#71 Wisdom, Love, and Obama?
All my life I have been philosophically motivated to seek out the answers to the many questions about existence that have plagued mankind ever since the first cave man carved his first postulate on his cave wall (I think it read something like “Why did god make me aware of loneliness?” Either that, or “Why is cavewoman upset with me?”)
I feel as though I have been both blessed and cursed with a mind that never ceases to question not only the greater mysteries of life (such as “why am I here?” and “Is there a purpose to my individual, and our collective existences?”) but also a mind that cannot stop questioning the absurd (such as “I wonder what I’d look like with a Hitler moustache?” And, “who farted?”)
Many times in my life, I’ve been told that I am “wise beyond my years.” When I was much younger (in my teens), this was very flattering to hear, and quite a boost to my developing ego. But In the last few years, hearing that I am “wise beyond my years” has shifted from the category of complimentary to the category of “frustrating to hear,” because I have often associated wisdom with success. And as wise as I may feel, I often don’t feel any more successful than I used to feel when I was younger.
And lately, I’ve begun to consider this cliché phrase not just frustrating, but I have begun to view it as a somewhat naïve, vague, and absurdly trite notion. In my opinion, age has no direct link to wisdom. The only factor that can be equated with wisdom is experience. I would argue that the definition of wisdom should be ‘the cumulative knowledge ascertained from personal experience.” So perhaps I have experienced more than most people my age, but I sincerely doubt this. I think I’m just good at faking a disposition that models that of the wise. And I think Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates were men who were good at doing the same thing. They were intelligent, but were they “wise?”
Let me put it this way; if you think that jumping off of a small cliff that you have never jumped off of before is going to injure you, or perhaps even kill you, and so you decide not to jump off of said cliff, then in my opinion, you are no more or less wise than someone else who elects to jump off of the same cliff. This other person may not recognize the same degree of danger that you have connected with jumping off of that same cliff – but your decision makes you no more wise, it simply means that you are better able to discriminate between the varying degrees of safety associated with certain actions than that other person. Ultimately, your decision may have been the more intelligent decision to make, but the process you used involved no actual wisdom.
But if you have jumped off of a cliff before, and survived to tell the tale, perhaps with some broken bones, and have since decided never again to jump off of a cliff, no matter how small or seemingly safe the jump may be, then every time you elect not to jump off of a cliff, you are making a wisdom based decision, because your personal experience has taught you to avoid jumping off of cliffs.
This is why wise people usually don’t tell people younger than them not do to things. If someone approaches you and asks you whether or not they should do something that your personal experience has taught you is a bad idea, I think that the best option you can take is to try and relate your personal experience to that person, and hope that they can intellectually understand the wisdom you offer them. But you cannot impart wisdom to another, for wisdom is only gained through direct experience. And personal experience has taught me that attempting to impart your wisdom almost never works, since people who ask for situational advice inevitably desire the process of experience to the process of learning from fable. This is exactly why history tends to repeat itself to ad nauseam.
Following other’s advice and never experiencing the experiences that gave them their sense of wisdom means living life vicariously through the experiences of others. And if most people lived their lives this way, we’d have a pretty boring world, and art would lose most of its value, since art is usually valued by those who recognize in the art some sort of mystical reflection of some experience from their own life.
I am not arguing that it is a bad idea to try and save someone the turmoil of making a mistake you once made, by trying to explain why they shouldn’t desire the painful experience that you have once experienced, but I am arguing that lessons are best learned the hard way, and so wisdom is therefore not an attribute that enables you to help others very much, so much as it enables you to protect yourself from re-experiencing harm.
The opposite of wise is foolish, and foolish people are those who experience pain from an experience, and then continue to act in a consistent pattern of actions that invites further, similar pain; foolish people do not learn from their mistakes, but wise people do. It is therefore not wise, but also not foolish to live your life vicariously through the experiences of others. But it is absurdly foolish to ignore your own wisdom when making decisions. “Fool me once, shame on you, but fool me twice…”
Lately I have realized that I may be wise in my attempts to not repeat the mistakes that I have made in my past, but I am by no means an expert at traversing the path of attaining wisdom. For example, I have quit smoking cigarettes and then resumed the habit enough times in my life to realize that my habit of smoking is akin to commonly jumping off short cliffs that leave my body bruised and swollen. Yet I cannot seem to embrace my own wisdom for long enough to actually kick the habit. In this regard, I am a fool.
