Definition:Complexity

I often use the word complexity. Below are examples of uncomplex statements about the world that attempt sincerity:

*if you focus on the good things, good things will come

*the choice man really has is between pleasure and pain

*the simplest answer is often the best

*good and bad are cultural definitions that cannot be universalized

*everything is energy

*we are all one

*the most important thing in the world is love

*greatness is achieved by losing the self

*truth is how we see it

This is a tiny slice of the idiocy. The combination of loose concepts that can be woven into these phrases is endless. What do they all have in common?

Most of them are sincere. And they show absolutely no awareness of what real life is like. They take abstract ideas of, say, "good" and "bad" and isolate them and then discuss them as if they were molecules that made up some inorganic creature called Life.

One way to see the beginning of the solution to this is to paraphrase the late Dr. Jeffrey Gordon's theory, Philosophy really amounts to learning clarity and wisdom. The quantity of these two things is defined by nature and must be recombined for an individual, after learning to think, in patterns that represent true experience. Add all of this up and remove emotional new-age thinking and you have complexity.