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Genocide of thinking

By David Young - posted Wednesday, 25 March 2009


It does not require thinking to insult and abuse. It does not require thinking to conduct a campaign of lies and misinformation. It does not require thinking to ignore everything that threatens to upset our narrow little lives.

And if we do something that causes harm all we have to do is come up with an excuse why we are right, and the other person wrong. No great feat of intellectual ability required for that one.

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We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive. Albert Einstein.

I see it slightly differently to Einstein. We will have to learn to think if mankind is to survive. What we do at the moment is not thinking.

So what would thinking be like? Can we come up with the characteristics of thinking?

As a beginning I offer here my concept of what thinking would be like without any dogma attached because we will not know what thinking is like until we start to do it. If we have something that needs to be solved we would start from the position of knowing nothing. If we know it all already we go nowhere.

This is the reason we so often go round and round in circles. We cannot get the idea that thinking starts with knowing nothing.

Thinking would require total personal responsibility. Whatever we did would belong to us.

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The bad news is we could no longer use the excuse that we were right and the other person wrong in avoiding responsibility. The lies and misinformation would also have to go.

If the human race learnt to think we would probably be able to solve our problems instead of arguing and abusing as our planet disappears down the drain.

Thinking would not mean the end of emotions, in fact it could be the beginning of emotional responses. It would not mean that everything would become rational and ordered. Thinking would bring about the things we wanted.

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About the Author

David Young has been a writer for 20 years. At other times he has been an architect and a flying instructor. Details of his books and writings can be found at his website davidyoungauthor.com

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Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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