Enlightening: The Monkeysphere
“We’re all members of varying species of hypocrite.”
Here’s a highly recommended read, on cracked.com of all places. A real eye-opener, for about 20 minutes, until your apathy sets back in. Do yourself a favor and check it out, if only for those 20 minutes of perspective.
September 30th, 2007 at 8:28 pm
I had a great big long response to this but it was way too long so suffice it to say that it was an interesting piece and I did like that the main point was that there are no simple answers. Still, there were some major flaws with the argument. For one thing, it’s simply not possible to care about EVERYONE as much as you care about those close to you, you’d be in perpetual mourning, depression, etc., if you did. And it goes without saying there really are people who are not worth caring about. Now thank me for stopping here and not going on point by point about what else I found wrong with the whole argument.
September 30th, 2007 at 10:15 pm
One of the minor points was also that it was impossible to care about 6 billion people. He never said you need to care about everybody as much as those close to you.
September 30th, 2007 at 10:29 pm
Agreed. At first I was so swayed by the argument I became paralyzed, first with joy over Bryce and Caroline’s newborn baby, but then with sadness as I lamented the passing of Joyce’s great uncle Gus. I was embarrassed to realize that the flowers I bought as a graduation gift to Huy Nguyen of New Zealand had gone instead to the detestable Lawrence Brills of New Guinea. Then I realized the darkness knob on my toaster works and I was free to go about not caring about strangers and resumed stealing cable from faceless corporations not made up of real people. I also went back to my simplified binary grouping structure, but, in my haste to re-group everything at once, I accidentally replaced Gandhi and Chris Hannah in the “Good” category with Tony Robbins and Adolf Hitler from the “Prick” category. So now instead of being punk and wearing a robe I wear tight pants and kill puppies.