Wednesday 24 November 2010

Having a Cause


Having a 'cause' reminds me of those science experiments all those years ago at school...the kind where you'd have the hypothesis given to you by the teacher, the outline of a method, and you knew, despite all the 'dressing up' of the task as a real 'experiment' that you would fail if you had not proved your hypothesis by the time you came to conclude the experiment.  So, in other words, there was no experimental or ideological freedom.  Having a Cause from the beginning, knobbled you at every stage.
People who have 'causes' as adults are similarly blinkered and one-track in their direction and ideas. They have their Cause and so there is no room for anything else.  At the end of this scale are the Extremists or Fundamentalists, not necessarily religious. Their view and views are so honed, so refined, so narrowed, they exist rather than live.  It is a living death because their life's work is done, they know everything; they need entertain no doubt, no questions.

They are everywhere.  I suspect just as common at the school gate as in government, and both frighten me. Every one of us has influence, a politician may have influence over policies, and a managing director over his employees, but is this any less insidious than the teacher over their class of young minds, the parent over the child, the chatterbox in the corner shop, or the chap vocal in the pub with his friends? We know the idea about the however-many-degrees of separation between every one of us, is it not reasonable to suspect that a person's influence over just one other can have unimaginable and far-reaching consequences?

If you have no Cause, you don't know where you're going, you can't pre-empt, and you don't know what might and might not be important, so you quietly pay attention to everything.

If you have a Cause, you risk knowing where you are going, knowing what you are going to say and conclude, before you even begin to speak, and that, my friends, is at best just an ignorant, uninteresting shadow existence, and at worst, a very dangerous thing.  

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