Is Thought Immoral?

Conversely, Taoism or Zen can appear to despise thought, but this is a mistake I think, in that they practise to dissolve mind/body, to swallow that binary or to step outside of it. In some sense from that perspective certain forms of Thought are tantamount to immoral, or more properly they are self-deceiving.

Thinking to deny Thought is doomed to failure, innit?

a) when does someone become an intellectual? the passage above is spoken by someone talking to a friend who unlike him, went to university abroad and came back full of theories and revolutionary zeal. the speaker, unable to follow the trend of the towns young men to go to university, remains behind working at a sawmill. what if those thinking are "the people"?

b) what is blood and soil ideology, and why is it a quick step between believing that reality lies in the lives of "the people"?

c) how have thoughts and theories reduced the torments of makinds existence?

d) do those "thinking" presume to imagine that they are able to see beyond what they can see from their own circumstances"?

by "thinking" in all my posts, i am referring to a particular type of thought, i am not "despising the mind", but am wondering whether the sort of "thought" i indulge in, which is fanciful, free wheeling query is worthwhile and if it isnt "self deceiving" and in being so, can lead he individual into dangerous territory.

this passage is taken from a book about bosnia. the author is describing the debates of a new class of intelligentsia back from vienna and sarajevo, who return to their town full of new ideas about national self identity amongst other things. the implication i drew from this chapter is it was these such circumstances that gavrilo princep came to carry out his deed a year later.

b) Blood and Soil is the Nazi appeal to a "natural" truth which precedes thinking. In this mind-set Races are natural organisms, not products of Racial thinking. The embodiment of the Race is in The People, or "the masses" in Andric's quote above. I don't believe in the Masses or the People, they both seem to be perspectives designed to remove humanity from individuals.

c) Thoughts and theories have produced technological and social advances that have reduced some kinds of human suffering. It would be facile to suggest they were panaceas, but more facile to suggest they haven't reduced the torments of mankind's existence. (Mankind again. Homogeneous lumpenmenschen.)

d) All useful thought - by useful I mean the kind of thought in point c - has to, in some way, posit an ability to see beyond the individual's perspective. The alternative is solipsism, which is an infinite full stop.

All thought can be "self deceiving", maybe it all is. As a crude generalisation, I would say that people who believe that fanciful, free-wheeling query is worthwhile have been on the side of creating less suffering throughout history. National Identity might well be an idea that's had horrific consequences, but it might also be an historically necessary idea, a staging post between more oppressive and less oppressive societies. You could argue that Princip's action was a result of failing to think freewheelingly enough, of adopting this stance that privileges action above thought. The same would certainly be true of his 1990s counterparts.

"in life there is nothing solved, or which can easily be solved, or even has any chance of being solved at all." - I'd suggest the fact that we can sit and discuss this thought here and now is evidence that it's false.

HERETICON
https://medium.com/@foundersfund/hereticon-2bb9b23928d5

This May 2020 we’re hosting HERETICON, a conference for thoughtcrime. Here’s why:

From Galileo to Jesus Christ, heretical thinkers have been met with hostility, even death, and vindicated by posterity. That ideological outcasts have shaped the world is an observation so often made it would be bereft of interest were the actions of our society not so entirely at odds with the wisdom of the point: troublemakers are essential to mankind’s progress, and so we must protect them. But while our culture is fascinated by the righteousness of our historical heretics, it is obsessed with the destruction of the heretics among us today. It is certainly true the great majority of heretical thinkers are wrong. But how does one tell the difference between “dangerous” dissent, and the dissent that brought us flight, the theory of evolution, Non-Euclidean geometry? It could be argued there are no ‘real’ heretics left. Perhaps we’ve arrived at the end of knowledge, and dissent today is nothing more than mischief or malice in need of punishment. But be the nature of our witches unclear, it cannot be denied we’re burning them. The question is only are our heretics the first in history who deserve to be burned?

We don’t think so.

We believe dissent is essential to the progressive march of human civilization. We believe there’s more in science, technology, and business to discover, that it must be discovered, and that in order to make such discovery we must learn to engage with new — if even sometimes frightening — ideas. So:

Imagine a conference for people banned from other conferences. Imagine a safe space for people who don’t feel safe in safe spaces. Over three nights we’ll feature many of our culture’s most important troublemakers in the fields of knowledge necessary to the progressive improvement of our civilization. Topics including but not limited to: biological self-determination (modification, design), geo-engineering, transhumanism, the abolition of college, transgressive media, sex, the softer side of doomsday prepping, the nature of conspiracy, the benefits of starvation, constitutional monarchy (what?!), revisionist demography, immortality, drag culture, and building nations. After dark, on the top floor of our hotel, in a hidden room plastered in newspaper clippings of sightings and secret bases, there may be a talk or two on UFOs and literally a séance. Let’s get weird.

i think thiel is involved?