The more I engage with people the more I realise how important an education is, one that includes acquiring the skills of inquiry, critical thinking, analysis, hermeneutics, and reflection.
Having acquired those skills – and experimented with them – we can then question perceived reality and confirm the sources of all our information, challenge commonly held beliefs and wisdom, and make rational – and irrational – predictions about our future.
This is why governments want to dumb society down. They don’t want us to think. They want us responding, in the moment, to what they feed us. Governments want us to comply slavishly with a piece of graffiti I saw painted on a house in Christchurch in 1989 – it said ‘consume, be silent, die.’
Since then, ‘work’ has been added at the start of the phrase to make it ‘work, consume, be silent, die’. I might be inclined to add ‘conform.’
Neil Roberts got it right when, in 1982, he wrote ‘we have maintained a silence closely resembling stupidity’ on the wall outside the Whanganui home of the nation’s computerised security system. He then blew himself up creating a full stop that has echoed with thinking people ever since. It’s taken awhile but I think we’re finally waking up.
Tihei Mauri Ora!
dykiegirl 