Dear mr Waters,
My apologies for clogging your comment wall with my opinion. But I feel the urge to say something.
I think you are partially right when you say that “read, read, read, read and then read again” is the heavy lifting. I think, on the other hand and based on my own experience, that this is mere fifty percent of the heavy lifting.
The other fifty is observe the people around you, interact with the people around you. The more, the better. The most geographically distant, the better.
And then keep on reading and keep on observing, keep interacting. That’s the one hundred percent “heavy lifting” in the way you, mr Waters, very probably meant it. And as far as your video showed, you did that, but for some reasons you did not mention it at all. Or at least that what it seemd to me.
Reading, studying, going deep inside any matter is not just a right of human beings. It’s a fucking DUTY; is a primary, fundamental, vital necessity, without which we are not human beings. We are not even trained monkeys.
We are a chocking weight for all humanity. We are a deadly burden to those around us, to those who live literally next door to us or thousands of kilometres away. A burden that mercilessly drags us into a dark abyss from which, to come out, will cost sacrifices that we cannot even imagine today, but of which we are having some sad and tragic taste.
Cultivating culture, the real kind, the kind that we may not like and that absolutely does not give a damn about ‘muh emushuns’, our desires, our anger and revenge and our fears, is as absolutely and inescapably indispensable and vital as breathing, eating reproducing; as Art and Science.
The ‘cancel culture’ first and foremost is not culture.
It is the fascist administration of a homogenised product that is insipid and poor in nutrients but full of drugs that make us weak, sluggish in critical thinking, full of muscles but deprived of brain circumvolutions; deprived of the right ‘antibodies’ to live in this often poisonous and indifferent broth called the Universe that was not made for us, but which we have stumbled into by a bizarre chance, and let me tell you, often through the ‘fault’ of an irony so cruel and incomprehensible that it can destroy a human being’s sanity if we do not have those antibodies I mentioned earlier, antibodies which only a proper culture, deeply rooted but with branches reaching everywhere, can help growing and preserve.
Mr. Waters, those are your words. Do you remember them at all?
We watched the tragedy unfold
We did as we were told, bought and sold
It was the greatest show on Earth
But then it was over
We oohed and ahhed
We drove our racing cars
We ate our last few jars of caviar
And somewhere out there in the stars
A keen eyed lookout spied a flickering light
Our last hurrah
And when they found our shadows
Grouped ’round the TV sets
They ran down every lead
They repeated every test
They checked out all the data on their list
And then
The alien anthropologists
Admitted they were still perplexed
But on eliminating every other reason for our sad demise
They logged the only explanation left
This species has amused itself to death
No tears to cry
No feelings left
This species has amused itself to death
