NOEMAYA

Who was Socrates? A historical figure? Perhaps, but only to those who cannot see beyond contingent appearances and instead reduce life to a collection of cells. And that’s the malady of our time: to stare at an image and see only individual pixels rather than the figure they’re designed to trace out for us. Our so-called education and modern training makes us see in history only contingent forms and nothing more, dates and events, and at best periodic analyses. But those whose vision is still alive and dynamic, know that Socrates was no mere historical individual. He was an autoimmune response of the spirit to a sickness: lack of objectivity and self-responsibility. 

Socrates pushed back against the Sophists of his time because they treated truth like a tool for winning arguments rather than something to be discovered and lived. In democratic Athens, many Sophists trained young men to speak persuasively in politics and law, even if their positions were weak or morally hollow and unsupported by action and conduct. Socrates saw this as dangerous: rhetoric without a commitment to truth breeds confusion, manipulates the public, and corrodes the soul. He insisted that wisdom begins with admitting ignorance and that the aim of speech is not victory, but clarity and virtue.

Our time, too, has become just like that, but I’d say even worse: we are mesmerized by beautiful and noble-sounding speeches but oblivion to the underlying corruption. Standing ovation and Nobel Peace Prize to figures in one part of the world that helped sustain suppression and murder in another.

No one owns their truth anymore, the meaning of the placard they’re holding. Borrowed and deformed meanings are what these empty forms stand for. Group identity reigns instead of critical and responsible self-examination. They protest against human rights violations of a certain group while keeping silent in the face of the mass murder and genocide of a people in another land. This is no human rights activism; it’s enslavement to ideologues.

Edmund Husserl, the man who brought western philosophy to fruition, pointed to the spiritual evolution of spirit as one of coming to a self-grounding, to self-responsibility, where man owns his truths, where he brings into  self-evidentness what he stands for, instead of babbling like parrots what their masters repeat, and proudly they are made to believe it was their own ideas but refuse to listen to facts and truths that might shake their blind commitment to an ideology they do not even understand. 

Why is it that the proponents of certain political forms are always those who’ve never lived under those forms, and they are not even willing to do so even if you give them an invitation and throw them a red carpet! Why?

Gnōthi seauton!

Examine yourself, your truths and narratives, trace back your ideas and what you uphold to its roots and see if they are within you or without. Take responsibility for the evidence of your slogans within you instead of living the life of a marionette. Rise to the level of human dignity and brotherhood. Be wary of inception. Be wary of people who speak confidently about things they don’t understand. Find your ground and belong to yourself. 

That’s all. 

A happy Iranian.