Congratulations you have won
It's a year subscription of bad puns
And a make-shift story of concern
And to set it up, before it burns1990 Kurt Cobain -
Opinion One day I was walking with Claire, an old work colleague of mine, and her 4-year-old son Mark. It was a typical spring day, the sky was a gorgeous blue and there was a cool breeze blowing. At one point in the day’s events, young Mark asked his mother;
“Mummy why is the grass green?”
Claire then proceeded to laugh at the incongruous question as she tripped over concepts like light and energy. As a mother, she is used to this. Mark asks questions like this from time to time. After all, he is young, has much to learn about the world and his immature mind eagerly seeks answers to issues we adults take for granted. As children we work through this reasoning process so that we can label what we see, group objects together and to gain some grip of what makes the grass green. Everything around us is absorbed as our minds act like sponges. We want to build a framework around which our understanding of the world can work.
Claire says that the grass is green because of
chlorophyll, and it has something to do with the grass needing to use light as food. She knows this because she learned it at school some years ago. Someone had discovered these things as provable fact, written for all to see. In fact, if a student wanted they could reproduce these results ad infinitum by repeating the experiments.
The human race has not always known the fine details of photosynthesis. Only as recent as the 17th century was it hypothesised and discovered. Indeed, as recent as 1939 the full understanding of photosynthesis was fully refined. These discoveries were not completely obvious to the naked eye. All these discoveries came through careful research. At every step of the investigation, people asked questions and sought answers. Other scientific theories have evolved throughout time in such a manner. The greatest minds in history have dedicated themselves to finding the truth behind the workings of the world. It has only been through the painstaking inquiry that humans have been able to create machines to fly into space, create vaccines for disease and communicate over vast distances.
Most of the population, however, leave rigorous inquiry to someone else. They delegate questions about the inner workings of the universe to people who can spend their entire lives working on a solution. Most of this is understandable considering it would take several years of study for most people to understand the intricate nature of how a TV works let alone what “
string theory” is.
This mechanism of delegation of inquiry is what differentiates humans from other life forms on earth. We have a society built around delegating tasks to people who are expert in those areas. At the “dawn of man”, hunters went out to gather meat while gatherers collected other essential items. One group of humans worked on tasks far away from home whilst others worked closer. In modern times, we divide tasks up into hundreds of thousands of specialties. One person may be an expert chemist; another may be an expert farmer, which allows the farmer to use the chemicals to fertilise ground for the food the chemist eats.
Yet in recent times, there has come a more languid form of delegation. As people have become more specialised at one particular task they have stopped caring about the workings of the world at large. Other concerns replace observation and consideration of what goes on around us. There is increasing pressure on the time humans dedicated to work, play, families, social clubs and other activities in life. Increasingly left out all together are some fundamentals of what it means to be human are being. Careful consideration and meditation on our place in the universe is an increasingly foreign concept to many people. Deliberate contemplation is virtually non-existent.
Information flows into our lives at terabytes per second. Sound bites, news flashes, e-mail updates, talking heads and “opinionistas” bombard us daily. The public digests this information and makes decisions about issues almost immediately. People have become accustomed to accepting the Media’s summary of the world’s activities within headlines. People have become accustomed to making decisions about a person’s guilt, a political action, a foreign nation or a corporate wrong going before the page is turned.
In the same way that food has evolved into fast digestible morsels, information, thought and options are broken down into easy to swallow bight size chunks. People have come to expect that everything can be summarised, analysed and disseminated in one sound bite. The experts and the commentators have become expert at polarising an issue so that the trial by media can commence. It is acceptable political parlance that you are either with us or against us.
From the very beginning of our schooling, schools teach that there are right and wrong answers to almost everything. Every problem has a right and wrong answer, just as there are right and wrong answers to mathematical equations. This “
binary approach” to problems then continues throughout our lives. The media gives us the impression that all issues have diametrically opposed options. People have ceased to realise that almost everything in life comes in shades of gray.
The general public, fuelled by the media on a deadline, or worse an agenda, no longer sees that there are more than just two sides to a story and that, generally, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. The questioning that allowed the unenlightened to become enlightened in the dark ages has ceased. More willing to swallow a sound bite, the public consistently fails in its
ethical duty to ask questions that matter. If people do not ask the questions, they will never find the answers.
People believe that freedom is a god given right, but fail to do the one thing that freedom affords; the ability to ask “why?” The media could tell most people two plus two is equal to five and they would never question it.
Every person has the ability to form his or her own opinion. An opinion is a person's ideas and thoughts towards something. It is an assessment, judgment or evaluation of something. An opinion is not a fact, because opinions are either not falsifiable, or the opinion has not been proven or verified.
For humanity, the worst lie is one taken as fact by those who hear it.
Descartes admitted that our mind is the only thing that we can rely on. The whole world could be an illusion; the only thing that we can be certain of is the existence of our minds. Yet people have become too willing to submit even that to the will of someone else. We have to learn to use our minds again to create structured opinions of what is going on around us. As humans we have to learn to start evaluating the information that is presented to us. We have to learn to be critical of what we see, what we feel and how things occur, otherwise what use are our brains.
