Thank God it does.
I recall as a child, like almost all children, moving closer and closer to understanding what adults were talking about. Naturally progress depended on so many variables, not least giving a damn about what was being discussed. And then later some of us pay attention to what those engaging in it would call “intelligent” discourse.
Qualifications, of which I have too many to mention, do say something about the possessor. An ability to absorb information, sometimes understand it, and then reproduce it at examination time. If you go too far down this path, it inexorably leads to the rarefied world of academia. For four years I was a university lecturer and so have all the credentials to engage in “intelligent discourse.”
It is a road to nowhere.
The discourse is so narrow it almost never strays beyond the boundaries set by the mainstream. Those boundaries contain within them system serving politicians, bureaucrats, academics, journalists, media presenters and a whole assortment of gofers and sycophants.
It would be so easy to say who gives a f*** about Teresa May, Boris Johnson, even Jeremy Corbyn and the mainstream media.. However as I, along with many others, have wasted many a good hour commenting on this lot I will pass this time to avoid being called a hypocrite.
This is the problem. Almost everyone never, ever gives a moment’s thought to where they get their information. Those who consider themselves intelligent will add as a caveat that they can see through what is being reported in the media and make their own minds up.
But they can’t.
Their world, and this is the reason why we are stuck in this mess, is constructed hour by hour day by day by the mainstream. The world lives in Plato’s Cave.
So my advice, request-maybe even plea-to those of you who are awake is to challenge, always nicely, how and where people get their information from.
My usual response these days to the mindless harvesting, and then perpetual recycling of uninformed opinions about things that don’t really matter is to say nothing.
But worry not, the world continues to awake despite it being terminally sluggish in the steam room and the swimming pool at Malvern Splash Leisure Centre.
There I’ve said it again. Done this topic to death. So please go off now and have a beautiful day!
Copyright Jack Stewart July 2016.