What we have found out about questions concerning the Origin Of Man is that where humanity began – similarly to where it will eventually lead, The End Of Man – can be guessed at, but never known. From time immemorial this guessing has set the foundations for every religion, creed, philosophy, and science the world has ever seen. The solutions they have offered and continue to offer have formed and continue to form the basis of all laws and moralities; they have set and continue to set standards of beauty and penalties for crimes, determine what is valuable, and so on.
Because we are all human, you and I today, as well as Grunt and Click were 10,000 years ago, we have what has been called a common humanity, you and me and Grunt and Click. Regardless of when or where a human has lived, there have always been laws limiting him, impositions laid upon him, and requirements made of him, and THIS by virtue of someone’s interpretation of what God, The Gods, or the alleged Godly Leaders (or no God…) is, are, and want.
Similarly, because we are all human today, you and I as well as Grunt and Click…we all have, and have had, in common what is called Creativity, that distinctly non-animal and in fact god-like ability to both deviate from instinct and bring into the material world, from only an immaterial idea, that which did not exist prior.
Perhaps, with a god, these idyllic creations can never go wrong. Unfortunately, for Homo sapiens, at least as much detriment and uselessness has come from his thinking and so creating as has come splendor and advancement for mankind.
1. You Accept Hypocrisy
Currently, the most-deeply rooted belief systems, and thus foundations for knowledge, are rooted in religious and scientific soils. In the early times, that is, after Grunt and Click but before, say, the 19th Century, there was no difference in this soil, as all studying and research was considered philosophy, and so, science. Since that time, since the separation of philosophy (and so metaphysics and religion) and science, the soils have become very different. The rooted knowledge, and so nourishment for what will eventually bear many branches, and sometimes even fruits, provided by each composition, is different. Yes, they can still cohabit, and do so more often than not, whether they want to admit it or not. But whereas philosophy seeks eternal truths, science must maintain the position that for something to be true it must be falsifiable, which literally prima facie denies the possibility of capital T Truth. Yet society must function under the presumption of at least some truths, which paradoxically might not be true at all.
On this point, consider two examples, the first that of gambling, the second of smoking. Technically, in a free society, a person should be able to bet his entire fortune if he so chooses. Similarly, in a free society, a person should be free to smoke anything he wants. But because some people are unable to control their spending, and others the dictates of their own bodies, society and it representative government places restriction on such activities, official proclamations making people, on the whole, less free. Apparently, argue the prohibitionists (as they always have…) these people become stricken with a type of what they call a “disease”. But these are not diseases at all, they evidence only personal weakness of will and lack of self-control.
What inevitably results, when society and its government place unethical prohibitions and taboos on the populace, is the condoning and even endorsement of nonsensical and illogical mandates. In a word, it necessitates HYPOCRISY, not only hypocrisy in full bloom but also a somehow established (undoubtedly through schooling and the media) ACCEPTANCE of this hypocrisy. Hypocrisy must become both scientific and acceptable.
Now back to our two examples, so we can wipe away the glitz and glimmer and get directly to the obvious hypocrisies established by them, hypocrisies so glaring it is impossible to believe so many others cannot see them. Is it that they do in fact see them, but choose to ignore them, or pretend not to see them, a type of mental cuckold of the type Sartre called Bad Faith? Regardless of the truth of that, to this day it remains true that if you have a mere nickel and dime poker game with your friends, or heck, even a penny-per game Gin round with your grandmother, you can be arrested and fined for having that game because it is considered gambling and so a crime. Similarly, you can be fined for smoking in the wrong places, or smoking the wrong things. Both things, technically and legally, are crimes, punishable by law.
The hypocrisy is found in the basis for the illegalities, the reasons for the taboos. In the VERY SAME societies in which these no-nos exist, there exist similarly operating entities that are for some reason immune to the principles behind the laws, indeed, to the laws themselves. The basis for the taboo on gambling – the addiction potential, the taking out of the mouths of babes moneys that could better go to their subscriptions to National Geographic and similar comic books, or the filling of their tummies with well-rounded Happy Meals and Lunchables – somehow is ignored when it comes to, for just two evidences, The Lottery and The Stock Market.
I will not elaborate long because this should be obvious to everyone with half a brain. The Lottery is the biggest mega-gamble of them all, for many reasons. People become as addicted to playing it as they become addicted to the Blackjack table. It is not uncommon for people to spend hundreds, even on occasion, when the jackpots are high, thousands of dollars a week trying to hit that “half of all moneys collected”. Half, that is, minus the fees, maintenance costs, taxes, administration fees, and so on.
