Pessimism and Indifference

'Freedom injustice and all that crap people write about with no substance they don't know what they are talking about' - Sussex University Toilet 24th May 2010

Things like this always make me wonder if this person was writing out of pessimism or indifference? Do they not care that the world seemingly has no substance surrounding the question of freedom and injustice? Or is it that they think that there is no point writing about these things because the world as no clue? As subtle as the difference here is its important to realise that either way who ever wrote this wont be doing anything about what they consider to be the tragedy of the present. Which in turn makes me think, what exactly was the point of writing that in the first place? Are you trying to sound like an intellectual and make some poignant statement of the state of philosophy and politics which sounds very insightful but in-fact lacks any real meaning whatsoever? Or are you just angry at the world around you and yet unwilling to do anything about it? Again the divergence between these two questions is slim and it still boils down to the fact that the very statement made is tautological. The girl who wrote it is claiming that the world has no understanding of the concepts of Freedom and injustice and yet is doing nothing but perpetuating this by stating this as fact and then doing nothing to change it.

This is the state of affairs in a university today, the feeling of ambivalence of the conditions of social, political and philosophical understanding combined with the pessimism and indifference that means the ambition to do anything about this falls short and culminates in the writing of bitter meaningless statements in a toilet cubicle.

The irony here is that by protesting against this i am perpetuating they very thing that has encouraged me to protest. I am encouraging the tautology of indifference by vehemently protesting against the indifference. We might end up going in roundabouts here so i will just say that indifference is sustained by the pessimism that is incited by statements of indifference. So what exactly can we do, as students, to be honest even just as a member of this society? We write. We put down on paper in anyway possible our despair, but not only that, we also read. We read about the philosophy of Freedom and injustice, we read newspapers and books, and watch the world through documentaries. We come up with our OWN ideas. 

This stalemate between voicing an opinion and really taking a stand, lies in the worlds demand for instant information, resulting in our being spoon fed what we are demanding to understand, there by we are no longer understanding we are just regurgitating fact. I am sitting here trying on my own to change this, by reading and learning and hoping that others of my generation are tired for the same reasons and are doing the same. For really what is the world without trying to understand it? You can live from day to day and the world will still bumble along as it has, but the problems in the world will not be solved if we do not demand an understanding of them. You cannot fix the present problems with the knowledge of the past alone, for it is by way of the past that the problems came about in the first place.

You cannot tackle the state of indifference by regurgitating the very reasons for its being.

So here is my suggestion...pick up a book and work it out for yourself, you never know what might happen.