I was addressing a group of geographers the other day on Abbotsford’s social problems of homelessness, poverty, mental illness, addiction and affordable housing.
I decided to use their theme of inclusion and diversity to refer to George Carlin and his bit on mutually exclusive words with inclusion and diversity seeming to hover on the verge of being mutually exclusive, joining such examples as politicians & truth.
The point was to cite this as the root of not only our social problems but of almost all other challenges facing our societies, indeed facing the entire human race.
Not politicians and their propensity for lying or acting on what their ideology says should be the situation instead of what the actual reality of the situation IS. Rather it was my postulation that for the vast majority of the human race, especially politicians, thinking is an incredibly painful task, to be avoided at all costs.
What else would explain the length people will go to in order to avoid thinking about things or outright refusal to think period?
Politicians lie is an accepted truism, born out by the evidence of their words, actions and the outcomes of their behaviours. The solution to politician’s lies and so many other conundrums is the application of tools such as Occam’s razor or the science of logic. But this would require the application of thought, in some instances deep thought, causing pain, even agony throughout the population.
So it is that people go for what sounds good rather than apply critical thinking. They cling to what they want to believe or want to see rather than what the reality is. They avoid any thought or consideration of their core beliefs or world view because that would require deep thinking. Anything to avoid the pain of thought, the agony of deep thoughts
After all, who would refuse to think about problems and solve them, rather than wasting resources accomplishing nothing and allowing the problems to worsen and multiply, unless the very process of thinking was incredibly painful and must be avoided?
ipso facto: thought = painful experience for most people
I asked them to give a little thought to the effect that thinking being painful and thus to be avoided has had on social issues in Abbotsford and Canada. I asked anyone finding themselves experiencing pain, to work their way up to thinking by merely considering these ideas, kind of thought lite.
The point of this postulation was originally to engage their interest and drawing attention to the need to get people actually thinking about the problems, what needs to be done and on solutions. It served very well to engage their attention on major social problems and the hard realities we need to really think about and face in order to make intelligent, rational, sometimes unpleasant decisions on so many pressing issues.
The reason for sharing this here is because, frighteningly, when this idea continued to roll about my mind making me think further on the postulation about thought hurting so much, evidence in support of the proposition continued to grow. So think about (or at least consider the possibility) the proposition that thinking = pain.
Asking yourself: Who would refuse to think about problems and solve them, rather than allowing the problems to worsen and multiply, unless the very process of thinking was incredibly painful and must be avoided at any cost?
Frightening thought isn’t it?
