Another Trap

I heard a history professor say once,

‘The great irony of freedom

is the fact that most will choose to follow the crowd.’

The herd mindset will rage against true freedom,

and the pressure to be like everyone else,

will squeeze like a snake.

When given freedom

we become our own chains–

and these chains are helped put on by the crowd.

We’ll sit back and smile,

as they tie up our feet,

and chain our hands behind our backs.

We’ll laugh,

as the leash goes around our necks.

It’ll be fun at first,

to follow the trends,

and gratify our pleasures–

the pleasures that are put in our brain by the snake.

We still are tribal creatures,

but our tribes have become our politics,

our religions,

and our crowd becomes the ones who confirm our biases.

The trap of all traps,

multiplied by the web of all webs,

The internet.

This life keeps getting harder and harder to navigate through

All the philosophical questions of the past,

from Socrates, Aristotle, Plato and Jesus,

to Machiavelli, Nietzsche, Foucault and Freud,

even up to Kant, Hume, Descartes–

all the philosophical, scientific, and ethical questions they had,

well,

they still exist.

Nothing has been answered,

and with each generation,

the questions of their time emerge.

They just keep getting stacked on top of each other,

like a fragile house of cards,

and one gust of wind,

and the house comes tumbling to earth.

We’ve had so many thinkers throughout time and space,

and all of their writings are accessible to us,

so we can confirm our biases,

by picking which thinker suits us.

Another trap…

and it goes on and on and on…

-C.H.