Rightly knowin' junk

Everyone in life has goals. Some of these goals are grand and ambitious: to become rich, to travel into space, to be the best hockey player/singer/log roller/whatever you can be, and so on. For some of those less fortunate, the only ultimate goal they have is to actually stay alive.

It's these goals and ambitions that further the progress of humanity and the evolution of our species. If it weren't for visionary men like Copernicus, Edison, Einstein, and so on, where would our world be? If it weren't for great, strong-minded individuals to blaze the trail humanity could still be stuck living in caves or blindly following the ancient teaching of some tribalistic book of fairy tales (sadly, many parts of the world still live this way)

But despite the great thinkers among us, it doesn't take a genius to see that the world is completely fucked up right now. Maybe I'm still stuck in the mood of humanity negativity after reading Watchmen, but for a graphic novel that book makes a lot of damn good points. There are a lot of fucked up things in this world...greed, corruption, injustice, ignorance. All of these things only exist to embrace the individual, instead of the species.

One of the problems with our world is that the goals that so many of us have are just like that. Wanting to be rich, wanting a bigger house, wanting to be famous...these goals are materialistic and, for the most part, don't do any service towards any greater good.

What people need to do is shift from materialistic goals to psychological ones. The first step towards this is focusing on knowledge.

Behind happiness and health, respectively, knowledge should be the thing that people strive for the most. Ancient Greek philosophers used to value knowledge as one of the most valuable things a man could work towards...where has humanity gone wrong?

Knowledge isn't seen as important as it should be anymore. Looking at the world right now it's easy to see numerous examples of where stupidity and ignorance flourish where they should have been immediately fixed.

People care more about Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and other useless celebrities than they do local politics. George Bush got elected TWICE, and Sarah Palin, a woman that didn't know whether Africa was a country or a continent (when do kids learn this, like grade 3?) almost became the vice president of the most powerful country in the world, and she'll likely be running for the presidency in 2012. Some Islamic nations ignorantly base their entire societies around the Koran, a book which is easily shown as a crock of shit when studying it critically and comparing it with the rest of the world. The Israel/Palestine conflict is made up two sides killing each other in an unending, uncompromising cycle over a fucking chunk of dirt...doesn't anyone else see the insanity of that?!?

It feels to me like some people take PRIDE in being fucking ignorant and stupid about the world around them, and are blissfully happy as long as they have their TVs, toasters and steel-belted radials to comfort them. Don't people feel like there's more in this life than that?

Just think of how much better the world would be right now if everyone was always trying to learn more, to expand their worldy knowledge.

Hundreds of years ago this could be excused considering the way human cultures were, but now with the Communication Age coming into effect and the amazing progressions that have been made in technology there's no excuse for ignorance anymore. It's so easy for anyone to learn anything...all it takes most of the time is a simple Google search, which apparently is too much for a lot of people.

This term has been thrown around a lot lately, but I do strongly believe that the world needs a Second Renaissance. The human race is capable of so much, but in order to achieve anything truly meaningful we need to reinstate the importance of education

I'll admit that I'm no genius. Hell, I'm not even the best student in my program. But at the same time I do what I can to learn, when I can. I truly value the importance of knowledge and am always looking to learn more, whether it's in class or even on my own time surfing the internet. There's so much knowledge out there and I know I'll never attain it all, but I'm sure as heck going to try and learn as much as I can.

Hopefully one day more people will reevaluate their goals and go back to valuing intelligence. After all, it doesn't take a genius to know that there are problems in the world that need fixing.