Fast-paced

We live in a fast-paced environment and a great many people barely have time to think about what to eat for dinner, let alone such elevated and far-reaching topics as the human mind, the Universe, life itself with its many intricate and intertwined levels and so on. It is precisely this lack of time combined with an ever decreasing propensity towards critical thinking and undertaking imaginative journeys to the core of any issue out there in order to produce insightful responses that is making people resort to shortcuts and take the path of least resistance for explaining (primarily for the sake of their own curiosity and ontological awareness) why some aspects of the world we live in today are as they appear to be. Thus some of them tend to believe, because of an intrinsic need to feel secure and at one with the world and to reassure themselves, that no one is going to do anything that might put their life and fragile inner balance at risk. So they seek confirmation for their beliefs in any way possible. And then there are those folks who seem to think that each and every molecule that ever existed or still exists conspires to harm and hinder them, to break their spirit and suffocate their initiatives. Of course, both sides are gravely mistaken, the first one because they have wrapped themselves up in some fairy tales and beliefs that everyone wants to help them and contribute to their betterment, and the second one because they have allowed themselves to believe that everything is all about them, especially the detrimental aspects of existence. However, the two have something in common i.e. the fundamental need to explain the events that take place anywhere near them or, at a broader scale, around the world; the content of their explanations, nonetheless, differs from one individual to another and from one outlook to another. These outlooks are fostered by their background, by their upbringing, by their experiences and are thus very difficult to change unless their environment and overall condition change so as to grant them the space to develop new ways of coping with reality. I am of course referring to a reality that can easily be misunderstood and misrepresented, especially when the amount of information released at very high speed in the public sphere exceeds the individual’s abilities to process the input at an equivalent rate, leaving them wandering about a world of ideas they haven’t even got the time to prospect, let alone assess with a critical eye. So, in the light of this state of affairs, with the political and economic environment functioning outside any regular person’s visual and sensorial field, with tons of sensitive information being kept secret from the vast majority of people, the latter will develop biases, fears, concerns, and hopes (it’s written in the way our cognitive apparatus works). The hopes can address a wonderland that is not (yet) here and the fears can address the idea of a post-apocalyptic wasteland that is seen as a potential threat to all human beings as a species. And this is so because any intuitive endeavor that is not followed by an empirical approach to the reality we find ourselves immersed in will eventually lead to absurd and distorted views. These could prove to be not only unscientific, but also dangerous to us all.