A few months ago my son David and I were chatting about ways people lapse into illusion and foolishness, and he suggested that I write it up as a book, or at least put it on the blog. I came up with several score items\u2014well, actually I blurted out, \u201cThere are a hundred of them!\u201d and he called me to deliver. Yikes. I did, although in my following blog entries I confess I\u2019ve conflated different items\u2014like a discussion of the \u201cseven deadly sins.\u201d <\/p>\n
The key point is that people kid themselves. The mind likes to keep on an even keel, and if it needs to distort the perception of reality a bit, or a rational analysis of what\u2019s perceived, so be it. I\u2019d like to see this topic taught in every late middle school or early in high school\u2014it\u2019s as fundamental to looking at the world realistically as realizing the world isn\u2019t flat and the sun doesn\u2019t go around the earth. We live in many, many illusions. <\/p>\n
Some of those are mere habits that feed our present status, so we come up with rationalizations to preserve them. Some of these ideas are really subtle rules and customs sold to us by the more powerful, with the help of spin doctors, so that we\u2019ll refuse to believe that we are oppressed. This is beginning to wear thin with the middle class, though only beginning. The lower classes sort of knew it for many generations, but haven\u2019t been able to marshal a plausible critique. And the critique of mere socialism seems too one-sided for most people. <\/p>\n
But it\u2019s not just economic. Fashions can keep up mentally enslaved, and general social custom. And those so caught up in the system\u2014like me not willing to rebel against wearing ties in the mid-late 20th century world of professional life\u2014hardly experience some of these elements as oppressive. <\/p>\n
I\u2019m going to start posting mini-essays on various kinds of foolishness and other ideas that deserve to be called into question. I won\u2019t always have a neat alternative. Sometimes it may suffice to begin the process by casting some doubt on what previously we had all taken to be obvious or unquestioned truth. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A few months ago my son David and I were chatting about ways people lapse into illusion and foolishness, and he suggested that I write it up as a book, or at least put it on the blog. I came up with several score items\u2014well, actually I blurted out, \u201cThere are a hundred of them!\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,11,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-follies","category-literacy","category-wisdom-ing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=256"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}