Requiem for Higher Thought

The world is speeding up. But humans, sadly, are slowing down. The information superhighway has become an instantaneous information superportal, and now you can access it from the dark recesses of the world on your personal pocket-sized supercomputer. But the billions of people with access to this resource use it mostly to read about celebrity romances, gossip with their friends, and, let’s not forget, find pictures of naked people.

When I say slowing down, of course I mean it in a metaphorical sense, meaning getting “less intelligent.” When it comes to the ferocity of our collective desire for instant gratification, or the speed with which we absorb cultural stereotypes, we humans are quite obviously speeding up. More quantity, less quality.

The problem lies partly in our ever decreasing attention span. This part of the transition to idiocy is made liquid smooth by the constant barrage of shiny pictures and soundbytes. With so much of our world dominated by brevity, we’ve essentially trained ourselves to lose interest in any subject that can’t be summed up in a thirty-second computer-animated commercial. It’s the kind of self-sabotage that only humans are clever enough to create.

What most fail to realize is how much of an impact the things that we spend our time looking at, reading about, thinking about, and generally paying attention to have on our brains. The more time we spend watching bad TV or gossiping online, the more our brains are trained to think in terms of soap operas and gossip. I know it sounds like your mother - “too much TV will rot your brain!” - but give the old lady some credit. She did have some widsom to offer. My own spin on her cliché would be: “too much brainless activity of any kind will make you a friggin’ idiot!”

The worst part of all of this is how our degraded thinking patterns cause us to act. Your typical teenage girl who gets her relationship advice from Paris, Britney, and the rest of the celeb supersluts will proceed to spread their dimwitted ways throughout her own life. She will have similarly shallow expectations of men (hot, dumb, and cocky), not to mention similarly shallow expectations of herself (hot, dumb, and ditzy). She’s setting herself up for a life of extraordinary unhappiness, with thanks in no small part to the role models our brilliant culture has erected for her.

The teenage girl is one of the most obvious victims in the era of Kate Moss being revered for having her skin stick to her bones, but there are countless ways that this stuff affects all of us. Guys are modeled in the media as the most successful when they make the most money, drive the nicest cars, and have sex with the most women. What about being emotionally supportive of their wives and kids? What about being responsible citizens and pursuing important issues politically? What about having a positive impact on the world around them? All of these qualities are incredibly hard to find in the large majority of the mass media, and it’s no small coincidence that they’re subsequently hard to find in reality.

We’ve gotten ourselves trained so well that it’s actually become a laughable thing to suggest that those who make their lives revolve around money and sex are missing the point. “Oh, come on, don’t be so idealistic” or “welcome to the real world” are typical responses to this kind of rhetoric. We’re so far out of touch with our potential as loving, caring humans that we don’t even believe it exists anymore.

Alright, enough bitching, Jake! If you’re so smart, what’s your solution?

In large part, my solution is to start re-training ourselves. And one of the most effective ways to get your brain back in shape is to read. I’m not talking People magazine, either, although it may be a good place to start if your reading skills have steadily declined since Kindergarten. What’s one of the best ways to start thinking in terms of the bigger picture, to foster the kind of imagination and creativity that enables you to see beyond the daily drama? It’s by reading the written works of great thinkers in our history who have excelled in this endeavour.

Translation: read books written by smart people, and you’ll get smarter. You’ll start to think like them. You’ll start to question what you see and hear, and eventually you’ll form opinions about the world that are genuinely your own. After awhile, you’ll know why you believe what you believe, and this will give your beliefs strength. This strength of conviction will likely motivate you to take action in the world to pursue what you feel is right. Imagine if half of Americans took an active interest in making the world a better place! It’s a long way off, but it’s possible.

What’s more, chances are, you’ll be more compassionate, more supportive, and will generally have a much more positive impact on your world. When you take the time to learn about all different points of view, you tend not to think other people are so dumb for disagreeing with you. You see where they’re coming from, even if you don’t agree, and you don’t feel as separated and standoffish.

Part of the problem we face is pessimism. We’re so far from a real solution that it’s difficult to think it’s even possible. To do so requires thinking on a very large scale - something that is very difficult for us to do, especially in light of our current drive for instant gratification. It’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem - how are we going to get people to start thinking in the long term unless they re-train their brains, and how are we going to motivate them to re-train their brains unless they think in the long term? This question is more difficult. Perhaps part of the answer lies in motivating people via their own personal gains. If people start thinking more profoundly about their lives and the world around them, they will undoubtedly be happier, though it seems hard to convince them of this without them finding out for themselves. So the initial motivation is still elusive. Regardless, there are those of us who know this to be true, so the least we can do if we’re serious about improving our world (and our lives) is to put our knowledge into action, and maybe even go out of our way to help other people do the same.