A reader emailed today and included the following passage from DFW’s famed Kenyon Commencement speech that resonated with me as we all try to come to terms with the decisions we have to make in Iraq:
[A] huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.
Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.
This is not a matter of virtue. It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being “well-adjusted”, which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.
Now think of cable news or the instant web cacophony; think of “winning the morning”; think of all the certainty I convey on this blog every day. What I’ve been striving for in this space since the Iraq War began is a way to think about the world that is less about ME and to grasp the realities of global politics in a way that is less about US. What I pray for is an America that is “well-adjusted.”
Posts worth revisiting today: Internet addiction in China and in a brilliant music video; Republican sectarian warfare after Mississippi; another Windsor-fueled breakthrough for marriage equality; and the mental health of animals and Uruguayan football players.
The most popular post of the day was Raging Against Obama – And History; followed by The Whoring Just Keeps Getting Worse, on the latest low in “sponsored content.”
Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here. You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 15 19 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month.
See you in the morning.
(Photo: People walk through the site at Worthy Farm in Pilton on the eve of the first day of the 2014 Glastonbury Festival on June 24, 2014 in Glastonbury, England. Gates opened today at the Somerset dairy farm that plays host to one of the largest music festivals in the world. Tickets to the event, which is now in its 44th year, sold out in minutes even before any of the headline acts had been confirmed. The festival, which started in 1970 when several hundred hippies paid £1, now attracts more than 175,000 people. By Matt Cardy/Getty Images.)
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