"Try not to be a gullible country girl in the big city of ideas, or you are likely to fall for all the smooth-talking counterfeit spiels, and end up with a lot of illegitimate notions you can't support."
So true, often we succumb to the placebo effect. Ideas, notions, theories are so personal that it is always hard to live by and adopt with someone elses. Each one of us have to search for our empyrean.
The problem is believing things that flatter your self-image, preconceptions, prejudices or other needs, without thinking enough or checking them out: accepting things at face value, not exercising such critical faculties as you have. There is certainly a tendency among Americans, if not humans in general, to approve of "faith" and "dreams" and "beliefs" and to think the word "critical" is a put-down and "rational" a turn-off, that "skeptic" is the same as "cynic", and to equate "doubt" with weakness. Americans, if not humans in general, prefer the fool rushing in to the angel fearing to tread, the "native hue of resolution" to the "pale cast of thought".
The trouble with life is that it usually takes a whole lifetime to learn how to live it.
# posted by SV @ 7/31/2003 09:54:00 AM