Why do human beings mask the truth?

Something I noticed about this play that bothered me is the general dynamic the play lies on by not saying directly that Farid’s brother is a homosexual. I understand that this is a play for little kids, never-the-less, misinforming the audience about an important topic by oversimlifying it and, as a result, avoid it is vulgar enough to annoy me.

The character that best represents my point is Farid’s mother, which (oh, surprise) acts as a typical conservative mother which has to suppresse her homophobic tendencies to accept and love once again her first born. Before doing this, she constantly avoids telling Farid that his brother is a homosexual by calling him “different”.

So, is this play trying to brake the taboo of homosexuality by treating it like a taboo? Not a great plan.

To start the comparison, it’s sure to affirm that Farid’s mother is the character of the play which is the most different from me. Because she is the type of person that doesn’t express things as they are, always puting things in different shades to mask reality. Personally I think she would answer my philosophical concern by saying something like: “Oh child, do not say that. Stop thinking those things, you could get in trouble.” And I think she would likely answer that because that’s basicly the attitude most of people 0f her age have (more acuurately if they are dogmatic persons) , or something between those lines.

The sad thing about this is that a philosophical reflection cannot be fullfilled when this attittude prevails, dogma is the general rule…

For my part, I think human beings mask the truth because each one of us accepts the truth that we can understand. Most people believe that they know, but there’s a huge diffetence between believing that one knows and knowing that one knows. And to affirm that homosexuality is bad or unntural is not based on theories or facts, but in old dogmas. For those like me who want to learn, in order to know the nature behind homosexuality, I read a breaf explanation given by Richard Dawkins, name that is unknown for most of the homophobes.

They don’t want to know, they want to believe they know; but as I said earlier, each one of us accepts the truth either one of us can understand. In the case of Farid’s mother, she accepted homosexuality for a personal reason, not because she understood the nature of it. Which, I think is good enough but still, there’s to rationality there, no place to have any debate without falling into fallacies.

In conclusion, this play awoke this philosophical concern because it is very frustraiting for me that in our daily lifes one cannot trust fully in the information given by the people that surrounds us; it is very sad for me to notice that “non-thinking” books make us think more than the thinking people that live on Earth.

This is one of the biggest questions of human history. Whether we are responsable for our actions or we are just part of a complex system.

Personally, I think determinism is a more realistc approach to understand reality. Because I don’t see how humans are a separate thing from everything else.

We are just a result of everything that surrounds us, of all the external and internal proccesses that occur whether we like it or not. To think otherways seems to me like don’t wating to acknowledge all the discoveries the human race has collected thought  the scientific method.

Sam Harris is a neuroscientist which once wrote: “You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm.”

Simply put, we are as free as the wind is.

(If you know how the wind works, you’ll understand why this isn’t an argumnet in favour of free will).

There’s only one very big problem that concerns me about the deterministic way of acknowledging the wold, and that is, morality becomes absurd.

We are just a drop of water in an endless river, we can’t go against the current and we cannot pretend that we are not part of it.

According to Heraclitus, the ARKHÉ was change itself, that everything flows; as part of his particular point of view, “there are gods in everything” and that the force that makes everything flow is LOGOS (which, according to some interpretatons of the word, means reason).

So puting all this elements together would make a theory that says: Everything is made up of gods which are originated thanks to change and all of this is ordered by LOGOS.

My own theory would suggest a way in which human beings could relate to the universe:

Everything changes because it needs to change in order to create beatyful and meaningful things, everything that is simple and everything that is complex.

I am part of everything there is; I am god, but everything around me is god too, this meanning, I am divine, everything around me is too.

Nothing is either dead or alive, everything is made of gods (including myself); gods cannot be born or die because we are originated by change itself and if something didn’t exist or was dead, it couldn’t ever change.

This is why I have always been (including everything else)  here, I have always been part of everything there is and that changes.

