A regular blog commenter, "cc," sent me these thoughts recently. I enjoy writing like this: something I can read several times, and not exhaust the thoughtfulness contained therein.
Reminds me a bit of Chuang Tzu's useless tree.
When the extra-terrestrial alights on Earth it says to the first human it encounters, "Take me to your leader", because it sees immediately that the human is not intelligent enough to live an unauthorized existence.
It is obvious to the extra-terrestrial that the human's slavish dependency on its knowledge renders it ignorant of the need for an open mind; that because it can't allow for what it doesn't recognize and can't comprehend, it can't think or act "outside the box", as the earthlings say.
Eventually, however, the extra-terrestrial does encounter an open-minded human.
But what it sees is that this human is the most useless, powerless human on the planet because, having no leader and no followers, it is virtually alienated from its fellow human beings. Ironically, the extra-terrestrial and the open-minded human are more closely related than most humans are to each other.
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