Quote of the Week...from Billy Joel

Though we choose between reality and madness it's either sadness or euphoria.    ---Billy Joel

The above quote is a line from Billy Joel's 1976 Summer, Highland Falls, a track from his 1976 Turnstiles album.  This song's lyrics are a cognitive reverie in philosophy...I encourage you to listen it, which I just posted this past Monday as #393 on my all-time favorites list.  Before I go into what this quote meant for me, let me share that once in my eleventh-grade English class back in late 1972 we had a guest speaker, a poet of renown, to sit in on the class and discuss his craft.  I remember him stating that oftentimes he would get feedback from people who credited him with all sorts of revelations in his poems that enlightened them...but that he himself hadn't been thinking at all along those lines when composing them.  And then he said that the work stands on its own once it's out there and that even unintended interpretations are legitimate, as far as he was concerned.  So with that in mind I acknowledge that I may or may not be in total sync with Billy Joel's intended message here, but I'll give my own "feedback" anyway, for what it's worth...

If there's one word that I believe adequately describes these times we live in and the social attitudes epitomizing it, it is "narrative".  Art Linkletter may have said that "kids say the darndest things", but people in general believe the darndest things as long as they fit within their own personal adopted narratives about the nature of the world around them and their own perceived lives.  These narratives, which include past personal history, religion, politics, socioeconomic class, identity categories, economic status, consumption patterns (including that of drugs), and entertainment preferences, tend to reinforce themselves in their holders' minds through supporting input...be it true or false...while they tend to reject any contradictory information regardless of its truth value...to believe something patently false just because it fits your narrative to me is a feature of madness.  And behind each person's personally and tenaciously held narrative...each with its peculiar mixture of reality and fantasy...is the unrecognized cause for it: the narrative makes them feel better...

One thing that social media like Facebook and Twitter do very well is to reveal and encourage people's personally held narratives.  These forums feed into narrative bias by giving users access to just about any opinion source that supplies catchy slogans or "news" items propping them up.  I believe folks in general want to have a sense of order about their lives and what's going on around them, and since it comforts them more they will be willing to throw away any objective, respectful and skeptical treatment of the news or the diversity of viewpoints about a particular point and instead boil it all down to the good guys (who possess all of the truth) versus the bad guys (born liars, all of them).  It's frustrating for me to see this in others, along with their tendency to only reference the news sources that resonate with their narratives, yet in all honesty as a human being here along with the rest of us I'm also plodding along through my own life with my own tightly-held, cherished narrative...after all, it's either sadness or euphoria.  But I've noticed one thing ever since I began this blog more than twelve years ago: when I write about a particular subject I often finding myself taking on both its pros and cons and on a number of occasions end up with a message that I hadn't previously intended...and I watch and read all kinds of perspectives on what's going around us.  Why don't you start your own writing blog and share your views with the world as well?  I'd be interested in reading it, plus it may benefit you as it has done me by helping you to sort out your own narratives. Wordpress or Google's Blogger (which I use) are good places to start...