Wrong Again
Everything you think you know – and you think you know a lot – is almost correct. Almost. There are wide gaps in your knowledge, and these gaps create some difficulties that will likely dash any hope you might have of being considered mightily intelligent. For being almost correct isn’t much better than being wrong. If you are wrong at least you can be confident in your wrongness, whereas if you are almost correct, there is no telling what trouble you’re capable of.
It must be hard waking up to the possibility that everything you thing you know is slightly off. Most people would rather not wake up to this at all; they would rather wake up to the sound of birds chirping and the smell of fish cooking. Most opt to live in a sleepy state of delusion; to admit that everything is otherwise, that one has just missed the mark regarding so many things, is too horrifying for a normal person to endure. It is surprising that more people don’t have a psychic break when they wake up and realise that, contrary to what it says in the newspaper and textbook, the objective truth is only partially available to them.
Almost everything you’ve been taught – and you’ve been taught an awful lot – is almost accurate. Almost. Maybe that’s why arguing with you is not much fun. While intelligent people are known to leave open the possibility that the premise they are working from may itself be flawed, you are certain of everything, which puts you on the borderline of stupid. The definition of stupid is one who, faced with overwhelming evidence that they are working off of a flawed premise, is incapable of admitting as much and continues to argue until he or she is red in the face and hopping up and down and screaming in a ridiculous falsetto.
Almost everything you feel – and you feel a tremendous amount – is warped by fear. In this respect you are no different from most other people and regions. They operate out of fear – fear of not getting what they desire, or of being denied something they think they’re entitled to, or losing something they thought they had. In your case, you are afraid of your mom. But you are also afraid of other people’s moms. And dads. But mostly you are afraid of containment. Plus, you’re afraid of your overnight success and of being left alone with baby-faced princeling. On some days, you convince yourself that you fear nothing, but on such days the fear of being almost correct cripples you with anxiety, and it is not until you read the Global Times that you begin to regain your normal state of delusion.
Nearly all of your friends – and you have many – are of the fair-weather variety. They like you because you have buckets of money. But they don’t trust you. It goes to your lack of transparency and history of nuttiness. So your friends hedge and sleep with your enemies, all the time smiling and nodding and bowing, trying to convince you that they are really, really good friends. If you were open, honest and less antagonistic, a stakeholder and not an arrogant know-it-all, maybe you’d have more friends.
