First of all, I would like to admit that I’m a little
frightened of doing this. I don’t like doing things unless I’m sure they’re
going to work, and I especially don’t like admitting that I want them to work
unless I’m sure they will. That’s one of the reasons I usually don’t tell
people about things until I’ve finished with them. But this, by its nature, I
can’t do without other people. So this is me asking for help.
More clearly put, this is my announcement that over the past
week, I’ve started both a website and a YouTube channel. The website is here, and the YouTube
channel is here. I would of course appreciate it if
you’d go check them out, subscribe, comment, like, recommend, and etc., but first let me
explain what they are and why I started them.
Truth – living, active, truth that influences people’s lives
– is the great passion of my life; I am wholly devoted to it. I believe that
belief influences our actions, our attitudes, and our behaviors. I believe that
right belief can give meaning, purpose, and vitality to life, and that wrong
belief can sink you into a pit so deep, you can’t find a way out. I believe
that truth is more than logic, it is living; it is not only right thinking, but
right feeling; not only right judgment of the world, but right reaction to it.
It’s hard to describe how I feel about this, but it is the center and driving
force of my entire life, and it is inextricably caught up in He who claimed to
be the way, the truth, and the life combined in one.
Nothing makes me more angry than the spread of willful
ignorance – that is, people who don’t bother thinking out what they believe.
They just believe whatever sounds nice to them, even if it’s completely
nonsensical, and then they talk about it until other people start to believe
this, too. I don’t just think these beliefs are wrong; I think they cause
actual harm to people. And it makes me angry that there are so many
misconceptions being perpetrated in society, that we can never get to the
truth, the truth that we need to be truly human, because we can never have an
honest conversation without its getting clouded in thousands of fallacies and
rabbit trails.
It is not my nature to speak up about things the instant
they annoy me, because I need to be sure that I’m in the right. My mother will
tell you that even when I was little, whenever I entered a new environment, I
would just sit and watch everything until I knew how it worked, and then I
would suddenly jump in and be completely confident. I still operate this way.
For the past four and, to some extent, the past eight years,
I have been sitting and watching: watching our culture, watching our
institutions of higher learning, watching how people interact and think about
the important questions of life, watching Texas and Massachusetts, Ireland and
Israel. I have listened from the boxing gym of Boston to the bazaar of Jordan,
from the faculty club of Harvard to the dive bar of New York. Harvard and I
disagree on a great many things, but for the past four years I have sat in
near-silence and I have listened, and I have thought, and I have waited. And
now I am done waiting; something has awoken inside of me, and it is time to
start speaking.
So this is where I’m starting. First, I have started a
YouTube channel, in which I point out inconsistencies and inanities in the
philosophy of movies and TV shows. I’m starting small at the moment; you won’t
find much there yet. But I do this by second nature; I regularly startle people
in restaurants by picking apart the lyrics of songs they hadn’t even noticed
were playing. (Eg – “Say you’ll see me again, even if it’s just in your wildest
dreams?!” If I just broke up with you, you keep your wild dreams away from me,
thank you very much.)
To me, this nonsensicality in movies/TV shows/music/etc.
represents a larger trend in the world, the idea of saying things that sound
nice, even if they don’t make any sense, because we can’t be bothered to think
seriously about the larger questions in life. So I am calling these movies’ bluff;
they don’t know what they’re talking about (not to say that I don’t still
really like some of them). Warning: I’m an extremely sarcastic person when I
want to be.
Secondly, I am starting a website, centered around a second
blog. This one isn’t about me; it’s about issues in society, things I think
we’ve gotten backwards or upside-down, because we’ve forgotten to go back and
check our premises, and so our deductions are wrong. The blog will include
commentary on movies, generally linked to my YouTube videos, as well as thoughts on
current events and where they’re really coming from – ie what is the debate
over abortion really about? What are we disagreeing on, and can we resolve
these differences? What assumptions are we making, and why? And it will include
a little gratuitous philosophy; I am majoring in it, after all.
Finally, I have published a short ebook – the Idrealist (yes, that is spelled correctly) which
you can either buy on Smashwords, or receive for free by subscribing to my blog.
This, more than anything else, is my response to the past four years of
listening; I wrote it in less than a week, but it’s the product of months and
years of thoughts finally coming together in a cohesive form. Harvard taught me
a lot of things, but it taught me more by the things it left out than by anything
else. So please pick up a copy!
And that concludes my little aside blog on my projects:
website, YouTube, ebook. It makes me nervous to launch them, because I really
don’t understand how internet dynamics work, and I’m rather afraid I’m going to
fall on my face. But if I do, I’ll just dust myself off and get up again; it
would hardly be the first time. In any case, I’d very much appreciate your help
and support. I won’t be posting on Facebook every time I put something new on
the blog or channel, because my Facebook wall would end up being a long list of
notifications. But please subscribe to them so you’ll receive the notifications
by email. And if you have any questions or suggestions, please let me know!
Thanks for taking the time to read all of this!
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