Remember from Part One that common sense is just collective wisdom. Collective wisdom, in turn, is a bunch of people that have had the same wisdom poured from the same pitcher INDIVIDUALLY into their empty glasses.
Only some people don´t receive the wisdom. This is because their glass has a lid on it. We call this lid…
ARROGANCE
Arrogance usually comes about in this way. A person with an empty glass gets a sample-sized pour from a good pitcher. They taste and see that it is good. Then the person with the pitcher offers to fill their glass. Instead of accepting, however, the arrogant person says, “No, I´m good,” and slaps a lid on their half-full glass.
They could have acquired more knowledge, but they shut themselves off. Instead, they zealously protect the incomplete knowledge they do have as if to say, “My water is better than YOUR water.”
Nope, still thirsty.
If you did this with an actual glass of water, two things would eventually happen. First, over time, the water in your glass would get stale. Second, with the lid on your glass, you can´t even drink the stale water that you have. So, you get thirsty again. Even worse, you can´t get any fresh water with the lid on your glass either.
In the same way, clinging desperately to incomplete knowledge makes your mind stagnant. Face it—the world is going to progress whether you do or not. If your knowledge is at a standstill, it is actually going backward. If ever there was a time when the arrogant person DID have superior knowledge, it doesn´t stay that way for long.
Worse still, the arrogant person is incapable of obtaining any new knowledge to supplant the old as long as he has the lid clamped down on the glass of his mind. So, the arrogant person becomes as thirsty as he was when he was ignorant.
The key difference, however, is that the ignorant person knows that he is thirsty, will seek out a new pitcher, and is prepared to RECEIVE. The arrogant person, on the other hand, refuses to admit his thirst, refuses to remove the lid that is keeping his old knowledge contained, and is therefore unable to receive.
As such, the state of the arrogant man becomes worse than the state of the ignorant man.
Completely Empty Glasses
There is a state that is worse still than arrogance.
At least the arrogant man has had a taste of knowledge at some point. There are those who have never taken the lid off their empty glasses at all. These people are utterly devoid of knowledge and not in the least interested in obtaining any. As such, they are not worthy of such an elegant-sounding title as “ignorant” or “arrogant.” Let us therefore simply call them…
STUPID
The stupid person will walk into the tree EVERY time. You can tell him not to. You can show him the line of people with unbusted faces. You can give him a self-help book called “Build a Better Life by Not Walking into Trees.” You can slap him purple and scream, “DON´T WALK INTO THE TREE, YOU IDIOT! YOU´RE GOING TO BUST YOUR FACE!!!”
And he will walk into the tree. Every…. stinking…time.
No matter how good the stuff in your pitcher is, ain´t nuthin´ getting in those empty glasses. The lid´s on, and it´s not coming off. If you try to pour knowledge or wisdom into those empty glasses, not only will you not achieve your goal, you´re also going to make a mess in the process. You might have better luck trying to teach a cow to juggle eggs.
See, here´s the thing about lids.
You can´t remove someone else´s. You can only remove your own.
Too often, educated people try to reason with stupid people and then they wonder why the stupid person doesn´t say, “Gee, I never thought of it that way. I guess I will walk around the tree!”
Walking around the tree is a choice you must make for yourself. You can´t make someone else walk around the tree.
The reason you can´t remove a lid with logic and reason is that logic and reason didn´t put the lid there in the first place. Pride is the clamp that holds the lid on a glass that isn’t full. Pride is what makes you think your knowledge is better, and pride is what keeps you from getting any smarter than you are right now.
Only humility can remove the lid. The only way you can position yourself to fill up your glass is to take off your own lid.
Even God can´t fix stupid.
So this I say and solemnly testify in [the name of] the Lord [as in His presence], that you must no longer live as the heathen (the Gentiles) do in their perverseness—in the folly, vanity and emptiness of their souls and the futility—of their minds. Their moral understanding is darkened and their reasoning is beclouded. [They are] alienated (estranged, self-banished) from the life of God—with no share in it. [This is] because of the ignorance—the want of knowledge and perception, the willful blindness—that is deep-seated in them, due to their hardness of heart (to the insensitiveness of their moral nature). Ephesians 4:17-18 Amplified
The only thing more useless than a stupid person is a whole group of them. Unfortunately, we have tolerated mass stupidity for so long that it has morphed into something truly evil. Instead of a simple lack of knowledge, it has become an anti-knowledge movement. These people don´t have empty glasses; they have smashed their glasses on the ground.
Watch out for these people:
- Those who demonstrate ignorance, then condemn those with knowledge as being ignorant.
- Those who demonstrate an unwillingness or inability to learn, then condemn those who try to educate them as being arrogant.
- Those who demonstrate by their words and actions that they have no capacity for critical thought whatsoever, then refer to their own utter dearth of common sense as “logic and reason.”
- Those who, when confronted with actual knowledge, logic, reason, common sense, etc. not only reject it, but actually deride it as being “intolerant.” Or ‟racist” (but only if the topic has nothing to do with race).
- Those who (figuratively) walk into trees, continue to walk into trees, say that it is their right to walk into trees, celebrate their busted faces, attempt to influence other people to walk into trees, but then take it one step further by seeking to discredit, demonize, and suppress the voice of anyone who might suggest that it is a bad idea to walk into a tree.
- Those who tolerate, align themselves with, endorse, or even (God help us) VOTE for anyone covered under 1-5 above.
These are the people who have rocketed past stupid to the realm of the irretrievably insane. There is no hope for these people. For them, the truth is a lie, and a lie is the truth. Black is white, up is down. They destroy everything they touch, then blame someone else (usually Donald Trump) for the results. They delight in the destruction of established traditions and sacred values. They seek the complete ruin of anyone who doesn´t think like them (i.e. anyone who thinks at all).
Empty glasses are the devil’s playground.
It isn´t that they don´t know what they´re doing; it is that they have no connection to humanity whatsoever. The Message paraphrase of the verses from Ephesians above cuts right to the point:
And so I insist—and God backs me up on this—that there be no going along with the crowd, the empty-headed, mindless crowd. They´ve refused for so long to deal with God that they´ve lost touch not only with God but with reality itself. They can´t think straight anymore.
These people are dangerous, and they are to be avoided at all costs. I cannot emphasize this strongly enough. They have no conscience, no boundaries, no sense of right and wrong, no comprehension of the consequences of their actions, and no sympathy for the victims of those actions.
So naturally, we put them in charge. How´s that working out for us, America?
(OK, I need to go take my blood pressure pill. I´ll wrap this up with a more positive spin later this weekend. Be sure to click on Free Newsletter to be the first to know when Part Three drops.)
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