« Belief versus Knowledge | Main | Timely; or what? »
August 14, 2008
Update from Beijing (Personal)
To a degree I couldn’t have imagined as recently as a year ago, current events are confirming what my ongoing experience with pot smokers has been revealing about the way we humans think, and how our beliefs are shaped, both individually and collectively.Not that I’m necessarily the only one to have reached such conclusions; just the only one I’m aware of; which is the main reason I continue to push my admittedly far-out ideas in a blog relatively few people have discovered and even fewer read on a regular basis. All I'm trying to do at this point is record notes for a book that may never be written, at least in my lifetime. However, because I firmly believe the observations I’ve made through my interaction with pot users are both unique and as unbiased as I’m capable of, I think the effort is worthwhile.
To return to current events: last Sunday, two days after our American President attended the Opening Ceremonies in Beijing, his visit to China was briefly interrupted by an interview with veteran sports reporter Bob Costas, whose probing questions revealed just how dishonest and poorly informed our prez really is. Four days ago, I was in the frustrating position of being able to watch the interview, but unable to hear it, because dinner conversation was drowning out the sound and the other guests weren't the least bit interested. Thus it wasn’t until this morning, when I was trying to decide what to write about, that I saw the video.
In the meantime, the world hasn’t stood still; it's caught up in a frightening Cold War echo in Georgia; even as none are mentioning (and thus denying) the fact that both the US and Russia have enough nuclear weaponry to end civilization as we know it. Since my study has convinced me that a) all religious thinking is dangerously flawed, b) human emotions are far more important determinants of behavior than we care to admit, c) we have a history of resorting to violence (war) to obtain what we crave (or destroy what we fear?), and d) the planet has become dangerously overpopulated with stressed out humans in the past two hundred years, I'm more apprehensive than ever.
To me, it all suggests we are sliding down a slippery slope towards inadvertent catastrophe produced by an (unacknowledged) internal conflict between our emotions and our cognition. Until Science had provided us with the necessary tools, the danger was nil; in the last century the capacity for self destruction seemed to come exclusively from nuclear weapons, but in this one, the focus has been enlarged to include climate change produced by uncritical human pursuit of energy as the road to national wealth and power.
Are we reassured that Bush and Putin are now cast in the roles Kennedy and Kruschev played in 1962, or that the game pieces have been expanded to include petroleum and refining capacity?
For me, the cherry on the sundae of human dishonesty was when Bush cited our failing effort to drive "illegal" drugs from sports as a reason to persist in our irrational behavior...
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at August 14, 2008 05:50 PM