I believe in freedom of thought. There is nothing so offensive as to blindly swallow everything fed to you, to believe everything without thought of your own doing. People need to think for themselves. For it is that which separates us from the animals, our free will and our ability to make up our own minds. There is nothing more agitating than a person who makes statements they themselves know nothing about, that they cannot back up with an ounce of reason or solid evidence. Of even greater importance than not becoming one of these people is ignoring them. You can never win an argument with an ignorant person. If left to their own devices, in their own petty minds, maybe they can develop their own opinion rather than regurgitating something they read off the back of a cereal box, something previously so meaningless to them. Unfortunately we all have to deal with these types every now and again. As we’ve seen in the past few months, they are the talking heads which fill the media. They are the kind who make you an enemy since one of your views doesn’t coincide with one of theirs. They are, regrettably, most of the society in which we immerse ourselves.
And so on.
We can see the consequences of suppression of free thought in history. A group of people in Russia, presumably in the early nineteen-hundreds, got fed up with the regime of forced thinking they had been living under. So they started something new. Something better. Along the way, presumably during the mid nineteen-hundreds, they began to grow power-hungry themselves. People who had their own thoughts against those of the government were sent to cold places. Many of them did not return. Some years later the rest of the world agreed with the bulk of the people there and another, new, even better something replaced it. In this way, control and interference breed trouble on a grand scale. We deal with it today all over the world, with a select group of angry people trying to say what one can and cannot read, and what one can and cannot do to their own bodies. And so on.
A man in the nineteen-sixties had these thoughts of his own. He said, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” He was speaking to the heart of all people in the world, summing up the whole conflict with a simple analogy. More people should listen to his type of people. More people should listen to music.
This is not to bring about dissent , it’s more to remind people of the capacity they have as humans. Everyone has strong feelings, and should not only acknowledge them, but stand up for them and fight for them. Another man once said, “It is better to fight for something than to live for nothing.” We seem to be suffering from a lack of people like him nowadays. However, we don’t need to.
This I believe.