This is going to sound silly but please bear with me for a moment. Before driving down to Dunkin Donuts on Sunday morning do you consider all the possibilities of what might occur on that journey? If you did you would either not go or you would spend all day thinking about it. So you would just default to nothing will go wrong and go get your donuts. And like most people it would not even get to the stage a question, it would just be filtered out. If we did not automatically default to these black and white this or that answers in simple matters such as a drive to Dunkin Donuts we would become paralyzed. Black and white, this or that solves the problems even if the answer isn't true. It not an absolute that nothing will go wrong on your trip to Dunkin Donuts. It's just a probability.
But there is also a price to pay for these simple Black or white solutions. It becomes a habit a state of mind that is applied to the bigger questions automatically. And the faster society moves, the less time people have, the more they will seek fast answers. Someone reads somewhere that a certain
TPG company is the best and it sticks. Or someone reads that they should always buy the highest grade coin they can afford. I bet you'll find that statement on the first page of most intro books on coin collecting. And people either don't have the time or the inclination to question these concepts. It bogs them down. If I can afford to buy an MS67 for $1,000 why is that better than buying a MS66 for $200? And the answer is because that "greyish" and not black or white.
"By allowing the existence of large bureaucratic systems
under centralized control, whether corporate, governmental,
or institutional, we unwittingly enter into a hideous conspiracy
against ourselves, one in which we resolutely work to limit our
minds and spirits." John Taylor Gatto
Posted 02/14/2005 2:09 pm
