Why so much of a culture's problems are left up to its thinkers and writers and critics...

I think I understand why so many of a culture's problems are left up to its great authors...

Because so few people really care about them...
I mean really care...like thoughtfully resolving those problems really matters...

Most people don't care, much of the time, I'm learning...not really...

And some people care enough to do their best...for now...without a lot of thought about the future...

Most people care enough about problems to reinforce their own prejudices...and most smart people care enough to develop sophisticated arguments...to reinforce their own prejudices...

Very, very, very few people...care enough about the world...to operate from the higher intellectual standard...of discomfirming their own prejudices and ideas...rather than confirming...the highest intellectual standard...

A standard that very, very, very few people...take really seriously, at all...

Because most people...even the ones who care the most...

Do not, generally, care enough...to face a problem square on...at its fundamentals...and deal with it...honestly...

Most of the time...people solve problems...for now...

I wish I could think like that, most of the time...

My life would be more boring...and lacking in passion...or love...

But it would be a lot easier...

And fuck if I'm going to keep doing this on my own...if I'm going to be the only one doing this...

After having 3 district administrators make clear to me just how much more important bureaucratic detail was to teaching, since it was bureaucratic detail and not teaching that makes the big bucks from the fed...

And then classrooms full of kids and teachers...none of whom really care about thinking or learning or education in the deepest sense...

I'm just left kind of wondering why I should care so goddamn much...

Probably is not good reason...

Not at the pay I make...

And with the hassle I've absorbed into my life for that higher kind of purpose...

None of my professors really valued it, that much...

Which is why so many people turn to the lazy thinking that is involved with trying to force your way to results...

Because...it's easy to come to that conclusion...

When you don't really care...because you haven't really thought about it...

Because it doesn't involve a lot of thought...

And that's the beauty of it for people who don't care very much about thinking and don't really care that much, in the big picture...

Is that no thinking...is just so much goddamn easier...

Than thinking...

Still...

It would be nice to chat with someone who really does care...

It would make the experience a whole lot less tedious to go through...

And would mean that I would have at least one other person in this world...

Whose commitment to it that I really respect...

That's why there's so few really great authors and thinkers who really get to the bottom of a culture's problems...

Because most people...are just living their lives...caught up in the thick of those problems...

Without really thinking very seriously, at all...

About how to resolve them...

It's taken more than 300 years of secular thought to get the bulk of the world committed to a world of freedom and equity and intelligence...

I guess 100 years, give or take, to get people to take the merits of a question seriously...with a clear commitment to constructive resolution...and not always trying to prove that they are right...because it's just easier than thinking more seriously...is not so bad, with that perspective...

I'm just growing weary of facing my limitations at inspiring others to take the intellectual merits of important matters seriously...

Maybe I can find a smart girl to bitch and laugh about the stubborn fact of recalcitrant human stupidity...

And none of it will seem the total lunacy that it seems to me, today...

I have a couple of IEP's (Individual Education Plan) to work on (why do we do these things, again...I have no fuckin' clue, at this point...and that is the one hundred percent truth...because it definitely isn't because people use them to take the education of kids seriously, that is for damn sure...because they so overwhelm that latter more important goal so often...at least, in my experience, at this point)...

Is my life forever doomed to making way for the stubborn foolishness of the bulk of humanity?...

Today is a day that feels like that, I must say...

Have a better day than me, everyone...

Love,
Ben