The misadventure into Iran, imprudently initiated by the myopic Trump Administration, has directed the world’s klieg lights to the Strait of Hormuz. The latter, as known, is a narrow body of water (30 miles wide) connecting the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman. It is controlled by Iran and presents a potential bottleneck to its prodigious shipping activity, notably for the transport of oil and agricultural fertilizer. The Trump Administration’s inept, empty-headedness has exposed the flow of shipping to the military control of the attacked Iran, causing universal economic hardship.
Analogous to said conundrum, we have chosen to use the tactical potential for blockade of the Hormuz Strait by the besieged Iran as a contextual and thematic metaphor relative to the ubiquitous failure or inability of the human persona to seek reason and empirical understanding; the same due to the personal blockage by atavistic or preconceived beliefs and assumptions, usually instilled at an early age, by well-meaning parents and associates. It has been our dedicated intention to encourage, where relevantly applicable, the removal of irrational, limiting, and potentially harmful mental roadblocks or bottlenecks to the natural progress or flow of human reason.
As readers of this blogspace are, presumably, well aware, we are among the countless rational believers in the epistemological theory of John Locke ( and the plethora of empirical philosophers), that Man is born with a clean slate (“tabula rasa”) and that his knowledge is solely and exclusively acquired through empirical experience or instruction. Accordingly, any and all pre-conceptual assumptions of naturally instilled beliefs or non-empirical conceptions are more than inaccurate; they are effective roadblocks or ocean-going blockades to the acquisition of knowledge and Man’s most singularly precious, s evolutionary gift, that of the capacity of empirical reason.
Human reason dictates that solely, sense experience, observation and experimentation, rather than innate intuition or preconception (“felt” or intuitive knowledge or awareness), are useful and enlightening.
Nevertheless, the blockades to human reason and intellectual enlightenment, like the narrow, confining geography of the Strait of Hormuz, have atavistically persisted (viz., religious, superstitious, prejudicial, attitudinal) into the present digital age and have continued to unnecessarily stifle Man’s potential for evolutionary advancement and the pursuit of ultimate wisdom. The geography of the Persian Gulf is fixed and unalterable, unlike Man’s potential for the development of empirical reason; it is hoped that the extant blinders to reason and reality-altering pre-conception, superstitious beliefs, human prejudice, and other irrational and limiting blockades to human advancement, will soon be but a matter of an atavistic past.
-p.
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