By now, I’ve probably convinced you that I’m different, not just what I think about, but how I do that thinking. But why should that be? Is it a deliberate thing? Do I do so out of contrariness? Am I being perverse, or is it my default setting—that is, is it the way that I’m wired?
To be honest, I suppose that it’s probably a little of both. I instinctively resist the predominant operating system of this culture. I often find myself jumping the rails of the conventional straight and narrow. I don’t buy into the basic assumptions that most people happily accept unchallenged. They appear delusional to me—the assumptions and the people. To me, they don’t make sense, and I refuse to have anything to do with them.
This keeps me safe, unsullied, unspoiled, and safeguarded from being infected by what I feel is aberrant thinking. I dislike falling into the trap of linear, rationalistic and reductionist reasoning, and try not to. I think things through on my own terms. I look critically at unchallenged assumptions:
- That death is real.
- That there’s such a thing as progress.
- That logic is the only useful cerebral technique, and that this way of thinking is to our advantage.
- That human beings are superior to other life forms.
- That enlightenment is as grand as it is made out to be.
- That the brain is the be-all and end-all of thinking.
- That adults ipso facto are wiser than children.
- That life exists in certain places but not in others.
- That one’s self, friends, family, ethnic group and countrymen are more important than the outsiders occupying the periphery.
