Chrisonomicon

Monday, February 24, 2003

From William Goldberg's "Thought as a Hobby":

. . . I no longer dismiss lightly a mental process which for nine-tenths of the population is the nearest they will ever get to thought. They have immense solidarity. We had better respect them, for we are outnumbered and surrounded. A crowd of grade-three thinkers, all shouting the same thing, all warming their hands at the fire of their own prejudices, will not thank you for pointing out the contradictions in their beliefs. Man is a gregarious animal, and enjoys agreement as cows will graze all the same way on the side of a hill.

This from a man who's work I trivialized in high school, a man who visited his headmaster as much as I did and learned German from Albert Einstein, who "had devised a coherent system for living":

It was a moral system, which was wholly logical. Of course, as I readily admitted, conversion of the world to my way of thinking might be difficult, since my system did away with a number of trifles, such as big business, centralized government, armies, marriage.

A system to which I'd readily subscribe. (And although I've often lamented the fact that the appeal of original thought and creativity is dulled by the knowledge that someone will have always been there before you, it's a comfort to know that when wielding an opinion in opposition to "nine-tenths of the population," some has been there before you.)