Who are today’s philosophers, our seekers of truth willing to see beyond popular thought and find new knowledge? We are so reliant now on science to find our knowledge we have forgotten there are many things which science cannot tell us about the world. It was philosophy which taught us to question the status quo, it was philosophy that taught the French to revolt against humanity’s slavery, it was philosophy which built the dream of liberté, fraternité, egalité, it is philosophy that drives environmentalism.

But in a time of dramatic change in our world, where our communication system draws us ever closer and changes the way we behave, no new philosophies are being born. People talk of guarding privacy, and abandoning copyright, but these are political ideas which pale in comparison with the words of Jean Jacques-Rousseau who realised “man was born free and everywhere he is in chains”.

We don’t think anymore. We surf the net, we watch tv, we work, we sleep, we party. But we avoid the silence. We avoid the taunting voices in our heads which torment us with old conversations and moments of shame, anger, frustration. We deny totally the moments of happiness or joy. We don’t think, we don’t consider. ‘Sensitive’ is an insult. Sensitivity to the world, consideration of it and for it, is out of fashion. Silence is the enemy. Numbness is the aim.

When we can’t achieve the numbness, when the moments that haunt us seep in, we collapse under anxiety or depression, the ones that escape mental illness are the ones with the best systems of numbness. We’ve created so many inputs into our heads, from texting on our mobile phones to reading books in bed.

We shut each other out, sometimes I think this is a symptom of the post-war generations who could not speak to each other of their unfamiliar pains – abandonment, unspeakable horror, cruelty, addiction to adrenaline, boredom bordering on torpor – we keep a stiff upper lip and concentrate on our knitting, fixing the shed, having children, buying more dvds. But I think this has always gone on, just as war has, I suppose.

Our unspeakable tiny pains, which we know to be universal but feel completely unique to us in our own internal worlds, are nothing to the struggles of serfdom which kept the French in chains. We feel we are too comfortable to complain, we watch as the world changes around us, as power shifts further and further away from us and into the hands of media corporations. France would never have freed itself without the free press, the voices of dissent which spread their ideas throughout the nation culminating in society’s complete upheaval. Today our minds, our opinions are controlled by individual men bent on the accumulation and manipulation of power, the disempowerment of governments and independent media.

As an aside, the Howard government attacked our higher education; our ability to think and better ourselves. They attacked our free press and worked to empower the media monster which supported them. The current government has learnt the lesson of crossing the corporations, it lost its leader in a battle against the corporate giants. But we have food and water, rooves over our heads, electric blankets on our beds, DVD players and Foxtel. So we don’t feel justified enough to revolt. It took the theft of their rainwater for Bolivia to revolt. I wonder what it will take for us? I wonder who will be our philosophers?

Some stuff I thought of when I wrote this:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/romantics/ < — the instigator
http://wikileaks.org/wiki/WikiLeaks:About < — an incredible tool
http://www.sbs.com.au/dateline/presenter/about < — my hero of the hour
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Consolations_of_Philosophy < — another instigator
http://www.theschooloflife.com/ < — an incubator of ideas
http://www.jamieoliver.com/jamies-ministry-of-food/about < — an initiator

PPS. I was talking today with Dad about how ingenious Britain was in world war two, like for D-Day they made fake tyre tracks and cardboard airplanes to make the Germans think they were somewhere they were not. This kind of ingenuity seems to have died off. I get tired of looking back and glorifying the old days when so little is being done today.

i’ll be making a couple of posts today, while I watch SBS play the same four ads for greenhouse gas, Mythbusters, Heineken and Honda over and over for thiirty minutes… seems to be a glitch… makes you wonder about the ads that have corrupted – cars and beer (playing an awesome glitchy rythmic sound over snowy green visuals)… maybe SBS has been hacked?

Anyway books.

I wrote last time how i was annoyed about the materiality of song lyrics etc… well Alain de Botton landed in my life recently through a friends recommendation and a very cheap Penguin book Consolations of Philosophy and i find myself reading about Socrates, Seneca, Epicureus and so on. And I think a bit of critical thouhgt is just what i needed. It’s made me think about why i bought the clothes I bought recently and pointed out to me just how much i DON’T buy into mainstream pressures, and maybe that’s a good thing. Also I don’t completely agree with the picture Alain describes of the world, I can’t help but think the privileged life he’s lead still hasn’t communicated to him what it’s like to have no hope, something which the middle classes may not suffer, but those in poverty certainly do. Poverty isn’t all sunshine, hard work and loaves of bread, buddy.

Anyway in response to this intellectual void i’ve suddenly noticed, I got myself more meatier reads (to go with the Jasper Fforde books I still didn’t own) such as Blubberland and The Great Feminist Denial.

The latter has a hilarious book cover which says everything I want it to. Even more when you compare the American cover with the pinched waist to the original UK/Australian cover. Just in case you were wondering if the book title was justified.