October 9, 2017

Your Ability To Think Obligates You To

By wise sloth

Picture of Dr. House holding a human brain, next to the caption, "If you have one, try to use it please!"

 

Human beings are biological, sentient, autonomous cosmic supercomputers. You’re smarter and more powerful than the most expensive computer in the world. You’re the rarest and most valuable thing in the universe. Regardless of your personal opinion of yourself, you’re capable of looking at the world around you, identifying problems, solving them intellectually and then enacting your solution. You’re the only being in the universe that we know of that’s capable of doing that. Celebrate that fact, but know that with great power comes great responsibility. It’s your responsibility to think about the world’s problems and then solve them.

That’s an intimidating responsibility, but you shouldn’t have to be guilt tripped into accepting it. You should already be doing it out of selfishness if nothing else. You want to live in a better world, and you have the ability to make it better. You don’t have anything better to do than making the world a better place.

Even if you’re content where you’re at, the future of mankind depends on everyone solving as many problems as possible. The future has to be built brick by brick, and the more people who pitch in, the faster the future gets better. The more people find excuses not to solve problems, the slower humanity progresses and the greater the chance of collapse; there’s a tipping point where if too many people ignore their responsibility to think, then collapse is guaranteed.

We’ve spent our entire lives on the wrong side of the tipping point and don’t even recognize we’re living in a collapsed society. We take gun violence, international wars, sweatshops, invasive, predatory police, corrupt politicians and inefficient bureaucracy for granted. We even celebrate them. What we don’t do though is take responsibility for the world’s problems. We throw up our hands and tell ourselves it’s somebody else’s responsibility to fix all the problems around us. But it’s all of our responsibility to go out of our way and our comfort zone to think and solve problems. The whole reason the world is awash with problems is because most people aren’t thinking. If you’re not thinking then you’re being stupid, and stupid kills.

Evil triumphs when good men do nothing. Doing nothing is evil. It’s the main ingredient in failure. If you want your life to be a success you need to think. If you want the world to become a better place then you need to think. Even if you don’t want to, the rest of humanity needs you to.

Think about this. The matter that makes up your body was present at the Big Bang. You’ve traveled through gas clouds, oceans and atmospheres to get where you are today. You’re a conscious being in a seemingly unconscious universe. You’re wasting your life if you don’t do the most amazing thing you’re designed to do. Think, and let’s build a better world brick by brick, problem by problem.

 

"What a man can be, he must be." Abraham Maslow

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

The Meaning of Life
How to Think Like a Genius
Knowledge and Learning
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My Tweets About Philosophy 
This entry was posted on Monday, October 9th, 2017 at 7:35 pm and tagged with , , , , , , , and posted in How to Think Like a Genius. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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