Coffee Shop Ideologues

Coffee shops seem to be breeding grounds for pseudo-religion, pseudo-science, and pseudo-history. On the one hand the table next to me represents about 2 conversations per day I’ll hear in a coffee shop about religion, history, and philosophy. Not a single accurate statement. Attributing Aristotle’s ideas to “mediaeval Roman Catholic scribes”, etc. Then you’ve got the pseudo-science guy who is handing me talk of reptilian brains, who must have read Dragons of Eden and made it his religion, because if you say “I don’t believe” he says you’re reptilian and aren’t in touch with your emotions, the cry of every ideological fascist who wants to force his view down your throat. He says there’s no such thing as objectivity, but when you disagree, you’re wrong – so apparently he doesn’t believe what he says – he just means no one but him has objectivity – everyone else is at the mercy of the subjective on the one hand, or his truth on the other. These types are just fundamentalists, even while they decry fundamentalism – they’re just the version of the day. They’d burn us at the stake as surely as any other rock-thrower. Then you’ve got the table of A.A. unitarians, who spend their time discussing how they’re trying to hold the line for all the people who just don’t ‘see’ – all the ignorant people. I guess I’d be one of those ignorant people, because I certainly don’t see, don’t plan on seeing, and would resist seeing to the point of death. Not to be left out is the ideology of the anti-ideologues – the reactionaries – these guys decry all ideology, not realizing they’re espousing one in the process. It’s easy to be ‘above’ all the ideologues when you don’t commit to anything, which is the equivalent to saying that having no thoughts is superior to having contradictory and factually incorrect thoughts. I don’t like either option. I don’t think a dead mind is better than a wasted one. But I do think that the chaos of mental contradictions, whether empty of content or full of it, is a particularly loathsome curse to heap upon oneself. The only thing worse seems to be to lack the intellectual tools to climb out of it. Being wrong or thoughtless is understandable, if you’re trying out different thought processes, but creating ideology because you just don’t care enough to discover whether it corresponds to reality is not only sloppy, but it’s intellectual suicide. How does someone who hasn’t read any real history decide what the “Catholic Church” did or did not “make up”? How does someone who reads a popular book of scientific theory make it the rubric for sorting out the rest of humanity? Since when did the world consist of people who can see and who can’t see, with the key to seeing being a young, inexperienced person who has been to a few A.A. meetings. In which meeting did the universe unfold and the cosmic insight was imparted? Or since when did knowing nothing about any of these things equal the things being unknowable? I like coffee shops, but I find them cesspools of belief. Belief is floating around like turds in a state fair porta potty, it’s as prevalent as dirty diapers in a Walmart parking lot. Mere belief. There are lots of beliefs, and you can’t argue with them, and you shouldn’t need to – “But you’re reptilian!” Yeah, yeah – and the moon is made of cheese, and little elves made my shoes, and so on. Yeah, I’m one of the inferior types, the unseeing ignorant, the reptiles – whatever the fuck that means. It’s one step away from “To the guillotine with these reptiles!” Belief. It’s a violence to the mind. I love coffee shops, but some times the violence is too much.

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