Public Service Announcement

One of the most interesting and satisfying classes I took as an undergraduate was Philosophy 100. The conditions were ideal: I was an intellectually hungry young mind, the professor was a recent PhD in his first job and the class had only twenty or so students. Every day he would challenge us with readings in philosophy that we would debate for an hour. We would read the dialogues between Hylas and Philonious about the existence of the material world written by Bishop Berkeley and come to class morally outraged that anyone could claim that the physical world simply doesn't exist. Our professor would pace back and forth at the head of the classroom and, when we had run down and started repeating ourselves, he would glance over and say, "may I rephrase that?" Of course, you knew immediately that you were lost! In his rephrasing he would summarize what little you had to say and often had to do no more. Occasionally, when someone actually made a point, he would have to make an argument. But he always won. What was so remarkable about the class was that we actually practiced the act of philosophizing exactly as it was done by Plato and Socrates over two thousand years before. We were learning how to think critically. I have never quite gotten over that class. Thank goodness.

I mention this because sometimes the professor, who had a particular interest in moral philosophy, would begin the class with something of a public service announcement. Not like the ones we hear today which are inevitably lawyer-driven attempts to propagandize us into doing whatever The State thinks we should be doing; no, au contraire, these announcements were actually by way of being a public service. I remember one occasion on which he said watch out for hard contact lenses, they can have side effects. I suppose this is no longer the case, but at the time I'm sure it was useful knowledge.

In the spirit of my long-ago philosophy professor, I would like to make three short public service announcements that may be worth taking into account.

1. Fifty percent of the people you meet every day have--by definition--below average intelligence.
2. According to some psychologists, one in every twenty-seven people you meet is a sociopath.
3. Every institution, whether it be a school, university, corporation or, yes, government, acts so as to benefit itself--and not you.

Now let me see, what would be an appropriate piece of music...

Ok, two pieces of music. First, what we seem to amuse ourselves with:

And now what our hidebound, unenlightened, barbaric ancestors amused themselves with: