I sent that speech to an unnamed party and she wanted to know just what I meant by it. I wrote this in response.
Tis a graduation speech. I can't force myself to put on an antic disposition and put on fair speech. And thank him and her and look to the future and make myself want to put a bullet inn my foot. I decided to blare out one last lesson. But it isn't a lesson. It is a demand. If I am to live with you, I ask that you think. That you know what you are thinking. What is the source of doubt, of a group's internal conflict? Conflicting philosophies. Observe a religion and you will see its philosophy. Listen to an aesop fable and have the philosophy/moral made clear. Even in a commercial, though you may need to stare to see the miffling under there, you can find some premiss that underlies the declaration. Ideas can not exist separate from an underlying philosophy.
What is it for? What am I trying to get across? Durst thou not hear the world outside? I hear a thousand ways to die intellectually. I hear fraudulent philosophical ideas being tossed about with nary a thought more than to the dressing on top of them. I call upon every person who hears me to bring her or his current patchwork of world-view out from the recesses of the unexpressed and engage in self-honesty. Then one may see if one has accepted some poison during all these years of life. Religion? Religion is simply a target that 90% (min) of my audience has experience with. And, a religion represents a philosophy, if only the ethical portion. This is the closest most ever come to interacting with pure philosophy. No, I thought of one. The question asked jokingly, "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, did it fall?" has as few tresses as possible without being the real question. That is really about whether the universe exists outside of human conception. Note, that any who say no tree fell are danger. They see no value or concreteness in the world around them. They may lie to you without compunction. And so on and so forth.
12:37 AM
Not another day can go by without this. I unveil, for the world, my graduation speech. No graduating class shall hear it. I was turned away. In reading, note that I was turned away before the final two paragraphs were written. And the second version was just practise.
Friends and others, thank you for allowing me to speak before you all. As most of you should have guessed, high school is not about learning the pythagoran theorem, playing football, or Macbeth. Four years have been spent in teaching us how to be adults. I lack humorous anecdodes about this, so I'll give you another tool for that purpose instead.
Lets play two rounds of word association. Religion. I feel safe in guessing that your parents did their 'duty' and introduced dogma to you during youth. Be it Christianity, Taoism, Islam, or Satanism, all are easy: believe what they tell you. Round 2: Philosophy. A dead white professor's game right? About useless questions like, would you trade 50 IQ Pts for happiness? It is not. Philosophy is about answering three questions about the universe and its relation to you. The three questions are: where am I? How do I know it? What should I do? These formally deal with its three branches: metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics.
Is any one out there thinking, 'Nick I don't need philosophy, it hasn't influenced me'? I want you to think really hard about that for the next minute. Have any of you ever said or thought "I couldn't help it! Nobody can help what they do" You got that idea from a philosopher named Georg Hegel. or, "I'm only human, nobody is perfect." You got that from Augustine. "Its evil because it is selfish." That was from Kant. Some answer "Sure, but I used them at different times, but I don't believe them all the time. What was true then isn't true now." Hegel again.
Why am I going on? As you can see, you use philosophic concepts all the time. In any idea of value, there is a philosophical issue. Especially in religion. I ask that you take a hard look at your religion to see if its philosophy is sound to you. To do so, ask these questions:
Where am I? Am I in a world with structured natural laws or changing chaos? Are experiences real and outside of you, or created by your mind? These are the questions that you must decide for Metaphysics. And after those are answered, bam, how do I know? Do I know because I can use reason to integrate what I see or are my thoughts determined by how long my mother breast-fed me. Can anyone who uses their mind learn about the universe or do we need a supernatural being to give a revelation? These are epistemological questions. And what you decide will determine your conclusions about what man's values and actions should be, Ethics. Are you to seek self-improvement or self-sacrifice? Is life for acheiving joy or avoiding pain?
My whole purpose is to show you the need for active investigation of what you believe. I admit that I accepted the beliefs that my parents fed me during my youth. And in the process of becoming an adult, I made sure that the clothes my parents gave me, are the clothes that fit me. Because these clothes determine how I treat you, how I treat me, how I think, and who I am. On September eleventh, we saw active thought and blind belief come into opposition. The engineers trusted in the soveriegnty of reason to build the World Trade Center. The terrorists believed in a book that told them that killing a whole bunch of people would grant them thousands of virgins in the afterlife. Though how anyone can know this without dying is beyond me.
So, I ask that you examine the philosophy of whatever you believe. If what you find is in accordance with the universe, by all means continue believing so. Your beliefs do measure up and reflect our world, no? Because if they are based on fantasy and have no connection, you have discovered a fraudulent philosophy. One such is the belief that a fairy exchanges money for teeth. There is no corroboration, and thus we do not entertain that idea. However, unexpressed, such traps may rest in your mind and sap at your resolve by contradicting your nature. What do I want out of this? I hope that you will take my advice and pare down your beliefs to their essentials. In doing so, you will find that you may have reason to discard some previously unnoticed yoke. I want to live in a world where everyone I speak to is free from any subversive philosophy. I have hinted at what I recognize is the only rational philosophy all throughout my speech. If you are honest with yourself, you will reach the same conclusion. Good Bye.
Version 2
Friends and others, thank you for letting me come before you again to speak one last time. I will speak with the theme that high school was essentially about: becoming an adult. There are many qualities that can act as anchors in your assumption of that (position goal). I will examine one. Will you be an adult that believes or thinks?
What do I mean by belief? I mean the belief required in Religion. A belief that supercedes reasons or proof. When the word of a prophet can wiegh as much as ten scientist's theses. Even if that prophet was born in the Medival Era when women were considered property. (And even the allegory doesn't support women as property. Was Eve created from the rib or the foot?) Religion doesn't require that much. It is easy. Believe.
What do I mean by think? Feeling your shorts crawling up while you listen to me isn't thinking. Deciding to stand up to rearrange it is. Thinking is an active process. What some consider 'passive thinking' is only letting the world push your buttons. Active thinking is using reason to integrate what you see and hear into concepts, such as judging the truthfulness of what I am telling you. Why is thinking important? Man is a reasoning animal; this is what sets us apart from the rest of the animal world. However, although active thought is necessary for survival, we are always able to choose not to think. We can't decide whether we can live without thinking, we can't. To go out into the workforce and expect that you can be paid for not thinking is not naive, but stupid. Even a lumberjack thinks as she hacks away at a tree trunk. Without thinking, the lumberjack might cut it so that another person is killed in the tree's fall. We must decide, instead, whether we will think or simply experience, believe.
12:34 AM
This is, essentially, a plagarization of Ayn Rand's West Point commencement speech.
1 Comment: by froginabox77 niiiice. that would've been awesome if they let you say that at your graduation.