Michael Mitchell: Archive

The only people who need to be told to "shut the fuck up" are the ones who also need to be told what the fuck to say.

Why do we need to manage each other? Why isn't everyone self-motivated? What causes psychological dependency? These are actually foolish questions.

Most of what we learn in life, we learn implicitly, especially when we're younger, before we've learned how to learn, so to speak. If we're not guided properly by our "elders", by the people we look up to, then we can't retrace those steps, so we get lost and don't even know we're lost, and just think it's all magic or whatever.

A philosopher or scientist would say "inherent" or "intrinsic", rather than "magic", but it's all the same shit. They simply don't know how they know what they know.

Show of hands. Who remembers learning how to walk? No one. Walking is a skill you'll use your entire life, but you learned how to do it when you were a baby. There's a proper way to do it, a certain posture and method for controlling your movements that's better than others, making the whole activity easier and more efficient and less physically stressful on your body over time, and you can learn it these days with a simple Google search, but most people wouldn't even think to try because it's merely something we've always done, something we've never had to give much thought to.

Now apply that to thinking itself.

This is why we need philosophy, not religion, and the results of scientific studies aren't enough, either. It's also why our minds are riddled with doubts rather than secured with certainty, leading us to depend on each other psychologically, because we don't understand and trust our own minds.

Thinking for yourself, moral independence, self-motivation, these are not qualities we acquire when we mature. They're qualities we lose with every remonstration from truly loving and caring adults attempting to teach us what they themselves know they don't know. They only know what works, what society has evolved to deem acceptable, so all we really learn is duty and sacrifice, not values and virtues from our personal perspective, but from the perspective of what's good for the family or tribe or community or country, etc.

Independence is literally stolen from us before we know it, and then the ones who hold onto that fire get constantly ridiculed by ignorant shit like this quote. Dependency isn't merely implied or hidden in it. It's featured. It blatantly says it's not the responsibility of the person who talks too much to know when to "shut the fuck up", but that it's everyone else's responsibility to manage him. A "man", not a child, can't read a fucking room. That's literally caused by the solution the quote offers, as if everyone in his life doesn't get that shit, either.

But who's the real dumbass? Why learn how to properly socially interact with people when you can just rely on others to manage that responsibility for you? And if everyone thought like him, who'd be left to keep everyone in line? That duty to each other which the quote endorses and takes for granted as self-evident, axiomatic, prima facie -- that's the poison, not the cure.

"A leash is a rope with a noose at both ends." -- Ayn Rand