To Think or not to Think ... that is the Question - A satire

To Think or not to Think ... that is the Question - A satire by P.K. Odendaal October 2024

From Descartes we have the statement: I think, therefore I am. Wow! What I farce. For the long or brief periods when I do not think, I am inanimate or even vegetable.
In fact, should I never think and follow the global Woke movement who are not capable of thought.

From Shakespeare we have the adage: To be or not to be ... that is the question. 

We can easily adulterate or hybridize the two above statements and form a new one: To think or not to think ... that is the question.

Many of the great thinkers like Aristotle, Karl Marx, Darwin, Michelson, Morley and many others have led us down this garden path and made us believe their false thoughts for centuries and even millennia. Maybe the world would have been a better place had they not thought at all.

My own experience as a young engineer many decades ago can vouch for my notion that we should not think.

My client, a property developer, asked me to draw up some plans for the clearing of a small stream running through his residential estate. I did the plans and he opted to do the clearing of the stream with his in-house resources and duly asked his Head of Parks, a former locomotive stoker with the name of Dup, to have the work done.

The main item of the work was to remove silt and clay from the stream bed by hiring a large dozer and then transversely dozing the silt and clay of the stream to the side. The dozer arrived and the operator was told to doze from left to right perpendicular with the stream flow.

After some time, watching the operation from the bank of the stream, he was satisfied and had to go to the office to attend to some urgent business.

When he returned two hours later, the dozer was gone and the operator was standing on the bank of the stream. He asked the operator where the dozer was, who in turn pointed out the top few centimeters of the dozer's vertical exhaust sticking out of the mud in the middle of the stream.

So he had to hire a big excavator to excavate the dozer which took up the rest of the day and cost them thousands.

After all was said and done, he asked the operator what he had happened, whereupon the operator answered that he thought that it would be better to push the silt and clay from right to left in stead of from left to right.

So Dup said: "Listen here carefully. You thought once today and it cost us thousands. We are sixty million people in this country. Can you imagine how many billions it would cost our country if everyone would think only one thought per day!"

Being a philosophic being or philosophaholic, I will never forget this profound truth.

What is the origin of thought? Easy. Free Will.

Each of us can tell countless stories of how our free will made us do things which had profound negative effects on our lives, and which mostly diverted our attention from our true calling and mission in life to some sideline activity and grief.

I have visited many offices in my life where they had a plaque on their desks with only one word on it: "Think". And on every occasion I tried to think something, but I could not. Somehow my appetite for thinking disappeared when I saw that sign.

I do remember also that Adam and Eve thought that the apple looked so nice to eat and they changed the future of the planet and mankind by that one thought. We can be so glad that they never thought anything again.

Thoughts are generated by idleness and that is why philosophers never worked.

Whenever we catch philosophers or ordinary people red-handed while they think, we should put them in jail without judge or jury ... says this thinking addict named Yours Truly.