-Neil Gabler, The New York Times (August 2011)
The article The Elusive Big Idea kept me glued on it as I was trying to process the thoughts by its author. True enough, the post-idea world is wherein idealists are endangered to extinction and information through the help of technology kills our ability to think and give ideas. Ideas are very hard to define although one may just look for his dictionary and find out that it is “something imagined in the mind” (thanks again to Webster).
I am not talking about ideas connected to creativity or about the exploitative ploy just to earn attention and be known (e.g. being a YouTube sensation artist, a scum artist or a stupid politician who can’t even argue his own side in a debate). No. I am talking about philosophical theories, ideas and analyses from the very minds of the educated ones that brought us to the paramount of thinking albeit being abstracted in nature. We lack them in this era and the answer is very rude to discuss to be made as a topic to a debate. Once upon a time, mankind dreamt of having advance tools in the ever changing environment of the world and thus came the boom of the Industrial Revolution in England. Years later, computers are being developed for computing and keeping government data and statistical documents and as the 20th century entered the arena, humankind has been able to produce computers capable of processing data to information. And to think of it, information itself is the root cause of the extinction of philosophers that have the guts to awaken our deep consciousness and entice us to think, think and think!
It is always true that the answer lies on how we think and not on how we know things very well. The things we know are there because we accepted it from the very beginning as true and authority tells us to believe in that reality. The essence of reality is always subject to change. What is true in the past centuries are not considered as true in today’s era. Just take a look on the bigger picture. The contemporary setting is flooded by unpopular politicians that tend to be the image of autocratic rule, Hollywood celebrities that were cursed from hell due to paparazzi exposure and scandals that net-users are feasting for, spreading the gossip like a wildfire in the very wires that connects us to the virtual world, the Internet. Crap. Where are the successors of Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Einstein, and Sagan to name a few? They are nowhere to be found and so is our own thinking. They have been dislodged and the worst part of it is that instead of looking for them, we tend to ignore those who are trying to revive the Idealist world or the Age of Enlightenment. We prefer those people who are ignorant of the beauty of philosophy and the art of critical thinking. We love to hear those issues about those Hollywood fornicators and sensual models as if they are the answer in our curiosity to the depths of our inner crave for intellectual leverage.
If there is one course or subject that must be studied by all students, top on my list is philosophy for without it we will never understand how the work of the Creator worked for He loves us that He sacrifices everything to save us from eternal damnation. Think, analyze and solve.
