And what to do when you just can't explain in ten words

but stay quiet?  Oh, the silence of teenagers in a judgmental and independent country

Old, Dead, White Men

Plato determined philosophers should be kings.  This was after he came up with the cavemen story, in which in a world where men are forced to watch shadows created by a fire, one man breaks free.  Plato believes that that man should rule the world, but none of the others do.

Plato is full of shit.  So is Rousseau who, if he spent one minute complaining to a sensible person, would have been told that his whole 'Social Contract' is his way of getting out of work that he doesn't want to do.  Hobbes's 'Social Contract' is really just an expression of his fear.  These old men should have spent heart-to-heart time with themselves and asked themselves what's really bothering them.

Yet they are a part of today's liberal arts cannon.  Granted they did live in powerful societies, who gave birth to today's modern government; however, this is a time where if we did nothing but learn, we might learn a fraction of the information out there.  We do not have the time to become polymaths who deduce the idea of the philosopher king by starting with a universe of ideals and ending with modern men.  Yet we reserve a valuable amount of time for reading this stuff.  Pity the poor person who spends ten years immersed in it until they realize that they spent ten years learning something that added nothing to their lives (I've met these people).

Unlike Plato, I understand the bias that not knowing something can do to a person's impression or understanding.  A child literally does not understand death.  The development of child-murderers are frightening, because these children ruin their lives in ways that they can't begin to comprehend.  Our brain knows only things that it can see through our own senses.  If nothing else through these two facts, I can deduce that there's quite a lot I don't understand, and what I don't know affects my life in ways that I can't understand.

Therefore, if we don't know what we don't how, I've thought about how we should allocate time to learning different subjects.  I've come to believe that people have inner questions, and that they should be allowed the time, space, and guidance to seek the answers.  Too often, in our education system, we're forced to listen to lessons about which we as a society even no longer care, instead of being taught to answer the questions around which we form our lives.  Perhaps if Plato, Rousseau, and Hobbes had education systems that taught them to distinguish rationalization from reason, they would have published more worthwhile works.  Perhaps if we learn how to target and refine questions and then find the answer, we'd have a healthier dialogue.

How Parents are like Politicians

When Hera learns that her pet Dido would suffer a terrible and horrific fate, she goes to intervene by setting Cupid upon Aeneas.  While Aeneas talks to Dido, Cupid guides their falling in love, which in the end, destroys Dido, who kills herself upon a funeral pyre.

Parents often think they know better than their children, because a great majority of the time, they do.  Parents know the consequences of having unprotected teenage sex; they know the consequences of dropping out of high school.  They don't want their kids to make the same mistakes they did, and loving their children, they strive to keep their children out of trouble.

The problem is that knowing is not enough.  Intervening, if done badly, can worsen the situation.  Romeo and Juliet's parents learned that the hard way.  I am particularly bad at getting the message across to junior people that I think they're making mistakes.  One, I hate sounding like I know better, two, I may be wrong and three, I have a hard time after a certain point telling them things that they don't like to hear.  Sitting by and watching the prediction unfold, though, generates feelings of resignation.  I wonder if this was in fact the first best solution.  In my life, the blame gets thrown to me: I'm not a good enough communicator.

I accept that better communicators have easier times getting undesirable messages across.  I think it would be good for me to study great orators, debaters, speakers, advertisers, and marketers.

That having been said, politicians, managers, and everybody who has sat by watching a bad decision unfold knows this frustration.  Anyone who foresaw Bear's liquidity issue or the current credit crisis must have experienced a painful period where they knew this was going to come, nobody listened, and now this happened.  A number of good speakers predicted both; I think that we as a people didn't know how to listen or know that under all that good marketing and oration was an absolute truth, an undesirable truth, that was not being heard.

Knowing in advance could have helped.  We learn so much in school about how to be good speakers and debaters.  Schools should have an obligation to teach us how to be good listeners.  In Asia they say that flies enter American mouths we open them so much.  We know that here, the best speakers often gets what they want.

The best listener also gets what he or she wants, but in a different situation.  I think it would be great to be both.

How Galileo was like Hester Prynne

I dislike Nathaniel Hawthorne.  Had I lived during his day, he probably not only would have not seen past my Asian skin, but he would have probably also set me out to scrub his floors.  Moreover, I think he hits a person over the head with the theme of a community not being able to see past a scarlet letter or not being able to see the mark of a Reverend that they consider holy.  

That having been said, I think Galileo probably would have empathized with Hester Prynne.  Being surrounded by people unable to hear the truth is a difficult situation to encounter.

So many obstacles face those who actually want to get to it.  Complex ideas, strong opinions, psychological barriers, investments in a having people adhere to certain beliefs all mar the route to the truth.  Sometimes there is no right or wrong, but other times, under all that ideological discussion or psychological denial, there is a more approximate right has little chance to emerge.

Nobel Physicist Max Planck once wrote "An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents...  What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out and that the growing generation is familiarized with the idea from the beginning" (The Philosophy of Physics, 1936).

A history of political thought professor once said that in today's education system, we learn to debate fiercely.  Everyone who comes to university knows how to argue.  The difficulty is getting people to understand arguments that philosophers are making.  We can argue until we're blue about whether Machiavelli was correct to say that a ruler should be cunning and fierce, except that the argument would be for naught, because contrary to popular belief, that is not what Machiavelli spent his life saying.

In today's rapidly changing world, I believe it even more important to listen, but people keep obstructing the words others are saying.