Thinking

It seems to me that the average person doesn't really want to think. He, or she, wants their thoughts, their ethics, their entire world, spoon fed to them.

Churches pour out dogma, one dose at a time, carefully indoctrinating small children with love before pouring all sorts of other outlandish ideas down their throats later on. What started out as love often becomes slightly veiled intolerance and hate, confirmed and sealed under a safe authoritarian God.

Justice plays out much the same way, varying in actual existence depending on the mores of the day. Free love bad. Narrowly defined heterogeneous love good. Theft of hard goods like possessions and jewels bad. More creative white collar crime clever. Whatever lines the judgers pockets and lives acceptable.

For them.

Education is good for a certain class of people. Not so good for those who might call them to account. Teaching children facts rather than thinking corrals them into a more amenable class of underlings.

People ultimately often come around to vote the way their fathers voted. Go to churches their grandparents attended. Expect little Sally or Dick to hang out with the "right" sort of people, right color, right sex, right social mores and manners, desires, and dreams. Anything else is threatening.

Anyone gulping from the bottle of open minded thinking is likely to become drunk on dangerous ideas. Ideas that might change the safety of the norm. And anyone taught to think could figure out how to explain their thoughts to other people in ways that produce change.

Thinking creates hardship for those in charge. Better to teach facts. If you do that right, it won't really matter what facts you teach them, because they will never really use them for much more than mundane things like counting their possessions. Life becomes simple one-up-man-ship and souls are left floundering.