Escape From Reason

Like it or not, you’re a slave. If that description pisses you off, good. Let it. The even worse news is that you built — and continue to build — the walls of the very plantation you’re enslaved to. I know that for a fact because I’m trapped on that same type of plantation and you aren’t that different from me, even if you tell yourself you are.

The night I graduated from high school, I attended a party at my friend, Wayne’s apartment. Parties at Wayne’s were always the kind of event attendees could barely remember the next day, but they were a blast while they were happening. Oddly, I still remember a conversation that Wayne and I had at my graduation party.

Wayne was a year older than me in terms of physical age, but he had at least ten years on me in the “experience” department. His advice was that, above all else, I should go to college, because at college I’d be surrounded by people my own age as opposed to getting a job where I’d likely be the youngest person on staff.

In those days, I had a hard and fast rule about offered advice — I would endeavor to do the exact opposite — and I followed that rule with Wayne’s advice. I spent two months saving up every penny I could. Then, I sold my 1968 Mustang convertible (my most regrettable mistake). Then, I marched down to the bank and purchased $1,500 worth of American Express travelers’ checks.

I was off to see America in the spirit of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road”. In those days you could still hitchhike so I alternated between that and Greyhound. I met a lot of interesting people and saw a lot of beautiful landscape I’d never have experienced otherwise. However, my little nest egg didn’t last near so long as expected and my father fell ill about that same time, so I headed back to Texas.

Still ignoring Wayne’s advice, I came home and scored a full-time job at Collins Radio as a draftsman. Wayne was right. I was the youngest guy in my department, and although I developed friendships that are still going strong fifty years later, those guys were all older with families and different interests than mine. Having exhausted the opposite, I finally took Wayne’s advice and applied to the University of Texas in 1974.

A Melting Pot of Ideas
I got lucky and completed my college years at a time when “liberal” still meant “open-minded” and college campuses were a mishmash of divergent perspectives. Admittedly, UT had splinter groups devoted to alternate lifestyles, alongside traditional elitists in the fraternities and sororities, but we all seemed to get along and enjoy interesting conversations in a day when “disagreement” was not a vile concept.

The Narrowing
By the time I graduated, I was married. Back in Garland, Paula and I joined a church and met other young couples our same age and living under similar circumstances. In fact, as our needs evolved, we attended several different churches and, by osmosis, began to reflect the mindsets of those organizations.

It never dawned on me at the time that contemporary organized religion is about emphasizing a set of values that are comfortable to the congregation while magnifying God’s judgment of outsiders battling a different set of temptations. (Marketing 101: Captivate your clientele.) In essence, we were re-creating God in our own image and reinforcing the doctrinal walls that would help form our mental plantations — only, we were the ones enslaved by those walls while all those nasty sinners on the outside enjoyed their freedom.

The Opiate of the Masses
Karl Marx might have been correct when he labeled religion as the opiate of the masses, but he introduced the global audience to a far more potent and addictive opiate — the politics of hate. Having survived my run-in with pseudo-religion, I remain in awe of the similarities between that culture and modern politics.

We blindly fall in line behind politicians with the ability to convincingly spout platitudes while introducing “beneficial” government programs that never accomplish what was promised yet do produce wealth for politicians. And we’ve willingly enslaved our intellects to emotion-based political philosophies that cater to nothing but our confirmation bias.

Exactly like those hardline churches I once attended, I see people maligning the moral bankruptcy of whatever politician du jour they disagree with while willfully ignoring the criminality of their own “chosen” leadership.

Do As I Say….
I’ll admit to being a sucker for business leadership books. I’ve read most of the big names. But awhile back, my friend Perry, quipped that those books are almost all identical — serving up a few buzzwords to make us feel better about ourselves while employing subtle manipulation techniques to get more productivity out of the people around us. Damnit if he’s not right!

In a recent mayoral race in my little suburban Eden, people badmouthed one of the candidates because they feared she was not a “team-player” (right out of leadership literature) while in the very next breath, they spouted feel-good quotes about diversity (more leadership babble). I can only assume their concept of diversity remains preferrable up until someone expresses a dissenting opinion which interrupts the financial profit of the good-old-boy “team players”.

Unifying Causality
Maybe I’ve been reading too many economists, but it seems that the common trait of the plantation we’ve enslaved ourselves to is emotion-based thinking that reinforces our confirmation bias as opposed to an examination of empirical data as a guiding factor in decision making.

What if there was an underground railroad of people who recognized their own shortcomings and sought truth outside their own narrow preconceptions? Maybe they could even help others escape those DIY emotionalist plantations and return to rational living.

A meeting of great minds who think alike