State and local lotteries, let’s remember, often take more than one form, and so now some states and nations have literally dozens, when it comes to countries, sometimes hundreds of different games to play. They try to justify this millions of dollars of state income each week by claiming benefits to the people, to society in general. But other than the people who sell the tickets, or who work on the Lottery Board, and its controls, and the lady who spins the wheel…well, it’s hard to tell who really benefits from these lotteries other than the same people who benefit by you paying your monthly mandated insurance fees.
They claim that the moneys collected will, for example go to education. What they do not tell you is that the money they were receiving before – from your tax money – has just now gone elsewhere, with only a token gain in overall gross spending by the educational system. They also do not tell you that the Insurance Effect is at play here, especially when it comes to education. When it is not the individual paying, but rather insurance, the price for those goods and service skyrocket (soon you will see this effect with even groceries because of how many people use a welfare-type or food stamp card to now buy their groceries, but that is a matter for another time); this is the Insurance Effect. Education gets a bit more money to spend, so its suppliers raises the prices, salaries go up, etc., with little to no overall gain for the student in the desk (or now, at the table).
The result is the biggest gambling business of all, taking a vigorish that makes the standard (and God-ordered…) ten percent look like gumball machine money. While on the one hand you are told gambling is bad, even punishable by law (try to start your own neighborhood lottery and announce it in the Daily Post and on Facebook…let me know how it goes…), on the other hand you are encouraged, even enticed by television and radio ads urging you to just “take a shot” at The Lottery.
I shant go further into detail but these same types of absurdities pervade the entire theory behind trading in the Stock Market; it is nothing more than, in principle and so at base, legalized gambling. Like The Lottery (I capitalize them because they are treated as exempt deities) the Stock Market is lauded and encouraged but a gamble nonetheless. As it stands, society either fails to acknowledge or cannot see the hypocrisy. The people, through lack of education, operant conditioning, and general disregard of simple logic, have come to accept it. Acceptance is perhaps an understatement, as it seems to me – as these hypocrisies continue to multiply – as if the hoi polloi have come to enjoy it, perhaps as some cuckolds enjoy their betrayals.
It is the same with smoking. Those highly esteemed (like the words of the Pope) men of medicine and attorneys/Surgeon Generals, who too often forget that less than 50 years ago their own organizations and FDAs endorsed Winstons or Marlboros, even cannabinoids and opiates. Today, these same brightest of folks have now determined that smoking (anything) is addictive and dangerous to your health, nay, perhaps the cause of every disease or ailment we cannot determine.
Let us be generous and say that the principle behind this taboo, then, is human health. But if that is the case, why are liquor, preservatives, Round-Up, even certain medications, allowed to exist? Gasoline sold to anyone? Again I won’t go on long because it should be obvious. If human health is the concern, I could think of many very prosperous enterprises that should be shut down. Not only shut down but their owners and workers and so minions fined and imprisoned, as, say, so many harrassed, fined, and imprisoned “users” of the past have had to endure.
Timothy Leary probably said it best. I will paraphrase. Fire, electricity, and water, can all kill you, but they are allowed to exist. In fact, people pay for some of them on a regular basis, like any other habit. As with gambling, laws regulating objects of human consumption are evidence of a glaring hypocrisy; both are ultimately caused by trying to unnecessarily and without reason curtail free human action.
Consider what this means if we extend this hypocrisy into the scientific world which is certainly our concern at present. You ask a biologist, “Say, Mr. Biologist, where did this amoeba come from?” It will not be far down the conversation line when he must, out of necessity, invoke a concept like “Nature” or “Infinity” or “Natural Causes” or “Mutation” or “Spark Of Life” in answering for the question. So you ask a Man of the Cloth, “Say, Brother Cloth, where did this amoeba come from?” In that conversation, also very early, you will hear invoked the very same terms, with one exception: the concept “God” will be added to the mix.
2. You Accept Extortion
I have argued in this set of essays that Science, with all the ambiguities that word now brings to mind, has become a new religion [nb: Science as used here capitalized means Theoretical Science, again, immune to criticism]. Blind faith is how most believe in this new religion, convinced by virtue of authority or, as some of them admit, lack of better alternatives, that imaginary realities are better than unknown ones. Mistakenly thinking that somehow true science must discard the idea of deity, the theoretical scientists have been forced by logical necessity to adopt, as fundamental building blocks for their creed, concepts and ideas that make Zeus and the Gilgamesh look as familiar as a man’s view out of his bathroom window. Replacing the old myths, Science has instilled the new myths, complete with heroes, real or imagined enemies, catastrophes, and an ever-present Nature that it will never admit is its prosthetic stand-in for God.
