Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Stuck in the Loop: Pragmatic Idealism

When I was a young child, my perspective on life was very limited. Like most of us, I was focused on the things that made me happy. Because I was fortunate enough to have been planted in the socioeconomic dynamic that I was, I was able to exist in both a pragmatic and an idealistic paradigm. In some cases, a child is able to do what is necessary, and that necessity is the achievement of a kind of blind happiness. Adulthood turns this paradigm into a negative feedback loop for people like myself. Necessity as dictated by society does not make me happy, and yet, I am forced to engage in the loop in order to achieve some sort of happiness.

I continue to find it unacceptable that just because society deems it so, I must engage in what I consider ridiculous "work," primarily because that which I consider "work" is distinct in a very important way from the orthodoxy. Much like my youthful self, I am eager to merge the two paradigms, for happiness would just then be around the corner. When happiness becomes the necessity by virtue of achieving both goals, that is the both the ideal and the pragmatic working in tandem. I am not content to be a man of specific talent... a robotic self serving some external agenda by becoming locked into a mechanistic function. My utmost desire is to engage in what Emerson called Man Thinking, where the dictates of my actions serve and are served by the rigor of both my intellect and my activities as a human being in society. Society does not desire this sort of thing; indeed, this antiquated vocation has been forced into the abyss of academia; back into the underground corridors beneath the ivory towers; where above, those who desired something similar as myself find themselves shuffling about in the same mechanistic fashion as everyone else in the capitalistic drudgery. Yet, I find myself leaning in that direction, in spite of the hypocrisy afoot, because there is nothing else in the society that rewards one with the necessary dollar for something akin to Man Thinking.

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