Fooly Educated

I began a draft of this post some two weeks ago. As such, I can’t remember exactly what it was that spurred the thoughts. There’s a good chance it was related to an article I read here on Medium, a post on Twitter, or a rant on Facebook. There are at least two reasons for that. The first is that I don’t generally interact with many human beings in any other fashion due to a nice blend of introversion and general busyness. Secondly, the Internet is where people seem to be ballsier with their thought life.

Since I don’t have a specific example or context to delve into, yet still have a point to make, I’ll get right to the punchline. We need a lot less noise and a lot more humility. I don’t even care about signal v. noise discussions for our present purpose, either. It’s really as simple as noise needing to stop, period. Not because there’s a signal, but simply because it’s noise.

We have done some rough math culturally and the sums simply don’t add up. Mistakenly we’ve used the concept of free speech as a catch all and thus have robbed our words of any value in many cases.

We’ve thought that since we are so well educated as people our opinions — any and all, it’d seem — must be well educated as a result. But this is not that, and our experience proves so time and again.

We can literally find out (nearly) anything we want with little more than a decent Internet connection and enough clicks. This ability to know can’t be rounded up, however, to the status of having actually known. The two things are worlds apart.

And yet we keep on talking, huffing and puffing our little matchstick houses of humility to the ground. It’s high time we — I’ll take the lead here — learn a thing or two about banners that aren’t as en vogue to be waving: humility and silence may be good places to start.