Think-Say-Do

Our ideas, words and actions define us in our surrounding.  However, it takes lots and lots of practice to get the three aligned in harmony.  Those who think this is easy to do, think twice. What we think, what we say and what we do start as inconsistent during childhood but as we grow older, we are expected to get them closer and closer by narrowing the distance between the three and through experience we should succeed eventually in unifying them. Once we achieve the unity among the three, we are consistent honorable people whom will be taken as a good example in our surrounding.  It is very common in our culture though to align at most two of the three and still preserve consistency in people's eyes.  Why is that?  Why is deceiving considered a survival technique?  Why do we confuse it with intelligence? Why is it OK to violate the harmony among the three and still be considered respectable people?  Guess what?

• If what you think and what you say, you don't do then you are a hypocrate.
• If what you think and what you do is not what you say then you are a deceptive person.
• If what you say and what you do is not what you have in mind, then you are either weak or abusive.
• If what you think is not what you say and what you do is not what you think and what you say then you lost the real sense of humanity.

  

A Nation of Diagonal Readers

Reading is listed under the interests or hobbies in almost every vitae I have encountered in Lebanon.    Do you know how many people have I met in the last four years who were interested in philosophy?  At many points, I felt stupid so I tried to read about the philosophers they mentioned and I got stuck for hours trying to understand one line of the definition of one's philosophical ideas.  How do all those people read a book about Heidegger in a week?  How can they understand Nietzsche's ideas in hours?  By the way, it is currently trendy to have Nietzsche as your favorite philosopher in Lebanon.  There has been a shift in the last decade from the admiration of Plato, Aristotle and Socrates; those guys are outdated.  You are only an intellect if you admire Nietzsche.   

In an effort to organize my thoughts, let me define reading.  "Reading is a complex process of decoding symbols in order to derive a meaning".   Once the meaning is derived, I don't believe it can be lost in a relatively short time.  However, talking to those geniuses, most of them are out of it.  Why is that?

We are diagonal readers or even worse, we are last page readers.  We are superficial readers who once we get one idea of what we read, we dwell on it.  We read one idea and then analyze it and talk about our analysis for hours thinking we got the point of the writer.  We are so smart, we do not have to read the rest.

If you don't like to read just admit it. Saying nothing due the lack of knowledge is way better than talking with the lack of the real understanding. Knowing a little from many things is good but it has to come after knowing a lot from one thing at least.  People admire and listen to those who talk with sense and one can only talk with sense about something if one knows it well.

I cannot wait for a device linked to a search engine that one can carry and it beeps every time somebody says something inaccurate.  I swear to you this machine will be playing symphonies as you sit with many people around here.  Worse than that, there is a common Lebanese quote: "Talking is tax free" translated from "El 7aki Ma 3li joumrouk".  This really reflect the sense of forgiveness that people have towards inaccurate speakers.  Forgiveness is great but not when the distortion of knowledge is concerned.  Knowledge is not show-off, it is a tool when combined with self-experience generates deep self-understanding and facilitates the understanding of the surroundings.  

Critical Thinking

An amazing tool for the survival of our species.  We can debate that without it, we would have been extinct.  For certain, it opened horizons for us to develop and to reshape our lives in its current form.   We are living  the age of thinkers and those who don't think cannot compete anymore.  It is the age where only the thinker can excel.  Come up with something new and you win.   Please give up the idea that memory is the greatest treasure.  It is a treasure only when it acts as a supporter to our critical thinking.  We are culturally programmed to use memory as the trash can of the difficult analysis.  Guess what, it is backfiring nowadays.  We are incapable of  producing originality cause it is way ahead of us. We need to run the rusted engines again.  We are not anymore impressed with those who memorize the capitals of the countries cause we can google them.   We got to think and think and yes it is hard.  Thinking is not exclusive to the educated, it should be the main tool in every profession  in order to develop that profession.

Our educational system is a memory based system with huge comprehension gaps.  Just listen to people saying that Lebanese education is so so strong, our kids excel abroad.  Maybe many of our kids excel abroad but thanks to their system and not ours.   

We have to start encouraging our kids to think alone.  Their dependency on us should be a decreasing sequence and not a monotonic behavior.  Encourage their sense of choice.  Try to avoid the "do this and do that" but get your way by giving them choices with consequences.  We got to teach our kids to memorize only what they understand cause then their solid base starts to build up.  Push our schools to rely less on memory and more on analysis.  We want future thinkers who think twice before they speak, who use emotions where it belongs and who can filter useless irrational conversations in addition to many other things that will for sure be obvious then.

A High Context Society

Our society is a high context society that loves sophistication and difficult expressions.  Watch our movies, listen to speeches or attend a play. Ten sentences can be said in one word, three scenes can be described in one scene.  Guys, great movies that made millions of dollars if not billions were based on a simple story, one or two thoughts the most per excellent commercial movies.  The days of sophistication are gone.  Difficult words are vanishing, spiced expressions are outdated, over dramatic gestures are not even funny anymore.   Why are we still stuck in this high context culture?  Is it because we are not used to say things directly?  Is it because we lack critical thinking so we try to fill our sentences with words waiting for the brain to continue the right thought?  Is it because we repeat what we hear and we think plagiarism is a smart tool?  Is it a culture of memorizing rather than thinking?  Is it all what I mentioned?