Basically, Ignorance Sucks, and We're All Better Than That

Do we have a moral imperative to think critically? According to me, absolutely. Is it ever possible to think through your actions free of emotional bias, and therefore think completely critical? Absolutely not.

To me (now this is based mostly on experience with fiction, so take it with a grain of salt), it seems that most of the awful things in the world (wars, genocides, crusades) come from a simple inability on the part of humans to see another point of view. We grow up learning to think one way, and once people challenge that way of thinking, or introduce their own, slightly different point of view, we immediately label that point of view as wrong. If the conflict is big enough, we have an emotional response - we get angry, or right away start thinking of them as bad people. We don't think about what the situation looks like to them, only to us. For most simple interpersonal conflicts, things could easily be solved by thinking critically about our emotional response, and what the conflict could mean to the other person.

What about when things get bigger? I'm talking about massive movements here, things like the Holocaust or the KKK. Are the German citizens who were just swept up in Hitler's propaganda just as implicit in the resulting genocide as Hitler himself? They were simply following what the propaganda and their neighbors were saying, but as a result millions of people were killed. If they had thought critically about what they were being told about the Jewish people, could the Holocaust have happened? Would they have been able to avoid jumping on the bandwagon if they knew what that bandwagon would have caused?

What about a more modern example? Same-sex marriage was recently legalized in the US, and people are opposing it. Violently. Clerks are denying gay couples marriage licenses, and are being hailed as heroes. They've been taught that their bible prevents this - they call it a sin. Are they thinking critically about how this affects the couples they're denying rights to? Could all the resulting misery be avoided if they took a minute to consider the deeper implications of the bible's statements on love, and the feelings of these couples?

I think that the kind of anger that causes violent feelings against another person is blind, and could be avoided if people really thought through the other person's feelings. In this case, there's definitely a moral imperative to think critically about the hate people perpetuate. In other cases hoewevr, this question could be approached very differently.

Delaney Tries Desperately to Respond Intelligently to an Open Question About 1984

The main issue with language is that it's inherently necessary for communication. It may not always be spoken or written out, but we rely on various languages to convey our knowledge to others. Without some form of language, your thoughts are trapped in your head, so language is crucial to inform other people of your thoughts. If the language you're using is flawed, your capacity to convey knowledge is severely limited. This goes both ways. If the language offered a people doens't sufficiently cover a topic, then that people cannot recieve each others thoughts on that topic. More importantly, you use the language you are taught inside your own head. You rely on it to solidify your own thoughts. If you don't have the words to describe something you are thinking or feeling, you cannot even communicate that thing to yourself. Knowledge relies entirely on language to communicate it. With flawed language, understanding becomes immediately flawed.

For these reasons, it is crucial to have a wide enough variety of words to describe everything, or you will not be capable of understanding everything. Syme is absolutely right when he says that "not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now." If the government imposes limiting language changes, and they, over generations, take hold, future generations will not have the words to express themselves, to others and to their own selves. Listening to people speaking in regular English, to those who have never learned anything but Newspeak, would be like an anglophone listening to someone conversing in fluent Farsi. Language is a crucial component of knowing, becuase, if you're deprived of the words to explain something to yourself, you have no way of ever understanding it.

Delaney Asks an Insane Amount of Deep Questions About Nothing But the Colour Purple

        There have been a couple of instances where I've experienced the world differently from the people around me. Just this week, I've decided I needed to wear more purple, simply because I like the colour and don't have enough of it. Suddenly, looking around, everything seems to be purple. There's so much purple in the world that, a week ago, didn't seem to be there. Just because I'm thinking about it. To me, this is pretty cool. Just because I'm a little bit more aware of the colour it's cropping up everywhere?  I think that's indicative of human awareness, and is probably rooted in some pretty deep history.

       So, what questions does this bring up? Firstly,  why do human beings notice things? How? How, in the past, has it been useful to notice specific things only when they're pertinent to our situation? How do our brains decide what to pay attention to? Why do we pay varying degrees of attention to our surroundings?  Do we notice our awareness of our surroundings changing? How does changing awareness of the things around us change our experience of the world?

Some Really Intense Thoughts On Plato's Allegory of the Cave with Very Few Appearances of Skepticism But A Whole Lot of Somewhat Depressing Realism

In Plato's Allegory of the cave, the people inside of the cave are us. The unenlightened. They're trapped in ignorance, having no other choice but to believe that the shadows on the wall, things completely insignificant in the grand scheme of the world, are the truth. The only way they can be released from their ignorance is for someone else to physically force them into the light, as the real world, to someone used to revering shadows, is dazzling and terrifying. Their ascent into wisdom, initially, is horrifying. For us, looking deeper into our truths and realizing how insignificant we are is also horrifying. The allegory mentions how the prisoners, who knew nothing of their world but their shadows, laughed at the one who was freed. This also reveals a truth - deeper meaning to almost anything seems ridiculous when you first encounter it. You have to have the perspective yourself - have to think through whatever you're talking about and witness the truth in it - to grasp what the other person is trying to convey. For the prisoners to realize the truth in what the freed man was saying, they would have to leave the caves themselves, and walk into the light.



In my mind, Plato's ascent into wisdom looks like this.



 In a modern day, we know that the truth of the universe is so much inaccessibly larger than Plato's truth that he probably couldn't have dreamed of it. I feel like our "cave", therefore, is the world we're in. From what we can tell, we're miniscule compared to the enormity around us, and yet Planet Earth is all we've experienced. It's also terrifying for us to accept just how big our universe is, and our relative insignificance. Really, in the grand scheme of the uncountable light years we're surrounded by, we mean nothing. Which is awkward, considering how much impact we think we have. The gray people in the drawing are that kind of mentality. If you're stuck in thoughts of how important you think you are, it's really hard to realize the vastness around you.