Only simple ideas can be held by large groups of people. Commonly held ideas are almost always dumbed down until they are practically lies… and often dangerous ones.
Now it is done by the central bankers and Treasury Secretaries themselves. They don’t apologize for it. They don’t hang their heads and contemplate blowing their brains out. Instead, they’re proud of it… announcing that they ‘saved civilization,’ or some such claptrap.
Norman Rockwell spent his career painting pictures that helped people understand their own feelings…pictures that enriched their own experiences and celebrated their own lives.
I think people can handle 150 to 200 miles a week. But something has to give somewhere. If he’s a student, how’s he going to study? He may be at the age of chasing and courtship, and that’s an important form of sport and recreation, too.
The world, then, no longer resembles the one that gave rise to the original insight. Soon, a person’s situation is so at odds with the world as it really is that a crisis develops, and he or she must seek a new metaphor for explanation and guidance.
So it’s a matter of fitting your current practices to fit the event and the individual. See, what’s good for you might not be worth a darn for the next guy.
Once vast numbers of people have come to believe the lie, they adjust their own behavior to bring themselves into sync with it, and thereby change the world itself.
A man on his owns knows that he is best advised to leave his dumbbell neighbors alone. But let him join a political party, and he fantasizes that he has the right and the power to tell everyone on the block what to do.
