October 2015 musings on thought ownership

[Jonathan Barlow Gee]

Thoughts do not belong to thinkers. Thoughts pass through us on a universal field of energy waves, but our brains are gray matter - only antennae naturally evolved toward receiving these origin-less, all-pervasive transmissions. Some thoughts cling around certain brains more easily than to others, and these form covalent, molecular bonds between individuals into groups or philosophical "schools."

It is said, "you are what you do" and not "you are what you think." If an original idea occurs to one person, it is unknown (unless by serendipity) to anyone else but them; they therefore (often) feel compelled to successfully communicate their original idea to another person or to other people.

If the idea is for a practical, useful tool, it can be made by rearranging present physical elements immediately. If the idea is "impractical," for an as-of-yet untestable hypothesis or purely theoretical, it can still form a new philosophical "school" if records are left of it and it is found a worthy "ideal."

Therefore it is said, "those who can, do; those who can't, teach;" but it should be added, "those who can't teach, criticize." At certain historical points, it becomes more difficult to overcome contemporary personal critics and successfully communicate an original idea, and so the idea is forgotten and said to "fall on deaf ears."

Were it not for the multi-national Delian League establishing the political model later followed by Roman Republicanism's expansion into the Roman Empire and then its de-politicizing and rebranding as a religion to form Roman Catholicism, the ideals of the "golden age" Greek philosophers would have much more rapidly inspired more people in "western civilization" to develop machine technologies much sooner than the 20th century "industrial revolution," and there would have been no intellectual "Dark Age" during European feudalism. The intervention between the discovery of the "atom" and the manufacturing of the "atomic bomb" elapsed only over the last entire aeon because of the story of Atlantis, described as Egyptian by Plato, being adopted as the apocryphal "book of Enoch" by the Torah scribes at Qumran as an authentically Hebrew scripture as well. In this story, Atlantis was destroyed (in the flood) because they had implemented manufacturing technologies taught to them, according to the myth, by the "fallen angels," a later term for "alien gods." Because the "nefilim" of the city of "Enoch" had built up "civilization" as such, they were destroyed in the flood. The moral of this was simple: do not cultivate the technologies of advanced civilization. Hence, the "Dark Ages."

Nowadays, people patent or copyright their ideas so that they will not be stolen from them by other people, who could then claim these ideas as their own. In doing so, they apparently miss the realization that they, as well as their competitors, will then be required to merely rent back their ideas once they have been registered by the patent or copyright offices from these organizations. If their competitors have more money than the idea's original inventor, they will simply buy the rights to the patent or copyright from these offices and, as sole exclusive owners, they can then decide which technologies to invest their resources in further developing and which they will not. Thus, the "free energy" designs of Nikola Tesla, once patented, could be purchased by his personal enemy JP Morgan and, effectively, defunded in favor of Morgan's partnering with Dupont energy, a company providing depleting fossil fuels as a power-source for steel industry manufactured automobiles designed by Henry Ford. The result of this business maneuver by Morgan then is the "peak oil" panic humanity is undergoing now, which, had Tesla's designs been invested in rather than Dupont's, we could have easily avoided.

"Critical thinking" requires us to actively participate in contemplating the nature and substance of a given subject matter. If we read a book and it does not inspire us to agree with its premises in general, but to disagree with its findings in specific, or to want to amend or correct its wording, or to seek to improve upon its content in some original way unique to us as a reader, then the work we have read is taken in as merely "data" of "information," without being critically ascertained as "true" or "false" by the frontal lobes of our brains. Without weighing such data by the light of critical thinking, and without applying our own motives, reasons and logical reasoning to the content, we accept the information as "crystal clear," self-evident, indisputable and irrefutable. However, the result of being "open to channel" this quantity of information amounts to "brain-washing," because the less we critically assess the information we are receiving, the less we are weighing it by logic on the scales of "true" or "false," the more passively we merely accept our surroundings, and the more we are, ultimately, "brain-washed" into docile, compliant obedience. It is easier to slip from a position of "critical thinking" into a condition of being "brain-washed" than it is to move from a position of being "brain-washed" into a condition defined more by "critical thinking."