Idiot and Proud

Idiot is originally a Greek word meaning lacking professional skill, private citizen or individual. In Latin it means practically the same things: ordinary person or layman.

In what is considered the first known democracy, around 550 B.C.E. in Athens, an idiot was characterized by self-centeredness and concerned with private instead of public affairs.

Idiocy was, and is, the natural state of ignorance into which we all enter this life. With education, in the Athenian democracy, the idiot became a citizen. With time idiot came to describe a person lacking in sense or intelligence, but if we look at what the word was in the beginning it need not be a negative word at all in my opinion.

We are all ordinary people and we are all individuals. Some claim to be professionally skilled, but who is to say that is genuine? Professional is a title given out by some dogmatic institution whose canon of facts is not necessarily true. It is a result of a formal education, which in a sense is brainwashing.

In life the most important thing is the experience each individual is having, and it is this experience that creates reality and ultimately confirms any intuitions one might have.

An idiot is therefor, as I see it, a person that is aware of the fact that nothing can be known for sure, and that any answers (if there are such things) can only be found through direct experience and/or within the self.

To become a citizen is to become a slave. To have a formal education, and to believe in it without question, is to be enslaved. To focus on public affairs above ones own private affairs is to be distracted by the machinery of enslavement. So with this in mind an idiot has a very pure position.

The idiot acknowledges that the world is unknowable and that s/he is an amateur. It does not mean the idiot is stupid, nor does it mean that the idiot is lacking in skills.

It does mean that the idiot is open to all possibilities equally and that any skills possessed have not been approved by any institutionalized dogma. After all the biggest morons in the world are clearly well educated, so they are certainly NOT idiots.

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