[from my myspace] An Idealist Confesses

[intro]
I used myspace.com blogs for the past few years for my randomly-spaced blogging. Therefore, I am jumpstarting my blog here with most of those blogs, lightly edited.
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Original posting: Wednesday, August 02, 2006, 3:28 PM
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I was going to call this "Confessions of an Idealist," but I decided that was too wordy. Obviously, I did not use that.

So what is this thing I've temporarily dubbed myself for the sake of this Rant: "idealism"? According to dictionary.com (this is a great site! I have it bookmarked so that if one of my friends IM's me a big word, I can just quickly--and without their knowing--go to this site and learn the big word's definition and seem all smart), idealism in philosophical terms is "the philosophical theory that ideas are the only reality."

Now that some basics are laid out, I can begin confessing. About what, you might ask? You shall soon find out. Either that, or I'll ramble over nothing until I suddenly and spontaneously decide to stop rambling and realize that I've said nothing and won't do anything to change it.

However, luckily for you, that's not what I'm going to do. I'm just going to make it seem like I'm doing that.

Anyway, before I delve into idealist confessions, I shall first dissect the topic I've given this Rant: "An Idealist Confesses." I chose this topic title because I have some idealist ideas that, if possible to make a reality, would make the world a happier place.

Okay, I know what you're thinking; well, I know what I think you know what you're thinking. I'm not going to be one of those "War is bad! We need World Peace!!!" advocates. I think war is healthy and necessary to balance human nature. Instead, I'm aiming my ideas more toward individual-ish type things, such as greed, education, kindness, and so forth.

First off, we should just get rid of money. It centralizes human want into a single thing, heightening human greed. For example, if human want is divided among shelter, power, food, entertainment, and land, then how much Want is allotted to each thing would differ dramatically from person to person. However, because money can essentially gain any of these five things, Human Want can simply be funneled into money and less energy is wasted and less decision-making (among where to place Want) needs to be made.

Of course, I'm going to be an economics major, so we can't take away money because it's pretty essential to the field of economics.

As far as education goes, current education is just wrong. Sure, the alphabet and the number system are quite useful, but what if they didn't exist? People wouldn't automatically recogize a slender circle as the letter "O" or as the number "0." An X wouldn't be taken as a letter. A figure eight wouldn't be, well, an eight. Seemingly random things would have immediate recognition and nothing else can be seen from the same random assortment of items. I'm not sure exactly where I'm going with this, but the point of it is that human-made recognition is flawed. I would elaborate, but I haven't eaten much today, so I'm uber hungry.

Altruism. Kindness. Generosity. Paradoxes they are. Altruism basically means selfless assistance. Unfortunately, society has ingrained into our heads that helping others and helping the needy and so on is what we should do. It has become an unspoken societal obligation. Altruism cannot exist in contemporary society, unless basic human societal ideas are altered.

Okay, so my hunger is yelling at me for some food, so I'll cease this Rant. But yeah, many flaws in human nature, so on, so forth, et cetera, et cetera, blah blah blah.... Can't really fix it unless entire human history is changed.... Okay, I'm done now.