Intellectual laziness, stubborn ignorance, and the false self. [View all]

[Tobin S.]

Last edited Thu Apr 19, 2018, 01:29 PM - Edit history (1)

I think most people in America stop growing and learning intellectually after they get out of school. For a majority of Americans that means when they are 18. They might get a little wiser over the years if they learn from life experience, but when it comes to the exploration of ideas, they just shut down after high school. They might work hard jobs that require physical labor, but their interior lives are marked by intellectual laziness and an abhorrence for new ideas that might cast some light over the ignorance that prevails. If you want to learn you have to be open to being taught. Many people are just too stubborn for that. They hang on to their ignorance and erroneous ways of thinking to their graves.

It's very sad when you see this kind of thing in the people that you love.

My nature is to try to understand the world and the people in it. If I don't understand something, I learn about it. It just seems foolish to me to live in the world essentially cut off from everyone else. But that's what it's like in this country now. Most people are so closed off from each other that they are even closed off to themselves. This isolation of the psyche leads people to believe that they are something that they are not. Their true selves languish in obscurity and rarely see the light of day. And when the self does surface people are so surprised by it that that they don't think it's real. I firmly believe that our true beings reside in compassion and love. There is no room for hate and selfishness in the self. But most people are essentially selfish. Then what are they? They are a false construct that they have mistaken to be their true beings. Trump is the epitome of that. He is not real. He is not true to his being, and that state of mind is a product of America.