Francisco Miraval
During a recent presentation about access to community resources, a man we will call Mario suddenly said he couldn’t find anybody to talk about “everyday philosophical issues”. I must say I was surprised for the interruption, but I immediately understood that it was more a confession than an interruption.
Mario has clearly thought and calculated what to say and when to say it. He was doubtless asking for help and he wanted to emphasize that there are few, if any, opportunities to talk with people about “real issues”, beyond superficial, everyday topics. Having found a group of like-minded people, he shared his plea.
Mario explained it was not his intention to enter in any kind of academic philosophical debate. He had a minimal interest in reviewing 2500 years of Western philosophy, from the pre-Socratics to the post-modern thinkers. He only wanted to talk with a person or a group without the need of self-censoring his questions.
Leaving his native country to find better opportunities in his new country, Mario found himself away from his family and unable to complete his formal education. In his new country, language and culture became serious barriers to any serious dialogue. However, some “key questions” were constantly lingering in his mind.
“I want to know who I am and why I am here. I want to understand what is happening and what is about to happen. I want to understand my inner self. But I can’t talk with anybody about that”, he said.
As a way of emphasizing the “existential isolation” he was experiencing, Mario summarized his life and the lives of those around him as “getting up, going to work, resting for a few hours, and repeating the same activities the next day.” “And then I can only talk about the weather, sports, or soap operas”, he said.
For that reason, all those important questions everybody, except Mario, avoids, questions both deeply philosophical and profoundly practical, are excluded from “normal” conversations, forcing Mario to repeat a well-rehearsed soliloquy about his misfortunes and his underserved intellectual isolation.
But, why and how we have devalued our conversations so much that many of the “important things” in life are excluded from those conversations, except, of course, in the case of superficial commentaries about what happened in a movie?
Why have we closed our minds and hearts to the point of no longer questioning our own existence, an action that in previous times defined humans as humans?
And what somebody like Mario, who needs to find himself and find meaning in his life, can’t do it? What perverse forces are preventing him and people like him to achieve that worthy goal?
Meanwhile, people like Mario all over the world are increasingly at risk with every passing day of becoming precisely what they want to avoid: thoughtless zombies ceaselessly repeating the same day again and again, with no awareness of who they are or what they do. And all that happens just because they can’t talk about “deep” issues.