Wisdom is an incredible force. Most people who have successfully embraced their own wisdom and thereby prevented themselves from becoming a fool are indeed wise. And I think that most wise people (people who don’t repeat past mistakes) would be hard pressed to find a motivating factor in their decision making process that is even remotely as powerful and useful as the power of their own wisdom and direct experience.
But I can personally name one force of nature that more often than not tends to trump the mighty power of wisdom, and this is the power of love.
I cannot speak for the generation before mine, nor any of those previous, but I believe that I am making no false claim when I state that the average person alive in America, who is eighteen, and under the age of forty (also known as Generation X) would admit to having fallen in and out of love more than a handful of times. This means that the once sacred notion of “a one true love” has been, for the most part, eradicated from the psyche of the average young American citizen. This means that while love is still a powerful force, the unwavering belief in the everlasting power of love is, for the most part, dead in the eyes of my generation. We are therefore not a lost generation, but rather a highly disenchanted one. We are The Disenchanted Generation, incubated with disillusionment and a powerful sense of vicarious mistrust in idioms, adages, and lore.
If you trust this premise of mine, than the logical conclusion would be to accept the fact that my generation, who is about to take the reigns of leadership in our country, is quite a disillusioned and romantically hopeless bunch. We laugh at the words of Frank Sinatra, we shake our heads in disbelief when any character in a movie falls in love and the audience is expected to believe that the love will last forever (picture any movie with Meg Ryan, Julia Roberts, or Sharon Stone. (Just kidding on that last one.))
We attend weddings and shudder at the guilty thoughts that enter our mind as the brides and grooms reiterate that they will remain a team “until death do they part.” We shudder, because we know that science is the new religion, and science dictates that there is a fifty-fifty chance that a wedding we attend will end in divorce some day down the road.
I think this concept explains why a completely phony and morally vacant person like Hillary Clinton could be standing on the precipice of a successful candidacy for President of the United States; she is a reflection of The Disenchanted Generation’s refusal to believe that anything could be “real”; so Hillary has become a popular candidate by reflecting our reluctance to commit to any set of ideals, or even a basic moral code of conduct. Hillary Clinton aptly represents my generation’s own failure to embrace anything “real,” because we no longer believe that anything in this world is permanent, let alone very ‘real.’ Ironically, She is so ephemeral and fake, that she seems real.
But just because my generation is disenchanted with reality, does not mean that we are hopeless! I can assure you that many members of my generation are still attempting to live a life of love, and are thereby committing themselves to marriage and saying, “I do” at a pretty consistent rate. (We’re just not bothering to pretend that we are saving our virginity for the wedding night, and we’re not blind to our intellectual awareness of odds and statistics). But while the historical notions of love and marriage disenchant most of us, we also don’t care about our intellectual concepts of love, and so we jump in and out of love, all the while thinking, “things might work out differently for ME, this time!”
And so into the room enters Democratic hopeful Barack Obama. Obama is the complete opposite of Hillary Clinton. Obama represents idealism, hope, character, limited wisdom, and certainly not least of all, he represents capricious youth and all the tomfoolery that accompanies it. Voting for Hillary is akin to staring at a cliff and deciding that you will jump off of it if more than fifty percent of the other people making the same decision decide to jump. Because if elected, Hillary has promised the U.S. populace only one thing, and that is to do whatever is the most popular thing to do on any given day, at any given time. Hillary’s mascot would most aptly be a lemming.
But a vote for Obama? A vote for Obama is like staring at a small cliff and realizing that the fall cannot kill you, and also realizing that the jump could actually inject some positive change into your life. So maybe the jump is worth it – the jump could create a drastic change in your life. A vote for Obama is a vote for Evil Knievel; it’s daring.
To loosely quote my father, the political climate has finally called upon us all to finally “shit or get off the pot.” A Vote for Hillary is a vote for constipation, a vote for cold, calculated, and vicarious decision-making: it’s a vote to leave things as they are, and to continue along with the status quo; to remain hovering above a pile of shit.
A vote for Obama is a vote for change, and a vote for love. It could prove quite foolish, but we won’t ever know without the experience. Voting for Obama is a vote to see what lies outside of the outhouse we have been huddling in for the last eight years.
And what about those other two yokels gunning for the Republican ticket? Well, in my disenchanted and incredibly biased opinion, a vote for John McCain and especially for Mitt Romney is akin to sitting down on a toilet bowl and forgetting to take off your underwear. Sure, it will get rid of something, and things will change, but it’ll be messy.
