Blind Visionaries

“The good news is you came a long way, the bad news is you went the wrong way.”  –

 J. Cole  

When I think about it, the blind leading the blind is really not as dangerous as we are taught. Quite frankly that’s life. We do the best we can with what we have in this ever expanding novelty that is life. This is of course if the blind know they are blind. Where the danger lies is when the blind leads the blind with the confidence of a visionary. See those who know they are blind accept the fact that if they take 2 steps forward there is a possibility they’ll take 3 steps back. As for our visionaries? They step confidently with no regard for possible changes in direction. You don’t need a map when you are the way.

Why is this trap of being the enlightener without being enlightened, the freer without being freed, so enticing? I myself have been guilty of this in the past. If I was to postulate, I’d say it is our tendency to confuse our desire to be smart with wisdom. The modern day desire to be “wise” is actually the wanting for publicized smartness and achievement obtained from it. See, being smart is the ability to utilize or take advantage of a subject or event for one’s personal gain. This is not always, or even skewed towards the majority, with malicious intent, yet still an act for one’s individual advancement. Wisdom is the desire for deep education. The search for what the Greeks coined Paideia, the formation of attention that cultivates one’s self criticism that matures the soul. To understand a subject so deeply that you become a contagious, outspoken, vehicle for the betterment of something bigger than oneself. 

Far too many times we cloak being smart with wisdom. Deriving from the inability to self criticize. Why is this so damning? So empty? So misleading? Because it wrongly, yet confidently, leads you away from the one thing we all at the core of our existence share: Humanity. Without a matured self criticizing soul, we are unable to see and combat the things in this modern world that dehumanizes us. It gives us false perceptions of who we are and what we, and this world, need to be. So then the question arises, if we cannot connect at the human level, suffering, joy, love, loss, then how will we connect anywhere else? So like the great professor Cornel West says, “Let your phones be smart, you be wise!”.