Live In Your Small World — You Won’t Be Happy That You Do

I am always right.
Right?
Because it’s obvious, you know
that those other people are certainly 
wrong.

See look, I found these statistics.
They prove what I wanted to prove.
And here, I have this piece of information
and, of course, it confirms my perspective.

I’ll just continue living in the world
cultivating my own, small, familiar world.
Holding my bias tightly,
my opinions ignorantly,
because it is easier to just feel how I want
than to open up to the reality
that the world is always
more complex
than that.

So find the statistics.
They are always there.
Find the details that build your pre-determined outcome.
They are always there.
And forget that
your myopia,
your failure to see beyond yourself,
isn’t going to help anything.

We will all just keep spinning circles around our cyclical mess.

So then, dear friend, hold tight to your bias.
Ignore any sense of cooperation.
And remember that those who have
the strongest opinions
are the ones who have
thought the least
about them.

Keep justifying your familiarity.
Keep hating what you don’t understand.
And keep not trying to understand.
Keep yelling.
Keep defending your inherited positions
with your cold hands gripping
with masked uncertainty
the cold steel of your mental rifle.

Keep recklessly paralyzing what might be helpful
for the sake of your agenda.
Keep informing your uninformed absolutes
because the world would be so much better
if we were all
just like you.

If we were all
as enlightened as you.

If we could just see
what you see.

But let’s not talk about what you fail to see.
So that we can ensure nothing good will come of this.

Be ignorant.
Be hostile.
Be disinterested in whatever you might not know 
so long as nothing changes,
and nothing pushes you,
and you feel better about obviously being better.
Be a full cup that no new water can enter into.
Be so ingrained in what you 
were handed that you 
never look for anything else, that you 
blindly accept what is so clearly obvious to you,
that you don’t listen. 

For we often fear that maybe,
Just maybe,
We might be wrong.

So, I suppose, you just need to do nothing.
Don’t know the complex reality of the world.
Don’t search.
Don’t learn.
Don’t explore.
Don’t feel.

Don’t unfold yourself and, therefore, 
allow this global mass of life and its creatures to unfold.

Don’t see beyond your eyes…
…which is actually failing to see at all.

And everything will be alright.
Well, at least everything will remain in the mess that it is.

Live in that small world.
And you won’t be happy that you do.

Essays on Perspective, Disagreement, & Our Cultural Climate: