The Closing of the Mind

      It is not a contradiction: You can be a great scientist with a closed mind. I still pity such a man, Nobel Prize or not. Or you can be a dishwasher or a garbage man with a mind on fire. I don't think a mindless life is worth living whether Nobel laureate or dishwasher.  It is unworthy of a human being, a form of disrespect to the Creator even. And since there are very few people like Jesus or even Socrates walking around to converse with, most of us need books to talk to them. The devil – let's imagine there is one – would absolutely want to close the human mind and lock us up in the hell of our own egos, leaving his work to the corporate or autocrat-serving influencers responsible for making sure the thus imprisoned mind never comes into contact with reality, with beauty, with truth, with the souls of other people (a person as knowable though love), with God. The devil perhaps invented the modern school, a place where the minds of children are closed like no other, unless it be the screen, which is controlled either by the capitalist or the autocrat, which is to say, controlled by the devil. There is a strange interdependence between thoughtless and evil, as Hannah Arendt wrote. And our humanity lessens to the degree we cease to think and to be capable of thought. (You only get good at something by doing it.) Socrates uncovered the source of thoughtlessness or mindlessness – the lazy, self-satisfied, ego-centered conviction that one already understands everything or understands enough of everything, or understand enough to believe that understanding doesn't matter. The thoughtless or mindless person will not know or be bothered by their mindlessness. A man already has to be pretty thoughtful to understand how ignorant he is of what matters most.