“Is there any permission to hope? More specifically, is there any permission for smart people to hope?! – I mean, it’s easy to hope if you’re stupid! – but is there any basis for intelligent people to hope?"
- Terence Mckenna
Sometimes I wonder if it's better to regress back into ignorance and just live life in conformity to this culture of passivity that we're seeing all around us. Sometimes I wish that I don't know the things I know, and maybe my life would be different today. And sometimes, when I ride a jeepney on my way to work I see all this working people just trying to get by and think to myself how oblivious they are to where our world is going and most of them seems contented and well adjusted to this dysfunctional society. Believe me, I've tried to plug myself back into this culture just as Cypher wanted to do in the movie "The Matrix" and started contemplating the path of blissful ignorance. But the more I try to ignore the reality of our world the more I realized that once you're exposed to the kind of information that I was exposed to, there's really no turning back. Curiosity is in our nature after all and fortunately (or unforunately) for me, my formal indoctrination in our educational system have failed to completely crush the innate inquisitiveness in me.
"As intelligence goes up, happiness goes down. See I made a graph. I make lots of graphs." - Lisa Simpson
I don't claim to be smarter than the average Juan dela Cruz, but I do feel that I tend to be more engaged in social issues than most people. And it's hard to find any who are. Sometimes the only way I can get interesting conversations is with my barber, while listening to his AM radio, or with a random taxi driver, these people who are supposedly under educated tend to care more about society than most of my college graduate peers.
Our generation is privileged enough to be in an age where information access is easy and was raised in a comfortable setting, enough to allow ourselves to flourish as a human being. Very few of us have the chance to acquire these privileges we have today and yet for most of us who do, waste away their chances on celebrity gossips and vain materialism.
"Whose interest does ignorance serve?" said Carl Sagan and this quote is enough to motivate me to be better informed about the world around me. In the age of information access, Ignorance is a choice. I'm still in the process of reeducation. I'm teaching myself skills and knowledge that goes beyond what's needed on my day job. Hopefully I'll be able to sort them all out without compromising my main gig.
“Responsibility I believe accrues through privilege. People like you and me have an unbelievable amount of privilege and therefore we have a huge amount of responsibility. We live in free societies where we are not afraid of the police; we have extraordinary wealth available to us by global standards. If you have those things, then you have the kind of responsibility that a person does not have if he or she is slaving seventy hours a week to put food on the table; a responsibility at the very least to inform yourself about power. Beyond that, it is a question of whether you believe in moral certainties or not.” - Noam Chomsky
