I just got back from the graduation ceremony. After four years, this is my second degree, and first in pure philosophy. (I did a three-year course, majoring in philosophy and linguistics, and this year was my honours year in philosophy.) I sat down with my granddad with a special whisky that I bought with some of my scholarship money: Lagavulin 16. We are talking about life in general when he said something that stuck with me. He told a story about a warship approaching another ship. The captain is busy drinking rum or something. The person steering the ship says to the captain they need to change course by 15 degrees to the left. The captain shouts and says the other ship should move 15 degrees. This ship is not moving. After radioing in, the captain hears again that they need to change course by 15 degrees. The captain in his drunken mood shouts this ship is not changing course. The person shouts from the top to the captain, it is the lighthouse they cannot move. The moral of the story is that you just need to change your perspective on doing something sometimes. Life is not constant, life is full of decisions you need to make, and sometimes you need to make some decisions that you don't want to make which you need to make.

This got me thinking. How many things do we do because it is just how we do them, or we do them because that is how we were taught how to do it? How deep are some things we believe that actually withholds us from doing things? I will not read this book because I was told not to read it. Or we can think of a different situation. It is more subtle. We can call it structural. Some people are forever forbidden from doing things because their own minds cannot break through the self-build walls in their minds. This is something very serious in most countries. Most people are stuck behind the wall of preconceived ideas about certain things. I will not eat this food because it is linked to these people. We forgot how to think for ourselves.

The Diagnosis

Let us try and diagnose our current times. We are firstly stuck with the problem of making a blanket statement. I cannot say something that all people will fall under. But one can try. Some will differ from me, but most people don't know how to think for themselves. This needs some explanation. There is an ongoing debate between free will supporters and determinism supporters. The basic idea is we either have free will (i.e. we are free to do anything), or we are determined to do certain things (i.e. things in the past influences your current choice, i.e. no free will). This diagnosis doesn't say anything about if we have free will or not, but that it is built on the backbone of the arguments. You can stand in front of two pieces of cake: chocolate or fruit. Do you have free will to choose whichever you like? Some would say no. You may be hungry and you may be craving chocolate. You may have had fruit cake yesterday, so today you want chocolate. You may not be that free.

Now trying to bring this into the argument. We are told certain things when we grew up. Don't swim after you ate, don't do that thing. Don't hang out with those friends. There are countless examples. These things, if left unquestioned, will brew into something that will block future events. If you are told to exclude certain people because of their political views, or skin colour, or language, and you don't question these ideas, you will probably believe them. If you will believe these things, they influence your choices. But if you question it, if you start to think about it, it will change you. You will change course. You will no longer see people lower than you based on their skin colour or their language. You will see this is something untrue, a lie that you believed.

The ship that is your life, your mind, your ideas, may be on course towards a place that you want to go. There might be an object in the way (like false beliefs). You need to change course, get away from the danger and back to the open sea. Changing course may be a good thing. This is only a piece of a bigger post. I am working on the ideas that need to go into it. Any feedback will be great. I am also thinking about doing something like this in my masters in philosophy next year: where our ways of thinking need to change to accommodate our new and strange world.