MY PROBLEM WITH THESE TIMES.
The biggest problem of our time, in our view*, is increasing superficiality. A lack or lack of intellectual depth of judgement. The opportunity and free will or otherwise to do so which in multiple senses is cause for increasing concern and reflection. By this fine official sentence, I mean that people no longer take the time, allow themselves or are given the time by the pressure of their environment to think about everything that happens around them in peace and calm (of mind). Based on knowledge from multiple information sources, they can come to a weighted judgement. Much of the information we receive every day has already been chewed up, processed into bite-sized chunks that we as news consumers only have to swallow. Yet precisely lack of time and that the information is like the meat at the butcher’s, pre-cut leads to an increase in disinformation.
Now it seems to me that sitting back lazily, drawing your own conclusions in this day and age is quite difficult Especially when I compare that to how it used to be. When, for lack of distractions and pocket money, I could attend classes for eight hours a day and still spend an average of five hours a day in the evening 6 days a week in the books doing the homework given. Sunday the Lord’s Day I used to prepare test papers. I wouldn’t have managed that in my lifetime if there had been such things as Tik Tok, Instapgram or Facebook back then. The temptation would probably have been too great for my still immature and above all receptive brain, which at that age was not yet able to realise the dangers, to recognise the signs of addiction anyway. Which in a pinch can also serve for the religious nature of many. Because all this kind of social platform offers ‘ instant gratification’*, a kind of cup-a-soup for the brain just like lighting a cigarette or praying a Hail Mary in the old days.
To use just a metaphor, it used to be that stimuli from the environment came in a fixed and steady pattern. It had the discipline of a set ritual. Comparable to hoisting the patriotic tricolour early in the morning on a barracks yard. Or a more lovely image; a forest stream meandering kindly through an Arcadian landscape. These days, the amount of information and stimuli is more like a wild river about to run far beyond its banks. Like the other day in Spain. Everything in its path gets buried under unstoppable mudslides.
From all sides you are pulled and begged for attention without increasing the time of your life. While your brain barely gets a chance to catch its breath. Getting enough oxygen and hormone injections to let all this sink in. Which leads to a primary almost instinctual reaction pattern. A direct appeal to emotion and associated arousal, but leading to nothing else. At most to a somewhat superficial empathy. Which then also needs to be shared. Because although it may seem otherwise, an emotion is absolute and total as an experience, but certainly not profound. In terms of superficiality, it does resemble a holiday on the costa del sol. Leaves no real useful knowledge in the memory other than some vague traces that lead nowhere. Which can therefore be considered a waste of time.
You may wonder why I am so concerned with the fate of modern man or youth as the Biblical figure Lot? From which we derived the proverb of Lot. Actually, because I keep running into the disrespected limits of freedom of speech. A modern denial of this limit consisting of the superficial assumption that anything can be said, written and portrayed. Something I disagree with. However, the last article I devoted to this position consists of over two thousand words. I want to spare you that for here and now, because I also know that like cheap Chinese fireworks, the attention fuse is getting shorter and shorter. Consequently, opinions pop harder and harder at each other and burst like blanks.
But what would be an alternative or better approach to this concept of freedom in conjunction with the aforementioned Article 7 of our multi-interpretable constitution? It could also be, I thought after my first cup of coffee at breakfast that this article does not mean shout ins blaue hinein. Perhaps the constitution guarantees us enough time as a state guarantee and positive freedom* to arrive at a profound opinion,* a consideration that meets our own values and standards. Because everyone these days has their mouths full about our values and standards, but the bulk of their own people’s opinions on Facebook and X/ hardly meet them.
Ludo
*us used here as pluralis majestatis, the royal plural form that in a democracy like ours may be used by any citizen.
*arousal; the immediate activation of the central nervous system that determines the flight or fight response.
* instant gratification, immediate need satisfaction through release of the hormone endorphin.
* in conjunction with Article 23 in the Constitution on freedom of education. In my view, one cannot be separated from the other.
*positive freedom according to the philosopher Berlin the freedom to yourself to come to creative creations. Usually described by me as active freedom, the freedom that demands action versus passive (negative) freedom bestowed upon you from above.
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