I actually do think that it’s possible that things could work out for the better if we elect McCain, but history dictates, and the odds tell us, that things will most likely end up the same way they did when America embraced Ronald Reagan, Bush Senior, and our current President; we will continue to spend money that we don’t actually have in an effort to force-feed our patriotic notions of democracy down the throats of every country in the world who opposes our ideologies. And this could be quite disastrous.
I kindly ask you to envision the culprits of 9/11, only imagine them as a wild eyed drunk, who is high on PCP, and who has just punched a cop in the face and attempted to drive their car through a brick wall. At this point, you’re getting close to picturing the sort of irrational enemy our nation could face if we continue to bully and belittle Iran and the other nations on our ‘shit list.’ Sustaining our violence will breed further violence.
Most would agree that it is a bad idea to marry someone you have known for a short while. I think this also explains Hillary’s popularity; she is the most ‘well known’ candidate in the field. But all we really know about her is that she stands for doing what is popular, and not what is right. And I think these ‘ethics’ are unethical, and cowardly.
It is naive to assume that when you commit yourself to someone under the so-called eyes of god that you will want to remain with that person until death do you part, and a vote for McCain and his ticket of ‘staying the course’ in Iraq is a pretty committed position to take, given the overwhelming evidence that our ‘marriage’ to Iraq would probably best be cured by a swift divorce, even if we owe them alimony for the next 50 years.
But it is not a bad idea to marry someone that you’ve known for six years, someone who is not so convicted in their ideals that they are not afraid to change their mind in order to do what they think may be right over what is popular. A vote for Obama is akin to entering a marriage that may be emotional, but it is also based on a foundation of trust and love; probably the two most important issues to consider when considering marriage.
During my life I have vacillated between searching for love and running away from love, and shirking from love and embracing love. And as hard as I may try, at the tender age of twenty-six, I cannot seem to find the focus to remain faithful to any of these meandering emotions of mine. I fall in and out of love about as easily as most drunk people fall in and out of a taxicab at the end of a long night at the bars. Like it or not, I have recently embraced my personal experiences and wised up to this fact about myself.
But when it comes to politics, and especially to the 2008 election, I think that I am ready to finally throw in my towel of commitment to the third party, (which is a pretty stark metaphor for my fear of commitment in itself), and I am ready to embrace the love for America that Barack Obama is willing to offer us, the voters.
I think the word love does not deserve the fear-invoking connotations many project onto it. I tell my mother, my father, and my brother that I love them about as often as I can remember to, because I think it is a way of describing the profound affection, appreciation, and respect that I feel for them. And I would also like to tell many of my friends that I love them more often than I do, but I quite often don’t, because the use of the word love seems to cause so many insecure people to hyperventilate.
Hillary strikes me as the type of person who is probably afraid to admit to the power of love, because it would make her feel vulnerable, and she would therein lose the power she so unabashedly craves. McCain is a wise old man; he speaks from the experience of having been a prisoner of war, and from having served as a senator for more than twenty years. But I also think that these experiences have embittered the man, and made him unwilling to, quite literally, “give peace a chance.” And I’m tired of war, I’m tired of aggression, and I’m tired of hearing rhetoric nonsense about the necessity for war.
I think love is a state of mind, and it comes on strong and quick, embraces your spirit, and while it sometimes diverts your mind from making wise decisions, it also enables you to make decisions based on your emotions and your heart, and these decisions best create the moments in life that make life worth experiencing!
I think that America, in the eyes of its international peers, used to be a model of heartfelt, earnest decision making, and these were the very qualities that earned the generation that survived the Great Depression and World War II the title of “The Great Generation.”
I want my generation to be better than great. I want my generation to be known as The Loving Generation. The Generation who chose love and compassion over hate and aggression, the generation who embraced the principles of Ghandi: a Generation that leads by example, not one that thinks bombing campaigns can spread an affinity for the concept of democracy. And I think these changes can occur if we elect Obama.
I am going to vote for Barack Obama, if he wins the Democratic Party’s nomination. And when people who oppose me tell me that I am no longer acting as though I am “wise beyond my years,” I am going to stare into their eyes like Clark Gable in “Gone with the Wind,” and I’m going to tell them, “Frankly, I don’t give a damn!” Because I don’t. And it’s my personal experience that has dictated this wise decision.
This entry was posted on Monday, April 20th, 2009 at 3:43 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
