What in the world are thoughts? I know that no one really knows where they come from and that they just appear, but why? I mean we think all the time (most of us anyway….) and yet there’s no way to tell really what constitutes a thought. In the Harry Potter books (yes I am referencing some of the most attention getting books ever, but I liked them before the mass hysteria) they are described as thin silvery strands, but that’s not very substantive. Yet they seem to make up a lot of what we point to as “ourselves.” If we are religious we point to our belief in whatever higher being/power/deity we ascribe to. Our belief. And what is belief really other than a very organized set of beliefs that are one set of principles that govern the way we interact. What is any government, for that matter, but a collection of ideas – a way of elevating thoughts – that the society lives by? And when we are asked by employers to describe ourselves what do we tell them other than what we think we are. Because how do we know who we are without thought?
And what has been the source of most of the terrible crimes of the future worlds in literature throughout the years? Controlling of thoughts. In many of the scariest fictional societies the way people are controlled are through their thoughts. 1984 has the Thought Police; Fahrenheit 451 overloads people with useless information and bans anything that promotes thinking; Brave New World terrorizes infants and small children in order to control their spending as adults because they think they cannot live without what they are deeply afraid of; the One Ring in the Lord of the Rings books distorts what a person thinks they are capable of handling while subtly subjugating them to the will of Sauron.
Attempting to control, or at least have a significant influence on, thoughts is not only in literature. What is any add on T.V. or in a magazine or on the roadside but an attempt to get you to think the same way as that company? And in today’s America what is the job of every White House spokesperson but to tell the facts in such a way that people will think the same way as the people they speak for? And we all tell our own stories in such a way so that we come out more of a hero than we might have actually been to get people to think better of us. No one is above stating facts in a way that assists a person to think the way that they want them to think. Even I did it in my choice of books and the way I described them in illustrating my point in the paragraph above. What do you think about that?
Thoughts are so interesting. They control and shape us while we are simultaneously controlling and shaping them. Yet they seem to lack the see, taste, touch substance that many people say they cannot believe in something without. So what do we do with such questionable things?
I hope this has been thought provoking….