The main myths served up by the Priests of Paradigms, the new “scientists”, all descend from two core beliefs. These objects of faith are those two “great” never-ending sagas (like Windows Operating System…also a type of extortion, BTW…), The Myth Of The Big Bang Theory and The Myth Of The Theory Of Evolution. That these theories are wrong – all wrong – we have seen already. Just as we have no proof Zeus turned women into trees, or that Moses parted the Red Sea, we have no proof there was ever a time when nothing existed, into which appeared ex nihilo and by efforts entirely without intelligent basis something that went on to form the many different celestial and biological entities. Neither do we have any proof that at any time a truly separate genera of being came to exist by mutation, slow or otherwise, from any existing genera or species (this latter correctly determined…). We have shown how, like Windows, they never end, just pliable under new evidence.
Every good religion establishes a church, and today Science’s church is in schools. Like the preacher-teachers of (mostly…) the past, who taught fire and brimstone to kids in one room schoolhouses, even today academia plunders the children, through to their teens and on to when they are young adults, with tales of celestial fires and explosive brimstone points of nothingness. They “learn” of hybrid monsters and other mental constructs made to appear real by cunning artists’ conceptions.
Exactly as the Inquisition stifled the heretics one way or another, academia strong-arms the non-believers into compliance. This can extend, also exactly as it extended then, to those who do not believe in the same way, even if they – basically – believe the same thing. So, if we say God wears blue shoes and you say he wears red shoes you are a heretic, and, if we say the Big Bang began 10 trillion years ago and you say 100 trillion years ago you are a heretic. To say we both believe in God, or we both believe the world is billions of years old, is just not enough.
The church of Science has, by similar reductive, specialization “advancements”, been divided into many sects, with many branches, all over the globe. Those who consider themselves knowledgeable, religious, even righteous, among the laity, become adept at memorizing and accepting as Truth the gospels that have been taught them. Few ever bother to question these theoretical facts of science, certainly no more than question or have questioned the truths of the Bible, or the Rig Veda. But in this, people – you, and me, and Grunt and Click – have, in the main, always been the same.
At every turn we see Science has become the new, and perhaps the predominant, religion.
Chariots of fire have become UFOs and angels have become aliens. Paintings of cherubs in the sky have been replaced by digital art and simulations of what life is like on some planet we could never hope to see, or what an assembled pile of dug up bones looks like with its flesh back on. Like snake oil salesmen, theoretical “scientists” weave intricate tales, anecdotes, and sagas – sprinkled here and there with maybe true-maybe-not tales of success – in order to sell their product (like aspirin).
You are, on the whole, easily predictable cowards, your disgruntlements easily appeased by mediocre entertainment and subsidies. So, you accept paying for once-free television although the advertisements have not disappeared. You watch 15 minutes of commericals for every 15 minutes of “entertainment” product. Your accept taxes and levies although you are unsure where the money goes and what you get for our money other than, well, to pay the salaries and expenses of those creating these laws, and those enforcing them. You claim to want to “Support The Troops”, and have a celebratory month for them, even ask for charitable donations although the military already spends a good one-third of all tax money collected for them. But few of you, and none of you in power, puts two plus two together and dares say maybe the best way to show concern for the lives of The Troops is to use them for defense and defense alone. In my lifetime my country has been in constant conflict somewhere else in the world. Never here, and never have I felt threatened by any other nation. Yet every day, even as I write this, there are soldiers in my country putting their lives on the line for merely idealistic and/or corporate interests.
The very big money military-industrial complex, the big banks and investment firms, and organized crime, I believe, have now become one. When you say “they”, it is this nasty conglomorate you speak of.
It seems to me, as you accept hypocrisy, so now do you accept extortion.When you accept hypocrisy and extortion in one place you will accept it elsewhere as well, and you accept both, apparently, with regard to today’s scientific theories.
