Some of us think the world revolves around us, that we are the centers of the universe. More and more, if you listen to the uber-liberals in all fields, we’re being taught this preposterous notion.
Hogwash!
In reality, in the scope of things, each and every one of us is but a minuscule part of the bigger whole. Sad, but true, and even more especially sad for those of us who think they’re “all that.” Bill Maher comes to mind.
So when I wrote my first paper in my first advanced class (past the Masters) in my doctoral program, I made the mistake of using the first person (I) several times. Well, the teacher was furious — he was a professor — and while he didn’t say anything directly to me, he said something to my dissertation adviser because he gave me a quick talking-to about how no one cares what I think about anything until I have those letters after my name.
He was really re-affirming something I already knew, something I’d been taught many years ago – that in the scope of things we’re all small potatoes, virtually almost little nothings, each of us occupying space, using oxygen and just passing through the whole of what this universe is.
About that, by the way, about the universe, for all our advanced knowledge, we really know very little (although, again, some of us think they really know a lot). By that, I mean to say that we don’t have any real idea of what happens after we die other than what happens in the decomposition of the body. The soul thing, the spirit, mind-body, all that’s “out there” in the sense that no one really knows. It becomes a “what-you-believe,” and one of the great things about being born in America is that you’re free to believe as you wish.
Personally, I believe in God and in the Old Testament notion of heaven and hell. My faith has wandered, vacillated, been submerged from time to time, but it’s there, has survived, is stronger than I give it credit for. Not that it matters much, but I’m looking forward to one day — and God please, not too soon – going up there to be with my parents, my family, especially my one aunt, my mother’s sister, Hello Georgewood, whom I regret not getting to know.
Anyway…
This idea that’s currently fashionable that it’s all about us is not well-conceived. It’s not well thought out, it’s not based in any sort of empirical fact. It is, in essence, designed to fulfill another currently fashionable but poorly conceived notion, that of immediate gratification, that our every whim/thought/desire is meant to be immediately and instantaneously fulfilled.
More hogwash!
Like with almost everything, such notions of self-centered self-importance and the accompanying inherent right to immediate self-gratification — everything and everyone else be damned — have consequences, some of them unintended consequences which can often happen but which occur more frequently when ideas/notions/advocated value positions are presented off-the-cuff, without much thought and supported by that narcissistic notion that we are the center of the universe.
Witness AOC. Witness Beto O’Rourke, Elizabeth Warren (the Native American) and Cory Booker. Witness Bill Maher, mentioned twice here now, who so confidently denies God (thereby proclaiming himself a god) and who sits upon a personal wealth of $100 million hoping the nation is thrust into depression to fulfill his personal political desire to see Donald Trump defeated in 2020.
See the point?
This sense of the universe centering around us, especially when enjoined to the denial of God or some greater power out there, leads to ideas like “hurt the many to satisfy my desire,” “re-create segregation because I personally am afraid of white people,” or “we’re all going to die in twelve years if we don’t adopt the Green New Deal.
And so it goes.
I could call myself Dr. I have the letters and lots more letters too. But I prefer to think of myself as someone cognizant of the fact that when it’s all over for me, I will only have meant something, and that’s if I’m lucky, to the people who knew me. A little and minuscule part of the whole.
