Puck on... Understanding

But come now, am I not preaching to the choir?  Don’t’ you know this already?  Haven’t you looked at society now and again and thought, “no one gets it”?  That people just never learn?  The masses follow fads, which are easily replaceable and never an improvement.  Politicians break their promises, which are usually the same promises they’ve always made and always broken.  Wall Street invests in “bubbles” when they know they will pop because they always do.  Nothing ever changes.  Nothing has ever changed.  You know this, don’t you?

Yes.

And I bet you’ve thought, “if only they would listen, if only they knew.”  But they won’t listen and they probably already know; if they didn’t they could learn, if they wanted to.  But they don’t want to.  And that’s key as well.  Humanity’s desires.  It’s their driving force.  Really, the only thing that shapes their societies, their lives.

What they want?

Yes.  You only get what you want.  If you didn’t want it, you wouldn’t have pursued it to begin with.

But lots of people get things they don’t want.  Disease, heartache, death.

Oh, let’s be careful.  Certainly, no one in their right mind would say they wanted those things, (and I’ll pass up the quip about “right mind” here), but trust me, they do.  Oh, they don’t know they do.  They think they want something else.  They think that they’ll get something else.  More often than not, they simply don’t know what they’re asking for.  But just as often, they know exactly what they want or, to put it better, exactly what it will cost to get what they want, and yet they still ask for it.  What else can that mean but that they want those things as well?  All get what they want, so few like it when they do.

People don’t understand the consequences of their actions, their desires.

Haven’t you been listening?  Of course, they understand.  It’s not for lack of understanding or knowledge.  They know.  I can tell them.  History can tell them.  Can you honestly tell me there is some choice that exists for humans today that someone hasn’t already faced before?  Your age is not so unique.  They know.  They don’t care.  They ignore the knowledge, as I told you, shirk the wisdom that is handed out freely, in favor of their own or something else’s.  Or better yet, seek to debunk and disprove the wisdom to begin with.  Because if you can do that, you don’t have to listen.

And that may be the biggest critique on your generation.  Whereas before men sought truth through argument, sought to find the right by refuting wrong; nowadays it’s completely the reverse.  You seek to muddle knowledge, to refute wisdom through argument, to discredit the right so that you may embrace the wrong.  Whereas your forbearers sought to free themselves from ignorance and lies, you seek to free yourselves from truth.