Vivacious and idealistic youths, they fancy themselves to be the vanguard of revolution against old ideas, stale conventions and archaic rules that restrict the freedom of men -- but are powerless before words. Words that stir the heart and speak to inner desires; cheap words made to sound fabulous, or worse; untruths twisted, endowed with the ring of truth! How easy it is to take these all in! How convenient it is to bask unquestioningly in the wisdom of great men who never existed! How blissful it is to be credulous in a world of attention-hungry liars!
Yet we are powerless, because it is words that have made us. In the comfort of home, we plow the world's seas with the words of others, a world with as much variety as there are people. Our thoughts are expanded, our opinions are formed, our worldviews are broadened, yes, but are they based on the truth? How do we trust these very hands that wrote the accounts? What are they getting at? What are we to say no to them?
In his first RCIA session, Father Richards has asked: How do you know that what you have read is true? Were you there when history happened, when they did the experiments, when great ideas are put to practice? How can you say that something is true just because you read it from a book? How do you justify that belief?
It could turn out that our differences of opinion say less about ourselves, but more about what books we happened to have pick up, or what people we exchange rumours with. There is little ground, after all, for a completely rational discernment - any discernment must come from gut feeling.
The Chinese bus drivers had the cheek to hold their strike in Singapore, where they would be breaking the law. Supporters for a harsher punishment to the miscreants quoted that official pathways of complaint are always available; their detractors retort that the pathways are good as f-ckall. Who is in the right? What are we to say? Did we try to manoeuver the system ourselves? Can we be sure that our journalists, bloggers and politicians know what they are saying? No! Everything is hearsay, and every discernment is by instinct. No argument can be backed up with conviction, because it is my instinct against yours. There is no satisfactory way of resolution for arguments like these, save for a rather spectacular duel.
How does one live with this? How does one face a world of lies and see truth?