3. It’s Wrong, All Wrong
So, you ask, what’s so bad about Science as a religion? Well, other than that faith thing, there are two very big reasons. The first is obvious. Without any deity or Natural Law towards which to direct an appeal Science cannot determine what is Right and what is Wrong. It cannot tell what is Beautiful, and it can make no logical appeal to Love. It is, in a word, ethically, morally, perhaps even socially bereft of any benefit to humankind. You want to get married? We can test your compatibility, compare your ages, examine your DNA, and even monitor your glandular excretions and brain waves when around each other. We can send you questionnaires to fill out and find you a “compatible” [sic] mate. But whether your love is real, whether it will endure, and what even that word means is, for the standard scientific theorist, talking nonsense. Vows, vows are meant to be broken in this society. What is a man’s word worth anymore?
The best you can do ethically, morally, artistically, in such a god-less society, is work from principles of utility and start with premises (also without basis…) like “the greatest good for greatest number”. But on this or that issue, does the majority really know best? At least, any more so than know all the hidden tidbits in that X painting? Or who understand the arguments offered by the candidates for County Judge? Can the majority be trusted? Using the very same thought process used by the theorists today, would you rather trust what the majority of people say you should do about your noisy car engine, or should you rather seek the opinion of someone who is a car expert?
Anyway, let’s consider that thing called Progress. One idea often taken to be an example of “progress”, taken from the political field, is that men are better off without kings, and consequently that democracy, a.k.a. majority rule, is best for a people. The ancients, let’s remember, were nearly unanimous in their belief that the average person is neither steadfast, educated, nor informed enough to set the rules of society. They were convinced a benevolent kingship is preferable to democracy.
Then, because of perhaps some certain wayward, or insane kings, aristocracy became frowned upon, to the point of many a monarchy succumbing to very bloody citizen uprisings and revolutions. If only we had such spirits of honor and dignity today… Anyway, anti-aristocracy arguments, many of them put forth by excellent and well-meaning thinkers, cited as evidence for the need to overthrow “the gub-ment” things such as taxation, hoarding the wealth, unbridled power, wasting the people’s money, etc.
Now, in our democratic nations – where about half the people even bother to vote, a good percentage of them ignorant of the issues and some even unable to read the ballots, or just plain stupid, crazy, and uneducated in general – what do we have? We have Presidents who, through Acts such as National Security and procedures such as Executive Orders, have similarly unbridled power; an aristocracy of 2 percent of people who own half the wealth; a treasury that doesn’t know where all the gold is; a government that wastes tax money on kingly celebrations and galas and unnecessary wars; taxation on goods and services despite people once throwing stuff into the sea rather than pay a 2 percent tax.
Here to me it doesn’t look like progress. It looks like a compliance, forced by the threat of garnished wages and prison time rather than the hangman’s noose.
With theoretical science it is little different and taken as a whole it has shown only shady progress. While practical science, due to technological advances, has done very real things and so advanced our species to some degree, theoretical science has produced little, especially considering the questions it tries, and has tried, to answer. Questions that are, primarily, out of its jurisdiction. Nevertheless its offerings and artist’s conceptions have become esteemed to the status of Church, believed in with all the heart and soul of any denomination’s adherents.
This in mind, let’s begin with this Church Of Science, specifically how it, and all it affects, should be changed. Or better, how I would change it – and several other things – if I were King.
4. You Allow Your Kids’ Minds To Go To Waste
Now first of all if you fancy yourself a scientist and you produce nothing you would not be paid. You will not be paid for theorizing, as any idiot with a pen, keyboard, or touchpad can theorize. Anyone fancying themselves a theorist must prove the truth of those theories, otherwise he or she is merely a fiction writer, again, something anyone with a vivid imagination and a thesaurus can accomplish. Everyone shall be free to theorize, and it has been this “everyman“, rather than the scientific theorist-by-trade, who has been responsible for most human technological advancement. Businessmen who needed more efficient tools or means of production; engineers and hobbyists who sought ways drive fast, even fly; chemists and biologists who gave us things like refrigerators and antivenins. The key thing to notice is that all of these examples of progress came from people who had OTHER JOBS. One could argue that everyone thinks, everyone theorizes, or at least have those sometimes-fruitful intellectual Flights Of Fancy. This does not mean such thinking should be esteemed, or compensated, in and of itself.
Second, and not unrelated to the first change, is that what is taught in schools needs to changed drastically. While I believe most public school systems, especially in America, have plenty of money to educate children adequately, where that money goes is a major problem and concern. There is also the consistent and constant problem of making the slowest student the object of the most education. At some point classes need to be separated by academic ability, and an early way out, say to a trade school or, these days, a technical school, should be afforded to those without any academic ability or inclinations. It all starts with education, as even Plato knew.
