For my grandkids!
Use your own judgment!
Kids, I am often bothered by the way society works. In fact, it is convoluted. I have walked through my life journey knowing that whatever I choose to do, there will also be hundreds of alternate things I could have chosen. I used to be a stubborn, confident, and know-it-all kid, cocky I guess.
I was in my religion class reading a book written called Siddhartha. It was not a choice not to read that book. It was a class assignment. One night I came across the most powerful sentence, as far as I am concerned, that completely changed the way I see the world. It goes,
“For every true statement, there is an opposite one that is also true”.
It kept me up all night. That night was only a slideshow to what later became a series of sleep-deprived nights. Over time, I have grown to love to associate things that I do and think with that particular quote I read. My eagerness to debate, argue and reason with individuals I know less went into hiding. I have come to realize that one cannot be swayed easily by debating on national television shows, arguing in public, and reasoning in a friendly manner.
It has led me to believe that my capacity to think outside the box has also succumbed to the notion that there might not be an objective truth to abstract things we love to follow and believe - Love, capitalism, socialism, democracy, human rights, politics, and so on. This is the same reason I have learned to delist group thinking, conformity, identity politics, and political tribalism from my worth-pursuing bucket list.
Our advice and knowledge only reflect the prior experience that we helped shape ourselves. Here not to be mistaken with the idea that they are misleading and unnecessary. The core of the message is that we learn to believe things quickly without giving them enough reasoning. What do you think would happen, hypothetically, if your definitions of love, democracy, truth are to be administered worldwide. I do not think it will make the world any better than it already is. The situation of the world is already grave before even implementing such hypothetical ideas. I do not think we have bad guys. We have different individuals practicing what they hold to be true, whether it be politics, ideas, relationships, love, etc.
See! this is my point. Now, I am walking right into the rabbit hole; if I were to acclaim that we do not have bad guys but only those practicing what they believe, I am not totally sure that I could be any close to the truth. Of course, we do have bad guys, but where do we draw the line. When a person's life is taken away? When the collapse of a robust economy led to unprecedented famine? But be alert, the ruler you use to draw the line, again, cannot be applied universally.
The way I see the world has become murky after each day I live through. I feel like I am just becoming like you kids! I am sure you have learned or will have the opportunity to do so about normal distribution in math and statistic. Life is merely just that. We grow to believe that the more we learn the more we think we will know. But Kids the older you get the more you wonder about many things. You ended up not being able to make clear conclusions about many things in life. You become no different from infants except that you can speak.
I know you are reading this and cannot make sense. It does not to me either!
Should my idea becomes widespread, the linguists and philosophers will attempt to decipher them for you just like we were spoon-fed many philosophical thoughts through Sparknotes.
Let me end my thought here with a quote.
“ The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know” Aristotle.