I can understand the world around me because LOGOS is the way in which everything is ordered, I am too an expression of this order and that is why my mind can find sense in everything.We see the fallen leaves that were before a living part of the trees they surround; next, they will be part of the ground in which the trees stand.
In this manner, we’ll see that everything that was, will be once again, indefinitely.

And, as the sound of a melody danses between notes to create music; so does everything, in the most beatiful kind of music: LOGOS.

Now a days:

Scientists talk about entropy, which is a measure of chaos and distribution of energy in a certain system.

In calculus, continous change is foundamental to develop derivatives.

So to speak, the ARKHÉ Heraclitus imagined and wrote about can be seen as a prelude of these to modern concepts of physics and mathematics.

I’ve chosen to develop this question because the notion of progress we have in our days really bothers me . We are continuously wondered by the tecnological advancements of our era and astonished by the power of our economic system.

All the technology we’ve created has made our lives “easier” (actually they are more complex), but all of it has, too, a destructive side to it. Many people say: “We’re on the twenty first century” as if that meant anything; last century humanity almost committed suicide by nuclear fallout during the Cold War, so I think modern society is just in decadence, we have enough technology to kill ourselves as a species but not enough to save ourselves. We have polluted the world and we have almost reached the point of no return. We are killing the world and not enough people care to save it.

Science hasn’t made the horizon any clearer nor hopeful, the knowledge we have of the universe tells us that we are no more than a speck of dust in a infinite universe of silence, void and darkness. Modern men and women know that our extinction doesn’t matter what so ever, there won’t be anyone calling for us on the day of our extinction. So far, we know that Earth is the only planet with complex forms of life and we just don’t care; we are to busy playing our rolls as stupidly as possible in this society with no purpose but to make money.

In other times the image of god was the inspiration to make the finest forms of art; in our modern landscape no one is even trying, who’s going to search for the old man after two World Wars and this attempted suicide we call the Cold War? Now everything in art has a broken sense of Dadaism and superficial nihilism.

Mexican society is doomed. How do I know? When a generation of parents have the ultimate goal to raise their children to be mirreyes one can only stare and fear. I’m part of a generation that’s full of these stupid and egocentric kind of people, who say yes to every harmful thing to society; they see culture as something inferior and naco. And these people are the one’s with the greater power in this nation! A nation without culture is a nation without soul!

Progress is just another god humanity has believed in, but one that has left us in a boat without oars; in a dying world, a poor sense of art and a humanity that’s hiding from the knowledge of the universe I mentioned before, we now know how lonely we are in the universe, now we know the lack of importance in our existence, now we really feel the silence and the cold; now we know many things, one of them being: we have to hide from the truth. And here we are, in the slow death of our home world; death caused by this species of cowards and stupid people.

Life’s going nowhere, so, can someone tell me what are you talking about when you say progress?  

This reading was a quick and interesting introduction to the “origin of philosophy”. This reading talks about what the Milesians thought was the origin of everything. The ones that thought there was only one thing that gave  origin to every other thing were the monists. Then came the pluralists, which thought multiple things were the  fundamental ricks of reality. 

I think this reading was a very appropiate one to introduce anyone to metaphysics. Personally, I haven’t read anything envolving metaphysics; so I’m happy to be in ground zero, in order to rediscover the wonders of human thinking through the eras of human beings.

This first reading was a great introduction to anyone who wants to enter the marvelous world of philosophy. For me this is a fun, simple and dynamic way to restart my path of philosophical thinking. And I say restart because I was actually introduced to philosophy when my grandfather started to buy me and my brother a series of books which is called “Aprender a pensar”. This series consists of sixty books wich tell the life and thoughts of one specific philosopher per book.

One of the first books my grandfather gave us was “Nietzsche”. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into! Ever since I’ve grown obsessed with his ideas.

I also read Epicurus and Kierkegaard, so I love exitencialism.

In summary, this feels like a fresh start.