The greatest achievement of mind is memory. Through the use of memory we are able to learn and upon that resides the entirety of human history and everything we may become. But there is an inherent fascism in the way in which the mind learns. Because to the mind learning is all part-and-parcel of survival and when it learns its keys in what it learns as essential to our existence, and as if to underline the fact, we are left with many ‘facts’ we learn as children that become to us a second home, the ideas we most readily feel comfortable in.
Those of us who leave behind the ideas of childhood are truly using mind in its unique capacity to divine the truth from the myth.
Amongst the ideas the mind overlays upon us as we grow is a series of beliefs – that our surroundings are understood and therefore safer than anywhere else in the world, that our country is more homogeneous to us than other countries and therefore they are alien, that our parents politics must be right, that family assumptions must be more acceptable to us than other families’ assumptions and that what we have inherited as the forms and means of living must be followed because they work.
We default to what we know.
We should default to questioning. ‘Why?’ is the whole of science and the whole of wisdom and our only future.