5 most common mistakes of men #3

(The art of thinking wrong)



Part C
"Mistake Facts with Opinions"
(Failing to difference oneself from reality)

This is probably one of the most terrible mistakes people can make in their lives, and the mistake that is possibly hurting the most the modern Western Civilization.

Legions of persons, living in the protective umbrella of developed countries/cities/societies have totally lost the perspective about what it is really living in this World, what it takes to any individual of any living species to survive, flourish and ultimately to die
They have lost their reality checks and can go away with this because the "society" (the tribe) protects them from their own mistakes.

But reality, the final unappeasable, unappealable arbiter of everything usually comes sooner or later with the truth on one hand and a swath in the other and the candid smile of a child in the face to make accountable everyone for the mistakes made. Then "life is unfair" when it doesn't match my whims...

Example:
-"This cougar is just a big cat, let's have one in our backyard"
or
-"Rich people are responsible for the existence of poor people in the World"
or
-"Doctor Smith must save me from this strange tumor, otherwise I will sue him"


Of course everyone needs opinions because they are essential to make the infinite choices that allow us to keep ourselves alive and move forward.

But of course the cougar killed one of their kids, poor people existed before rich people and doctor Smith is not God.

And it gets worse since erroneous opinions are like transmissible diseases: They travel fast from person to person, hosting specially in brains not used to check information against the only a final judge of everything: Reality.

Some people of this kind are fortunate and can live all their lives in this sort of "pink lie" supported by the effort and thinking of other people. Other less fortunate just die or live unhappy because of their mistakes, without finally knowing what happened

This essential mistake is in big part responsibility from the default and ultimate failure of the ones supposed to help to guide the course of humanity's mental evolution: Philosophers, who contribute everyday to this confusion of Metaphysics with Epistemology allowing the fundamental mistake of taking one opinion of the World as the World itself.
They are supposed to be the enlightened, the best thinkers, the beacon in the night but instead they resigned from reason and engaged in the same mainstream fallacies and faults than the "common citizen" who they were supposed to help. Mysticism, grayness, subjectivism, ignorance, magic-thinking, laziness, cowardice, to name a few are the vices supposed to be fought by philosophers but they mostly don't.

It is up to everyone of us to correct this, because the future of the World and our kids is in our hands.

5 most common mistakes of men #1

(Analyzing the art of thinking wrong)



Introduction

Confucius in his "Analects" wrote 500 years before Christ that we should recover the meaning of the words.
Indeed. Words are arbitrary representations of things, ideas, etc. thus a word is more useful when its meaning is more clear.
Take by example the word "fascism" which was born as a definition for a left-wing collectivistic form of government leaded by dictator Benito Mussolini around the 1930's Italy. Today this word is used (specially by left-wing and/or progressive people) to design almost the opposite: Their enemies on the right-wing, or whatever the occasional user of the word happens to intent.
The word "fascism" has become some obscure synonym of evil. And evil is an opinion. The word lost its original meaning into multiple, even opposite concepts, and meaning too much is often meaning nothing.
We have to recover the meaning and clarity of the words, which means recover the meaning and clarity of our minds.
If everything is the same in the muddy clouds inside your head, it is easy for your mind to get bored and go to sleep, forever...



Part A
"Mistake Compassion with Pity"
(The ugliness of pity-based altruism)

Or perhaps the correct phrase would be "The ugliness of altruism-based pity", because for me pity is ugly.

And this is a clear case covered by the statement I made in the introduction: words used for everything become confuse and very influenced by the mainstream ideas of the time: Pity and compassion seems to be synonyms nowadays, but even when (thanks in part to long bad use) the etymology is not very clear, they are not.

Pity is more close to mercy and misery, it is a feeling born from the supposed superiority of the non-suffering over the (supposed) suffering who is seen as permanently helpless and unable to recover by himself. Pity is normally a feeling without respect for the others. And there is a lot of people that like to feel pity just to feel somehow superior to others and then having a reason in their mediocre lives to increase a little their low self-steem by sacrificing themselves to "help" those others while in reality they are only helping their own poor and guilty souls to survive one more day trough their boring lives.

Compassion on the other hand is a feeling more born from sympathy, from identification with other's temporary misfortune, from identification with his merits and his struggle for improving. Born from the though "it could be me", born from realizing that finally we all are on the same game: The Life.
All struggling for survive, for happiness, for our particular values. Each one with his own good or bad fortune, abilities, willpower, energy, intelligence, but finally all under the same rules: The Reality.

So now when I see a hard-worker digging a hole in the street sweating under the hot sun of the summer for a small salary, I no longer see him as a victim of some obscure and unfair "system", I see him with his dignity, with respect. He is earning his living as we all do, doing his effort to survive, to feed his children, taking his risks everyday or not, as we all do.

Are you completely safe from dying tomorrow? No. Not even the richest man in the World is. Not even the wisest or the stronger. Not you, not me. So why do you feel pity for this man working on the street? Are you so superior? Is your life so much better? By which standards? Yours? Ok congratulations if you are better or happier from your own point of view, but pity is still an ugly feeling, respect would be much better.
Respect for yourself and for every man trying to win his own rewards in this old game called life.

5 most common mistakes of men (Soon)

(The art of thinking wrong)



In the following five posts I will analyze some of the most
frequent errors of the untrained and/or evasive mind

Part A
"Mistake Compassion with Pity"
(The ugliness of pity-based altruism)

Part B
"Mistake Rule with Exception"
(The most used strategy to hide one's own laziness)

Part C
"Mistake Facts with Opinions"
(Failing to difference oneself from reality)

Part D
"Mistake Cause with Effect"
(The stupidity of pretending being by having)

Part E
"Mistake Individualism with Arrogance"
(Avoiding the mirror of the best)

Stay tune! :-)