This is especially true in the early, formative years, where too often children ready to suck up knowledge like a sponge absorbs water are instead taught little or meaningless drivel (and of course, how to sit still and shut up) by young adults not much older than their students, with little more experience, but brandishing a teaching certificate which, certainly, makes them qualified. Intelligent, bright, and eager students soon withdraw when they enter these systems, tired of curriculum geared to the slow and lazy. Children tutored by their parents in the very basics since the birth of their consciousness are thrown in with children whose parents only fed them and threw them in front of TVs and toys. If I had a quarter for every time I asked not only my own children, but clever friends and even strangers, “What did you learn in school today?” and they answered “Nothing”, I could surely buy myself, well, at least a new PC by now.
School should be a place for learning, not about moral training or operant conditioning. Teachers should be experienced, in fact, by my system it would be the older, even retired people who should teach young children. They have experience, know patience, are better at understanding, and that alone makes them better than what we currently have. The nenefits to the seniors is a subject for another time.
Doctrinally, we need to review that Darwin-Jennings debate. In fact, this debate should be taught at a very early age, as should, by the way, courses on death. No longer should schools shun religious doctrines as basis for all the doctrines, and substitute in its place theories just as extraterrestrial as the tales of the gods. Don’t teach kids one myth at the expense of another. I am fine with teaching all myths, and letting the children decide which makes more sense to them. Call this mandatory class “Metaphysics”. Along these same lines, hard sciences and real history must also be taught starting at a young age.
Ideally, beginning at about age 7 or 2nd grade, children should be separated by intellectual ability. At this age you can plan 3 tracks or tracts: the academic track, the trade tract, and the middle tract, this last which leaves open the possibility for its constituents to proceed in either direction.
Where We Stand Now (If you like this, check out the new [retarded] commercial on masculinity)
Most of you enjoy being used, and succumb to authority like any suppliant before his idol. You allow silly or “judgment-call” laws to exist, like “disorderly conduct”, and laws which limit your freedom “for the sake of safety” or some other half-assed reason. You willingly donate good chunks of your money and have no idea where it goes, work like a slave while watching those supposedly working for you not even show up on work days. You allow yourself to be charged astronomically for things you have no choice about, like electricity, and gasoline, and water, as if it is not ultimately the people of the nation in question who actually own these naturally-occurring commodities.
As for authority, clearly most people today have no problem doing what their boss, or their doctor, or their priest tells them to do. Verily, even those who consider themselves argumentative, and free to speak what they choose, will hush and crumble under the weight of doctor’s orders, and do whatever their “leaders” proscribe, even now leave their homes if ordered to do so. At birth, when your child is born, how it is delivered, what is administered to it or injected into it after birth is rarely questioned, certainly by no more than who question the 100-or-so battery of shots that child is “recommended” to have in its lifetime. Blind submission is everywhere, the easy way out, and now this extends to scientific theory, where the authority of “renowned” theorists, like Darwin, or Hawking, or Hubble, or Gould, or Dawkins, is believed in by faith alone.
As for extortion. I needn’t remind anyone the main reason America, like many other colonies, wanted its independence from The Crown. It was primarily financial, as these future independent nations got tired of paying tribute and tithings to England. In sum (…), it was taxation that was the main cause, and not much taxation at that. Payroll taxes that in the 1960s were garnered from the first 3000 dollars or so of income has now extended to the first 100,000 and more. Yearly increasing property taxes, state sales taxes, vehicle registrations, vehicle taxes, and of course federal taxes, extra taxes on certain goods, even road tolls, access fees, and the like constantly take more and more out of an individual’s income, with nary a peep from the populace. Why this is so we have already discussed in chapters prior. Subsidies, doles, entertainment, illusion of security, and more, is why people tolerate it. Yet, the fact remains, nobody asks where it goes, or more precisely, what do we get for our money?
Everyone in this society makes use of water, and most of electricity, gasoline, natural gas, wifi, telephone, and mandatory insurance, to name a few. Everyone now must pay for health insurance in America. Because these things are required for a good quality of life today, their costs should be regulated and drastically reduced. The reason for this is, especially regionally, that people have no real choices, and the businesses which supply these goods and services are therefore a monopoly.
