Human Activity

I was wondering what makes people like whatever it is they like. What makes them interested in whatever it is that they are interested in, I wondered? What factors are involved here, I asked myself. What is the mechanism? How does it function within us? I’m a bit of a people-watcher you see. Bit of an amateur psychologist. I like to try to work stuff out for myself. Observing folk going about their everyday business. Keeping an eye open. Paying attention. Not falling for the official propaganda. What they tell you in schools and universities. You can see people being interested in stuff all the time, particularly in shops and shopping centres of course. You can see their eyes darting to and fro, first looking this way and then looking that way. The eyes move almost independently of the person, or so it seems to me. So my observation – for what it’s worth – is that there is some independent factor at work there being the scenes, causing the person concerned to be interested in this and interested in that. Here’s the curious thing though – when these independent factors’ operate independently of us, as they do, causing us to take an interest, all of a sudden, in something out there, we invariably think that this impulse is coming from us. We assume that we genuinely are interested, rather than being mechanical manipulated to perceive that we are interested when actually we’re not. Of course, when you actually see this it puts a totally different perspective on human activity. How could it do otherwise? Just take a look around you, armed with this awareness, and notice the difference it makes in your perception of everyday human activity. The different is absolutely astonishing, I would say. I’m personally flabbergasted. Instead of ‘normal human behaviour’ we see the phenomenon of poor uncomprehending persons being jerked around helplessly in the most undignified fashion possible by the mechanical impulses that are busy governing their lives. Look here, say the impulses, look there. Think this, say the impulses, think that. Say this, say that. Blindly, obediently, we do so, thinking that we are somehow expressing our own inalienable freedom in this way. Proud we are to express our own inalienable freedom – both proud and defiant, sure of ourselves in every way. “There,” I say, to an invisible opponent with a flourish of self-assured activity, “Take that you swine! As you can see, I am expressing my own inalienable freedom. As you can see, I am living my own life…” Such is my life therefore – an endless exercise in self-deception. Such is our life – for you must not think you are excused. You must not think that you are the exception. Such is our life, this sad, pitiable mockery of freedom. Not only are we proud, we are arrogant. We are unforgivably arrogant. We are terribly arrogant. Great indeed is our arrogance and it will cost us dear. It will cost us dear indeed. So very dear. There is no fool like an arrogant fool I think to myself portentiously. No fool like an arrogant fool, no fool like an arrogant fool, no fool like an arrogant fool. But is it really me thinking this, I wonder then, or is this just the old mechanical impulses leading me around by the nose, spinning their endless webs of deception around me as they always do?

 

 

 

 

 

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