Common Sense-23

The pamphlet that was one of the things that started the American Revolution. I was never much of a history fan, but I was interested to see how much common sense was in "Common Sense."

Thankfully, both for the sake of the book being interesting enough to read and for the sake of preserving my last shreds of hope that humanity isn't completely comprised of idiots, the title of the book was an accurate description of it's contents.

As for the things discussed in themselves, I didn't find them particularly interesting. It quite simply an appeal using common sense as it's basis to split from Britain. Logic and common sense were really all it was, no politics or deceit or exaggeration. Thomas Paine simply presented the view that union with Britain was detrimental to the American colonies, and provided logical reasons as to why he reached this conclusion.

The question that comes to mind is, "why is Thomas Paine the ONLY one who does this? Why can't modern speakers take the same approach?"

A lot of problems today are caused by stupidity, wishful thinking, illogical and irrational decisions, and overall just a plain lack of common sense. If people could learn to set aside their emotions, optimism, and personal bias when making important decisions then we'd find that our world would become a much better place.

The question remains, WHY can't anyone do this? I try and act without bias, debate with logic and experience, and make common sense take precedent to emotion. For the most part I am successful. This does not mean I am without bias, do not sometimes debate based on ideals, and do not sometimes let my emotions override my rationality. I'm only mortal, so I can't claim I'm perfect, and I can't expect perfection from others. However, I do believe that if someone like me, a person who used to be very emotional and had very poor control over said emotions, can achieve this level of detachment and control, then it is not unreasonable to expect similar results from others. Particularly the people in positions of power who make the most critical decisions.

In a system where politics has degenerated into a democrat vs republican cold war, it seems that common sense has died. Now would be a great time for another Thomas Paine to surface, but now regular people are just as caught up in this lack of common sense as the politicians, so the number of people who could possibly be the next Thomas Paine are few and far between.

As always, I present such cheery thoughts in these blog posts, and all without any sarcasm. It's a grim situation though, and I'm not going to be focusing on the silver linings. I feel obligated to point out that the silver lining is just the edge of a giant lump of coal, that's just how I view things. I hope that people like me become more common, that way we can make the entire thing silver instead of just the linings. Then we can look at the gold linings without feeling guilty.

A Christmas Carol + Bloom's Guide to A Christmas Carol-24

Even with the guide and all the research and such included in it, I am finding it hard to figure out what I should blog on.

The story of "A Christmas Carol" has been told, retold, made into a movie and play, retold a few more times, had the movie remade, told again, had the remake modernized, and so on and so forth. The point is, there isn't anything about this story that hasn't been analyzed, broken down, or theorized about by thousands upon thousands of people before me, and will likely continue to do so long after I'm done here.

I'm trying to think of something insightful to say about the book, but the story seems rather straightforward to me.  An old miser is shown the error of his ways by divine intervention. So maybe three spirits that may or may not be  figments of Scrooge's imagination aren't quite divine intervention, but you get the picture.

The morals brought to attention by the spirits are not new concepts to me. I am aware of the fact that charities are necessary in order to help the unfortunate lower class. I'm constantly pelted with people encouraging me to be more sociable and less solitary. I understand the value of education and the danger of ignorance presented by the Spirit of Christmas Present, as demonstrated by my pursuing my own education rather than remaining ignorant in incompetent public schools. All of these are things I knew about already, and having them repeated doesn't really cause me to think about them more.

After realizing that there were no new concepts for me to think about, I am forced to wonder why this book made the list. I'm usually rather generous, and I am far from ignorant. Admittedly I do have a bit of a solitary nature, but I'm far from being or even becoming another Scrooge. Whatever solitary tendencies I have can easily be explained by the fact that I'm in the middle of my teenage years. Combine that with the fact that my social experiences from most of my childhood were unpleasant, to put it lightly, and I'm actually pretty sociable overall.

So I have now somehow managed to create a blog post for a book about how there isn't much to blog about. I'm not sure if I should be proud that I salvaged my situation or disturbed that I'm this good at beating around the bush and expanding what should be a one or line statement into several paragraphs.

There isn't really much else for me to say. I'd just like to point out that the time I received and read "A Christmas Carol" is coincidentally the beginning of the Christmas season, my mom probably planned this, but it's fun to believe otherwise.

I guess it's time for me to wrap things up and pray for insightful comments to save this post from patheticness.
Happy Holidays!

Bright-Sided-25

This book was particularly amusing to me, after so many years of my mom trying to convert my pessimism to optimism (often to my chagrin), this book that explains all the negative aspects of an optimistic view on things was quite entertaining.

The book provided a detailed history of optimism and it's roots. It appears this philosophy stemmed from religion. It started in Calvinism, a religion that believed that humans were predestined to go to heaven or hell, and that our entire lives should be spent working or reflecting on our flaws. The religion encouraged self-loathing and reportedly caused sickness among its practitioners. This eventually led to other views that eventually led to optimism.

The book also shows how optimism has infected every aspect of our society on a very basic level. Scientists  promote positive thinking as a key to longevity, health, success, social affluence, and just about everything else. Business owners subject their employees to constant pep-talks, and apparently "not being positive enough" is an acceptable reason to fire someone. The words "positive" and "good" are now interchangeable, and negativity has seemingly replaced sin in many churches.

When looking at this from a third person perspective these things seem so obvious that you wonder how you never noticed it before. The answer is simply that you haven't noticed it because you;re caught up in it too. How often do you connect pessimism with anything good? Have you ever thought that a negative outlook on something might work better than a positive one? If so, when was this? More importantly, how did the other members of society treat your negativity?

An example of how bad things have gotten that struck me as significant was an example where a worker for a company who was supposed to decide which stock options to buy, hold, or sell was fired for putting something in the "sell" category. He put it there because the stock was losing money and showed very little promise for a future comeback, meaning that it would, from a realistic standpoint, be a good idea to sell it. Apparently optimism disagrees, and so good decisions are rewarded with punishment.

I have never fully converted to optimism, despite my mom's best efforts. However, I did manage to shake my constant pessimism, something that the book also says is bad. I take the stance that is encouraged by this book, realism. I consider both positive and negative and make my decisions with common sense and logic. It's disturbing to see that I am part of a dying species. I have met very few realists, a couple of pessimists, a few pessimists who claim to be realists, but very few actual realists. The difference between realists and pessimists who claim to be realists is slight, but important. Pessimists focus on the negative parts of a situation, realists focus on the situation as a whole. The reason the words have become interchangeable for most people is that the state of the world doesn't leave many positive things to be considered by realists. That, and the fact that anybody who dares to consider a negative thing is arbitrarily labeled as a pessimist by the majority of optimists.

If any of the things said here strike anywhere close to home for you, read this book and see if you should reconsider your worldview to be more realistic. For now I take my leave, food for thought should not be force-fed, otherwise it soils the flavor and gives one indigestion. Also metaphors should not be created by teenage scholars, otherwise the sound corny like the one above.

Joking aside, give these things some thought. See you next time! Farewell!