Wednesday 24 March 2010

Independent Thought

Yesterday I was feeling particularly sheepish and I decided instead of studying (which I should be doing since this is revision period) I watched two documentaries instead.

One was called 'Capitalims: A love Story' - I am sure you know it, made by the now infamous film maker Michael Moore. I you want I can pass you on a link to where you can view the film online for free. Alternatively you could just google the title and get a link by yourself.

Now, secondly I watched the not equally famous film 'Religulous' by Larry Charles (the same guy who made 'Borat' actually). The Comedian Bill Maher travels to Israel, England, the Netherlands, Vatican City, and across America, speaking to people about faith and religion and takes the piss a lot. Both certainly worth seeing but be warned they are not in the high end of the documentary class and are made primarily to shock and entertain, and there is not so much an academic side to either. Now naturally they provide facts, or what they claim to be facts (I would advise anyone watching either to check the facts for themselves).

Both are very good documentaries for what they are, and they do not really ask much beyond themselves safe for the viewer to stop and ask himself what is what? Now what struck me with both movies/documentaries was how independent thought seems to have gone right out of the window. People are really so stupid nowadays that they take the majority of their interactions with life at face value, critical analysis of a statement, speech, claim, fact, book of what have you seems to be nonexistent. How on earth did that happen?

Certainly the story is different on the blogosphere where quite on the contrary, nothing is taken at face value and everything is instead analysed with a critical pair of spectacles. Perhaps that is the end result of crowd sourcing a crowd which is really very pissed of with the way their country has been dealt with over the past 3-4 decades. But the fundamental difference between bloggers and the rest of the people (this is of course a massive generalisation, there are swathes of non-bloggers who most certainly employ critical analysis on a very regular basis) is that the latter just believe anything and everything the media tells them to believe.

Now things are not going to well for the media it must be said, when people start realising that they being fed lies they act, the British unlike most other people seems to act on a retarded basis in that they do act but only in the very last minute. Apply this current Britain and you will quickly see that the majority have not acted yet, but things are a foot be quite sure. But on a more local level consider for example the Met Office which had been telling people, practically, that they were about to enter the next ice age, but that never happened and the Met Office is now the laughing stock of British society and no one takes them seriously. Much the same can be said of the Government and Parliament and pretty much the entire civil service.

We interact with them because we have to, but I think I am beginning to see more evil eyes being directed their way, than usual. That is not just in the metaphorical sense but also in real life. While we are long way of from being uniformly critical of our daily interactions with life and by extension our government, there sure as chips are far more bitter people around now. This is unfortunate for it should not be that way; people should be able to trust the people who work for them, who are paid for them, who have a job because of them but the receiving end have over the past two decades firmly decided that they are going to homogeneously screw the people - every last one of them until they are control of their money and not the other way around.

Which leaves us with a nation with bad weather and a bitter population, who feels betrayed by the army of servants whose soul purpose was to serve them, but have ended up being served by the population. This is a very very dangerous combination of events and results, but there appears to be no evidence showing that the political classes have learned a lesson. The only thing we can do thus is to not believe anything they say, ever.

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