Thursday, February 6, 2014

I heard you like true things


You don't have to agree with everything you hear.

Most likely, you don't agree with everything you hear. (If you do, become very, very worried.) Most likely, you also stop listening when you hear something you don't agree with. Since you don't agree with it. As a famous burner of libraries once said:

The books either agree with the truth, and are thus useless, or they don't, and are thus both useless and dangerous.

You might be able to spot a flaw in this line of reasoning. Don't you have to know the truth before being able to discern between it and the untrue, and isn't the reading of true books a way of finding out what this truth looks like?

This is so.

You don't have to agree with everything you hear. Most likely, you don't. But it is also more than likely that you don't listen to those things you don't agree with, by virtue of not agreeing with them. Like the burner of libraries, you're torching the truth along with the untruth, and all that's left is the ashes of words unheard.

You don't have to agree with everything you hear. But you'll be richer for having listened to it.

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