Hmmm...

It seems to me that there are two types of people in this world. There are those who love to muse about things, and those who spend their lives posturing and trying to get ahead for themselves. 95% of folks are in the second group. They learn to put on different airs which would seem to be meet for the situation. And they are struggling like salmon who swim upstream, to make their way for themselves in life. There are very few people who have sat down and thought deeply about all the different issues in life for themselves. People who muse a lot are very few and far between. A person who has thought deeply about life will recognize where the solutions are to the problems he or she sees around him. He will understand how trends take shape in small groups of people and large groups of folks, and he will work to push constructive trends whenever he gets a chance. This type of person cares deeply about other people. Unfortunately, because the posturers in our world are the larger group of folks, they tend to form consensuses about things among themselves, and they then tend to view the thinkers as being odd, because their premises with which they are building their models are always somewhat "outside the box," as it were. Deep thinking folks in the usa are really quite the objects of scorn, although because we are immersed in our society, we often become oblivious to this.

Another commonality among us deep thinking folks is that we tend to be very enamored with the idea of expressing affection through touch. Anybody who has run through all the models on that social custom sees the very profound value in it. Children in our society are always touching and caressing and being caressed. It's considered fundamentally important for young children to receive this kind of physical affection. However, adults in north america tend to get very weird attitudes about touch. There is lots of anxiety about what is termed "sexual attraction" (in quotes because I question the premises behind "sexual attraction", and really the entire context around that subject). In fact, more often than not, males in our society tend to completely conflate affection with sexual attraction, and then because of the problematic nature of sexual attraction as it shows on a person's face in different situations, they then proceed to push affection out of their lives altogether. Rejecting the custom of giving and receiving affection tends to make males in our society cold and distant.

No one is as troubled by this trepidation that our society has when it comes to expressing affection, as us deep-thinking folks. Because we are socially progressive in our outlook, and because caring deeply about those around us is so central to our way of life, many of us will tend to mix in that sexual attraction subtext with our affection which we show to other adults around us - especially younger adults. And those of us who are younger tend to be unnerved by that, because of what our society has taught us about such things. The upshot of this, is that younger thinkers are put off from hooking up with those who have more years behind them. And where young people ought to get mentorship - they instead embark on a long and lonely plod through life - among shallow posturers who can never appreciate them for who they are.

There is a whole vast sea of needy people out there who need our help. However, if we thinkers cannot even succeed in hooking up with eachother, we will never have the stamina or the resources to be able to help the needy masses.

explanation: I know some who are casually reading this essay will miss the context of what I'm saying here, because in your opinion the erudite of society are in the halls of universities completing their phds... or are doing some very important scientific research on this matter or that one. I am not referring to those people. I don't think of such folks as "deep thinking" people - even though they have a vast and wordy vocabulary that I'm sure would daunt any of us, when we tried to read their papers. For the most part, traditional intellectuals stay within the frameworks of the ideas of those around them. They are simply reiterating a point made by someone else at some other time. Those folks who I'm addressing in this piece, I believe will recognize who they are.