Somewhere around 300 BC Aristotle laid down the fundamentals of ‘moral responsibility’ with it all essentially boiling down to - someone becoming worthy of praise or blame, based on their actions or lack thereof. Just in case that was “too much responsibility” to be just dealt out by the hand of Oprah or whoever... he also points out (Nichomacean ethics iii) that it is really only the ‘moral agent’ who can actually be held accountable for their actions and judged by them. This moral agent position though, is not some unachievable, haughty, anal clenching post but just ‘people who possess a capacity for decision.’ So then let’s assume that for some stupid reason you decided to start reading this and hence you are a moral agent... voila, but still can you really be ‘held’ to this responsibility? It can be said that there is a possibility for you to be held to it if you in some way take it upon yourself to follow through with this, so it’s a sort of choice responsibility. There is also a responsibility that the law holds you to, that isn’t necessarily a choice because it is something one can be held to regardless of whether or not they choose to, and let’s assume that that burden is upon us all, and that’s a whole other thing.

Fatalism is also a thing, a philosophy that attributes all events to fate and kind of relieves everyone of any responsibility altogether because sometimes sh*t will happen no matter what you do. While I find the idle argument put forth by Oregon and Cicero to be profoundly self-indulgent/beautiful; i.e. if something is fated then it would be pointless to put an effort into trying to alter its outcome, ‘responsibility’ to some extent, surpasses the barriers of philosophical theorization because it is biological. We are structured to feel responsible towards our kin, because of the indirect fitness benefits of maintaining our gene pool. So as much as we try and escape responsibility it is etched on the very proteins that draw out our whole lives. So we feel it, sometimes, it’s there. If fatalism was removed from all thought, then there would essentially be three different kinds of responsibility; that which we choose to take on (or not), that which the law requires us to and that which is biological. I would say that keeping ourselves informed of current events falls into that first category of 'self-imposed responsibility’ and this is a highly dichotomous subject.

Somehow amidst our dark and dingy abyss of ignorance and Instagram, the news and current affairs and all that glorious real life stuff have become a hot topic for debate because of a growing disillusionment with the media. So much so that there numerous studies on why reading the news is bad for you. It is very possible that you could be attacked with this theory on some balmy night with a mildly attractive stranger, just when you least expect it “Panicky stories spur the release of cascades of glucocorticoid (cortisol). This deregulates your immune system and inhibits the release of growth hormones.”(Dobelli, 2013). However, as I don’t really buy the arguments of “reading the news is bad for your health” and “the media is corrupt so I chose to refrain from awareness all together”, I chose to instead look at the whole Trigger Warning phenomenon that has festered its way into educational institutions nationwide, breeding apathy and consistently paining my ass.

I don’t mean this to sound like, hey yo check out all this triggering trauma, in yo face b*tches. It’s more like the ignorance, laziness, self-indulgence and lack of responsibility that this trigger warning culture allows for is 1) really gross and 2) makes sure that none of us have to be in that position where we’re moral agents ever again, it was a choice anyway so f*ck it. Well here, I had a roommate once tell me that she had a friend who visited India and got PTSD because of all the poverty, I mean, tough sh*t, if only she could have triggered her way out of that one before it was too late, god forbid she ever has to see what other people live like in this world that we all share/ screw up together.

Anyway, you can be informed, uninformed, an ignoramus, sheltered, never offended ever, a know it all smart ass, that’s not really my point I guess…it’s getting more to something like this… because at the end of the day after I leave my bulletproof classrooms and fenced off imagination, I find myself reading Salman Rushdie… So, yeah… here I am again in love with the old perv, I have on my lap a newer story that my parents gifted me outside a bar near China Town, where a guy with a top hat and a foot long beard sat and sipped absinthe and a little while ago on a rainy night Jack Keruoac did something on those lines at that very same table…he writes it out, Rushdie this time, his own story woven into a magic world of nymphomaniac genies who step in and out of this one just to shake things up a little…his own, and therefore it kills you at the start ripping out whatever it was that held your heart together… when he writes, about himself...or rather, about a certain Rushdi, an old philosopher, exiled from his kingdom, his writings burned to flittering ash, but his life graced with a young jiniri when ‘One day soon after the beginning of his exile a girl of perhaps 16 summers appeared outside his door, smiling gently, not knocking or intruding on his thoughts in any other way…’ He loves her, he leaves her, all his life he runs through his head this argument he had with this one other guy…the idea of it, the good, the bad, the ugly, and the outrageous, and then he dies… “And Ibn Rushd was dead, but, as will be seen, he and his adversary continued their dispute beyond the grave, for to the arguments of great thinkers there is no end, the idea of argument itself being a tool to improve the mind, the sharpest of all tools, born of the love of knowledge, which is to say, philosophy.” And my knee caps begin to itch because that’s where my grandfather is embedded as sticky orange candy on the way back from school every day for all the first days of my life. And I think of that love of argument, not for anything, not to prove anything, not to belittle anyone, no agendas in that house whatsoever, not even really for the sake of dialogue, but just to play around in your own head…race through it wild and free as if you own the place…just to see where it takes you… so that you can go back to it somewhere, sometime...a million years from now… you can go back to it when you start to see out of the corner of your eye a robot waiting silently by your side, watching your legs give up and your breathing slow down… So I feel lost in this new world of unjustified agreement when we don’t stretch our thoughts into the vast expanses of the bizarre for fear of insult, when we close our minds off at that which we are afraid of our upset by…because what on earth will we do with ourselves, who’s minds I fear will melt to buttercream by the time our bodies start lining up for the next train out…

But back to the squares and 12pt font, what that rant means I guess, is that this whole escaping from the world into our own little bubbles, hiding away from that which we disagree with, trigger trigger go figure bs, we may trick ourselves into thinking that all of it is making everything rainbows and butterflies better, but I don’t think it really is, it’s just secretly fencing us into desolate isolation in our own little heads. So as scholars in pursuit of something greater some bubble pop knowledge explosion, expansion, whatever, in order to honour that, perhaps we should make it a point to offend and be offended and argue and disagree and stop wasting time worrying about whose toes we’re stepping on because ultimately those will be gone too and if we don’t challenge shit and argue and voice all of our disgusting and despicable thoughts then we’ll be both toe-less and forever bored because of the candy floss forms our miniscule brains would have evolved into by that time.