"Think Dangerously" Mug

Thinking…we do it all the time; but today it has become an act of cultural rebellion…and a sacrament. An original idea changes the world by revealing the divine spark hidden within it. The world is an open book, but it is encrypted. Decoding that world is what we call thinking. 
 
But there’s a problem; it’s called ‘civilization’. We have encased our world in a shell of preset facts and prefabbed interpretations. When we set out to explore the world, we most often see only this shell.
 
Thinking, on the other hand, is what happens beneath the shell!
This shell consists primarily of language. Our language tells us how to think (syntax) and also what to think (content). It offers us a detailed map of the world, already decoded. Of course there are gaps, like the blind spot in a driver’s visual field; for the most part, we look past them. But we have no foolproof way to verify the accuracy of the map; we must accept it on faith. 
 
Linguists estimate that only about 3% of the things we think and say are original; the other 97% consist of regurgitated memes. So, deconstruct yourself! When are you thinking and when is society thinking through you? You are alive, you are unique, do you have anything original to say about that experience? Or are you content just to repeat what you’ve heard elsewhere? 
 
This is not a new problem. The Bible traces it back to the Tower of Babel. But today we are immersed in a sea of pre-packaged memes: print, social media, and TV. Now I can appear erudite, or hip, without disturbing a single brain cell. Pretty attractive, huh? 
 
Civilization is an overlay of 4 great cultural advances: language, writing, computing, and now artificial intelligence. Note how each stage moves us closer to group speak and makes original thought rarer and more difficult. Thoughts can be shared, preserved, synthesized, and now, the process of thinking itself can be subcontracted to machines (AI) running group speak software.  
 
Unused adaptations atrophy and eventually disappear. Consider T-Rex’s arms or humans’ tails. Is it possible that what we call thinking will turn out to be nothing more than a phase in the evolution of our species? Are we becoming the Borg Collective? Is resistance futile?
 
So, original thinking has become a subversive activity, precisely what the world needs right now! So tip your hat to the political revolutionaries of 1776, 1789, 1848, 1917, and 1968…but you, original thinkers, are today’s cultural revolutionaries! You think, and therefore you are dangerous, and we all thank you for that!