i'm currently taking an ethics and morality class at meramec and it's probably the most interesting class i've ever taken. my professor is this philosophy connoisseur of sorts and is extremely intelligent. maybe too intelligent for his own good, but regardless...my professor's level of intelligence is not what i want to blog about. tonight in class we talked a lot about the rights of people...what rights mean, what kind of rights there are, what makes a person entitled to said rights. human rights is a very thought provoking topic so it was hard to just listen to what he had to say and not let my mind wander but i soon became enthralled with what he was talking about...by this time in the conversation, i could tell he was about to move on to abortion because we had read about it for homework and i could feel my body tense up. "here we go," i thought. "some liberal, academic view of abortion. this is really going to piss me off." but as i kept listening, my body loosened up and the tension ceased...here was this intelligent, rational, person talking about abortion in the most objective way possible. he was going over readings, stating what was wrong with the prolife AND prochoice arguments, and i was listening to him dissect all these arguments. and i realized that i rarely, and i mean rarely, question what i'm hearing...what someone's telling me. isn't that ridiculous and so dumb and ignorant of me!? i mean come on, you can't just go around believing everything you hear is true. and i began to feel my body tensing up again but not because i was afraid of the heated discussion the topic of abortion could be a catalyst for, but because i realized something about myself...something i don't like. and i guess something i've always been at least somewhat aware of but never has it hit me like it did tonight; i trust way too much sometimes. and one could argue that that's a good thing but i beg to differ...especially thinking about all the times i've had complete trust in the word and deed of others and have been wronged or hurt in some way.
at one point, i stopped thinking about what an annoying and potentially threatening trait i had just discovered about myself, and i heard my professor say something. it was simple, logical, and completely what i needed to hear. "in order for someone to lie successfully, the person being lied to needs to expect the truth." this is exactly right. and this is why people have been able to successfully lie to me so often...i expect the truth, and nothing less than the truth. now i'm not saying that you shouldn't trust people because you definitely should. but only if they've shown they can be trusted. you can't just let whoever feed whatever crap they want to you and trust that it's true...if you did that, you wouldn't be forming your own opinion about things, and that would be depriving yourself of personal growth. and i guess that's why i was so angry about the realization i had come to about my sloppy trust in others; i had trusted the word of others to the point where i was at risk of stifling my personal growth by believing what others say, simply because they're saying it. as much as i want to, i can't just trust that everything anyone within reason says to me is truth. but, i can take what they say into consideration and develop my own way of finding the truth.
i am a believer. it's part of who i am. but i have to be continuously aware that even though i would love to believe the best in people, i'm not always my best, so i can't expect others to be as well. people lie and make up things and push their opinions on people...i can say (with my tail between my legs) that i've been guilty of doing all of those things. it's not that i'm now a huge skeptic who's never going to trust in people or believe what people are telling me is truth, but i am going to quit using my trust in people as an excuse not to pursue discovering truth for myself.
i love classes that make me think, and i have a feeling there's going to be a lot more ranty, annoying posts about this class. sorry i'm not sorry!
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