I was listening to an interview of Noam Chomsky’s the other day and wondered how he come to have the mind that he has. Each time when someone challenged him on an accepted idea, he would turn that idea on its head. He spoke his judgment so eloquently that there was barely any room left to counter him.
Then I listened to another interview of Michael Crichton’s, and again I am surprised by his insight, by his views. As I moved from one interview to another, I began to feel ever smaller, ever less intelligent because, though I have read a lot and have lived to the cusp of middle-age, I still find their views new, something I have never considered.
If their thought process could be taught then I would love to learn. I know that these people are above average most probably because they have gone through criticism and experiences that most of us have spent all our lives avoiding. The question then becomes, is there a way to learn what they have learned without having to go through the same experiences. On the surface it appears as though we have, for our civilization is built on a system of social communication. This means that we can learn by listening, by reading and by watching. We don’t have to dig through the sand into the tomb of Tutankhamen to know what was buried with him. We can just look through a list in a book or in the internet. We don’t have to collect market data on how to run a successful franchise; we get it from the franchisor. We don’t even have to calculate the value of pi from scratch, because someone has already done it for us.
Many of us have the same opportunity of gaining knowledge and what was once made available to the great thinkers is also made available to us now. Yet why are the results of our thought process so different from theirs? The answer, I believe, can be found in the reason why we all hold different views. Some of us are pro-choice, some pro-life. Others are passionately anti-gay, while just as many support the lifestyle with equal vehemence. There are also discrepancies in our lives. For one, some of us who live in democratic societies expect the leaders we support to be totalitarian. We demand that others respect us, yet we act insulted when the other person demands the same respect.
Another telling habit of ‘civilization’ is the key performance indexes that society have set for us. Success is measured by what education you have, what job you work in, how much you earn and how good looking your spouse is. If anyone who has all the trappings of success dares to claim that he or she is unhappy, this person is immediately branded as selfish. Popular culture even goes as far as to call beauty good and ugly evil. It treats everyone as simple minded insects who should appreciate physical form more than the unstructured form of emotion and intellect. And amazingly enough, many fall for it.
The same situation also occurs in the area of knowledge. We allow others to tell us which ones are good to acquire, which ones are a waste of time and which are just sheer stupidity to even consider. For those of us who live by the rules set out by those we respect, our world view will continue to be limited by their biases. We have been trained to be bias in so many ways that acquiring a new one in relation to it is very easy. On the other hand, when we hear something that contrast with our beliefs, we immediately treat it like a lie. We don’t want to hear it, and we usually consider the new idea so ludicrous that we would not even consider it.
If only life were simple, and if only our beliefs would not manifest itself into the real world. Yet the thought to action model which has brought us our modern lives, is also the model that we apply in our everyday lives. In our obsession with ensuring the ‘success’ of our children we would go so far as to demean, discriminate and belittle any race, religion, career or lifestyle that deviates from our ideal. In that way we separate them from the beliefs and cultures of another individual from a young age. Each time they choose to reinforce that belief by joining clubs or communities that support it, we encourage them. Every step they take in that direction will ensure that they will not ever consider anything that deviates from our ideal in the future.
Therein lies the difference between the great minds and the little minds. To the great minds, nothing is too small, or too insignificant or too disgusting, or too strange for them to consider. An alien idea is treated with curiosity, maybe even wonder, and in this way they learned. We have the same opportunity but we shun them. They don’t. They are fascinated by contrast when the rest of us cringe back in disgust. To us, our ideals are better than anything else that is out there. To the great minds every ideal is equal to the other, for the resulting good or violence coming from the extremities of those ideals are equal to one another.
They have found the secret that knowledge is in everything, because everything is an evolution of the human experience. The lifestyle, beliefs, music, songs and gods of a different culture is a manifestation of their collective knowledge. If we laugh off, insult or even brush aside another person’s culture, then we are depriving our minds of a different point of view of life. We will never go beyond our current mental plane, for we have turned it into a prison with bars tempered out of generations of biases.
So does that mean that we will never learn to view life from a different perspective? No, it doesn’t. It will, however, take a lot of courage to step away from your comfort zone. You might even lose friends and be forced to make new ones. Yet all things considered, this is the best age and time to change and to learn, for this is the internet age. On the other hand, we can also use the internet to reinforce our biases, and add more friends to the ones we have now. As Bindeshwar Pathak says, change can only come from the heart, not from the mind. So don't ask your mind if it is rational to change, ask your heart if it is ready to.
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