Health care providers are all alike in that they deal primarily with insurance of one type or another. When one gets sick one does not compare prices. It is rather proximity and situation that determines where a sick person goes. In my society, if I were king, health insurance would be completely eliminated, as a racketeering scheme, prices for drugs and medical services would be controlled by strict guidelines, and profits for such suppliers kept with a certain range commensurate with other commodity industries. Taxes, relocated from administrative bloat and a world-watching military now back home, would pay for the difference. That Americans, and a few other nations, allow so much wasting of hard-earned money, while they still haven’t the security of good health, to me makes us, in these respects, a third world country. Unfortunately, even some of them have health care from birth. To be truthful, only about 30-40 known countries today DO NOT provide free health care for its citizens. It is insulting, really, as rich as we are.
The other, tangible commodities come from the land. As the governments will confiscate for the state objects of archaeological or historical significance, so should they take over these resources. Where oil is found, should it belong to the person or corporate entity that owns the property, or should it belong to the people in general, the inhabitants of this land? For this reason, profits on gas, and oil, and water, and so on, should also be price-controlled.
6. You Are Ignorant
This one hurts the most, I know, but let me explain why, and why we are still on track. Being ignorant has two real meanings, one meaning “without knowledge of” and the other meaning “with the wrong knowledge”, and both of these are very prevalent today. The bulk of you, even most of you who consider yourselves smart, or educated, at some point accept the theories of science just because they are the theories of science. You learn the predominant dictum of the day – be it Evolution, Big Bang, or the myriad of lesser explanations, and adopt it with fervor, even though you don’t really understand it, or know the details behind it. In some sick psychological enterprise, you assuage your curiosity with answers given by the authorities, few of you ever bothering to find out the too-often-omitted details. Yet, too many of you types consider yourselves somehow different from the average believer in God, who also has his or her answers, often to the very same questions, and with just as much proof.
You are ignorant, in the first sense, because you really don’t know, still, how we got here. You really don’t know how life began, or where, or how old the world is, or why so many different species develop in an ecology supposedly determined by location and environment. You have no idea where the first man came from, or at what site, or at what year. You cannot fathom what happens to a person after they die. And while you yearly come up with more and more reasons why “we cannot be alone in the universe”, you seem to yearly ignore more and more all the celestial, planetary, atmospheric, biological, and chemical events which had to occur for life on this planet alone to come to be. This Science Religion is not a celebration of man, as is found in all the other religions. It is a twisted, grasping-at-straws effort trying to minimize the significance of man in the wake of what appears to him to be an ever-expanding, in more ways then one, universe. As a humanist I find this all appalling, especially in the absence of any confirmed little green man, or even little green amoeba, from anywhere else.
You are ignorant, in the second sense, in that even the educated among you believe things that simply cannot be true, and we have detailed such things throughout this endeavor. You believe the Big Bang, though it is by its own admission a mental exercise. You believe in macroevolution even though Darwin himself admitted he was wrong. You believe things which cannot be known, like “20% of the planets could be inhabited” or “only 5% of the site has been excavated”, this latter without knowing how big the site is to start with. I could multiply these beliefs in mirages countlessly.
7. You Are Weak…And Getting Weaker
Now this is not just physically, but with regard to constitution, mental acumen, strength of will, understanding of dignity and pride, and susceptibility to disease. As what is acceptable as good food and nourishment has changed, so have you, perhaps it is true yo are what you eat. I think, really, you are just confused. You have become, on the one hand, a more “kind and accepting”, politically correct world – while on the other hand, you are the only sick species that, with ever-increasing frequency routinely robs and kills and otherwise hurts his fellow men for no reason at all. Too many humans put themselves before their children, for example, and too many stories continue to breal about mothers abandoning their children, something that, among advanced mammals, only sick animals are known to do. This is mental weakness, a sickness borne of self-pity and laziness, not to mention a twisted sort of value system that’s all about the ME. You insult me, poor me, no one understands me, pity me…help me, I don’t know who I am. Mantras of the modern.
I will finish this with one example from good old professional football. Less than twenty years ago players would get in the game and give it their best shot regardless of their overall health. Broken noses and fingers, walking with limps, chest pains, headaches, death in the family, you name it, that player needed money so whatever it took he would play, at 25% or 50%, he would go in. Today, symbolic of where we now stand, players say things like “I am not playing unless I am 100%”, as if that number is achievable, or even, determinable, by antone, on any given day. Worse, the coaches and owners of these teams consider such behavior acceptable. So, many players collect their salaries, but do little for it. This is exactly where we stand today, in just about every field there is.