by Jason Stotts
It’s quite a sad day for me to know that we as a race have retrogressed so far that we are no longer able to shine light upon our own actions and see them for what they are. People have become so pragmatic that they have lost the ability to think in principles, they have lost the ability to put their actions into the contexts of theirs lives and see how they will affect them both now and down the road.
A case in point is the other day a person took a glass from a restaurant and then threw it away. When confronted about this and asked why he had done it, he replied that it was not an issue that it was merely a cup. For him all his mind was capable of grasping was that he had a cup and it was his to use. Why was it his to use? Because he had paid for its use while in the restaurant. Was the cup really his? No, he was only renting it for a small amount of time in a particular location. But he did not seem to grasp something so simple that one should not have to explain it to a child. He did not see that he did not own this cup, that another did, and that his removal of their property from their possession was not merely “taking a cup with you”, but was an act of theft. To make matters worse, he did not understand that the act of throwing the glass away was not merely discarding something that one did not need, as if it were a paper cup that had merely been used and had no other value, no throwing the cup away constituted the destruction of another’s property that one had previously stolen.
This person in effect had the cognitive capacities of a child and a mind so crippled by pragmatic philosophy and out of focus thinking that he could not even understand what he had done.
This makes it a sad day for me, to know that my brethren have sunk so far as to be able to understand their own actions, to know that their minds are crippled and they cannot even understand what it means to think in principles. Perhaps soon we shall have to celebrate another “memorial day”, except now we shall have to grieve for the memory of intelligence and rationality.