Thoughts on thoughtlessness
“If you only read the books that everybody else is reading, you can only think what everybody else is thinking.” — Haruki Murakami
People read essays in order to broaden their thoughts, to improve critical thinking, to get inspiration or maybe to brag about it. Did you know that these points are so deeply carved into society (except the last one of course) that even a chatbot can write an essay about why one should read essays with these exact arguments (in fact I just tested it, and the results were pretty-impressive[1])? The same bot cannot come up with arguments on why one should not. Do these ideas really intersect with reality? In the next paragraphs I will try to come up with ideas which may not be replicated by artificial intelligence (yet).
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To my mind, the quote from above is an excellent one to demonstrate the dangers of careless reading. Most of the time, I talk with people who read, they tend to replicate the thoughts they found, use unnecessarily complicated words which they do not even fully understand and become the very thing they look down on, a thoughtless person. These people who are meant to make a difference in the world, do they even exist? Being a light version of Nietzsche does not make you authentic, having pre-written visions does not justify the fact that one is not a fool. The inability to have original thoughts makes one an advanced chatbot. Most people who read essays are not getting influenced by them but become the essays themselves. What do they gain from reading?
The reproduction may not endanger the idea’s validity, but it deprives the vision from its authenticity which takes away from the originalities divine value. A reproduced thought is starting to be the reproduction of an opinion which was based on reproductivity. These ‘reproductive’ people do not seek truth, they seek the fallacy of self-validation and they do it by superficializing depth instead of deepening superficialities. Upon debating they do not care about what the other says, they dig into their memory searching for fancy, well memorized ideas, long deprived from their true meaning in order to grow in their own eyes. What do they gain from reading? Nothing, they are not even grateful for their reproduced opinions and become even more foolish.
Sometime during my life, Freud has become a cliché, and the death of a God has turned into a casualty. Orwell is slowly getting deprived of meaning, who is going to be next? All in all, cultural snobbery is a frequent phenomenon amongst the upper middle class, which destroys the very essence of being a human: authenticity. Do not read essays if you cannot respect the originality of the mind.
[1] OpenAI: ChatGPT (https://chat.openai.com/chat)
