guy is relatively smart. So how could he be arguing for such nonsense?
According to him, love is equivalent to attention. So by acting you are giving attention to something and thus loving it. Do you hear that ladies? The guy who raped you actually loved you. Do you hear that Jews? Hitler actually loved you. [Reductio ad absurdum]
Man, stuff like this can drive a logically minded person like me over the edge. What prevents me from going over the edge is trying to understand how someone could get to a point in his mental life where he actually believed this crap.
After thinking about it for a while, what came to me was this notion that “silly ideas emerge from silly use of words” – in other words, the reason this guy is able to make such an absurd argument is that he has become habituated to screwing around with the meaning of words to solve philosophical problems. But this is a misuse of philosophy as well as the “tool of thought” in general.
Philosophy, and thinking in general, are tools that human beings have for understanding and engaging the world. Thankfully, our minds are programmed/evolved/designed to do this naturally and commensensically. It is true that our emotions often delude us into mis-understanding the world and to place too much emphasis on singular events. It is also true that we carry around a lot of pain and emotional baggage because we hold onto and indulge the violations of our past. And sometimes it is important to seek true understanding in order to diminish the pain and soften the negative impact our past might have on our present and future.
But to seek true understanding is quite different than fooling ourselves (or tricking ourselves). In today’s West (influenced by yesterday’s East) it has become fashionable to believe very silly things about the Universe and reality in order to appease our psychology. The idea being that our psychology is fundamentally wrong when it comes to the way it perceives the world. There is this undercurrent in our culture of taking on ridiculous beliefs for pragmatic purposes.
And this argument from my old acquaintance is one such example. To make this argument, the man had to basically first redefine “love” as “attention” – from there the argument made perfect sense. But this is a radical distortion of the notion of love and does not fit any sensible understanding of love. Rather, it is a rejection of the reality of love in favor of some other more primitive force the author refers to as “attention.” When an argument requires that words be redefined, and the author fails to acknowledge the redefinition or make a case for the redefinition, you can be sure that there is a deceptive mind-trick going on, normally a mind-trick that rejects reality in favor of serenity.
I reject these practices because they lead to absolutely insane ideas like the one my acquaintance advocates above. If to achieve serenity I must become insane, then I reject it. Serenity is not my ultimate goal in life. Truth, justice, love and mercy are.
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