I think vision is a very important thing to include in the way you live your life. I have been pondering about it. I think it is important that individuals have visions in themselves aswell. A vision like what they want out of life, even as simple as wanting to become a contractor is important. I have noticed that people with no vision in their lifes lead a very apathetic life. A vision gives you drive to do somthing, acheive something or be something. It allows growth no matter what the vision is. The idea of vision in its many forms is somthing I have come to regard as essential in life, in myself and in the people around me. Have any thoughts on vision?
Personally, I think what you are talking about refers more to an internal drive rather than the CoV lexicon usage of vision, which is more about thinking far outside the box. However, I believe that thinking so far outside the box is impossible without a strong internal drive, since one has to be motivated to reach such a level of philosophical insight. It cannot even be given by a teacher if the student is apathetic, because it is not just knowledge but also a different and more complex way of thinking. The other way around is not necessarily true, since one can possibly be driven to a very specific goal without every considering the wide implications of it. Anyhow, I'll get on to commenting on your definition now.
I have an internal drive to do something, anything significant.. call it vision, call it ambition, call it anything. I just can't be at peace without feeling that I am getting closer to some important goal I have set for myself. But vision is also dangerous without reason, because cults and religions seek to recruit people like me by providing a clear purpose for us to follow. For apathetic types, other recruiting methods are clearly necessary. The apathetic ones who do not operate on abstract principles still operate on principles such as hunger and thirst and other types of pleasure, otherwise they would not survive. Your type of vision is good, but it must be accompanied by reason, because one with vision but no reason is much more dangerous than one with neither vision nor reason.
But sometimes I wish I could just let go of vision... it is a quality that can cause painful restlessness to oneself, once in a while, if there is too much of it. It is as much of a virtue as feeling pain then, but while pain drives us backward from that which harms us, vision drives us forward to that which can help us.
I know exactly what you mean. Here's a meme for you, though I'm not sure who started it:
"The measure of greatness is the ability to suffer." That's suffering in knowledge that isn't generally accessible, not in terms of 'gnosis', but in terms of reasoning ability and vision.
There've been times I've wished I could dumb down and let go of it, but that's not a path open to me, any more than a self-lobotomy.
More than 20 years ago, I looked at the extinction rates and birth rates, and went into a total funk of despair. I came to the conclusion that our form of intelligence may prove to be an evolutionary dead end because short term gain outweighs long-term reason in the growing and growingly powerful general population. The trends I saw back then looked like a linear path to hell, or global environmental collapse by 2050. Life would continue, of course -- life is tenacious. But our species would be gone or nearly so, as would most mammals and a whole lot of sea life.
Even though the current state of the environment and population growth now seem to bear out my earlier doomsday scenario, paradoxically, I am actually more hopeful today than I was 20 years ago for several reasons. The most important reason is that I've learned that 'the path to hell' as I've called it, isn't a linear one at all. As a paradigm, one might say that as the system becomes more complex, more 'opportunities for redemption' arise.
The most important of those opportunities is perhaps nanotech. If properly conceived and executed, nanotech's potential is nearly unlimited in terms of cleaning up our waste, recycling that waste back into useful materials, and so on. But it also has the potential to confer a form of immortality if the promise of knowledge of the genome and cellular repair pay off.
But does that mean that the battle against toxic memes will continue infinitely? Perhaps. But perhaps a form of prophylactic treatment might cut down on proliferation of vectors: limit the use of nanotech for bodily repair by branding it as the mark of satan, for instance.
This may be too radical or it may be unworkable, but the idea is sound. If nanotech applications to humans are branded with a deeply-held negative connotation coupled with those negative memes that have been and are being used against the 'elite' and the 'intelligensia', etc., then it might be possible to limit its use to people who are not already toxically infected by self-destructive memes.
Of course, such a suggestion carries enormous ethical risks. From a moral standpoint, can we justify deliberately crafted meme warfare? If the use of memes prevents certain individuals from benefiting from technology that could extend their lives indefinitely, does that constitute a form of genocide, even if it is a genocide by choice? At what point does survival of the species rise above survival of infected individuals who if left unchecked may bring about extinction of that very same species?
I am all for alternatives, providing they have 'a snowballs chance in hell' to work.
« Last Edit: 2007-08-19 11:14:42 by ViralMadonna »
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