Challenge: How Do Open Minds Find the Means to Overpower the Closed Ones?

Contradictions, contrasts, oxymorons have always been enticing. In our present days of incredible (to me) leaps in understanding of the place of human beings in whatever we choose to call our space and time, every one of us is presented with the most incredible juxtapositions.

An example of simulated data modeled for the CMS particle detector on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. Wikipedia

When the first brilliant leaps of credibility struck the known universe, from ancient civilizations that modern Man has unearthed and learned to interpret, to the 21st Century comprehension of such things as the 'God particle' and the elasticity of gravity, nuclear physics, genetics, brain imaging — the minute human place in what's out there becomes ever smaller. Every new discovery seems to depend on a single flash of mental suggestion that led to labor for decades or even centuries that comes to another revelation that increases the boundaries of what we need to try to grasp. Some larger, some smaller, all beyond ordinary intelligence to grasp firmly.

The ordinary person will usually admit freely how impossible is to understand the immensity of space as it expands endlessly, the estimated count of galaxies and universes of which we have only electronic signals, from time (measured in light years) we can’t comprehend.

It’s no easier to take in the miniscule realm of quantum physics and particles that to this day are unseen, yet that scientists have managed to prove really are present.

Where do our minds and our mortal bodies place us in such knowledge? Despite the fact that we would likely be unnoticed if some intelligence beyond our solar system can detect our world, are we in some way lords of all we have found out how to survey?

Given the capacity of our species to imagine and eventually comprehend the unimaginable, are we infinitely tiny, or symbolically bigger than where we happen to be?

Well enough to be awed by the brains that have led us so far: the questions the ordinary people of the world are called on to grasp are those who have no more knowledge of these ideas than they have of nuclear physics or color theory or the structure of fugues.

There are millions whose understandings have been poured into religious or political molds from their first consciousness and who will in their own lifetimes, perhaps in generations beyond them, never learn the two most important things needed to preserve us all: how to imagine and how to inquire.

Every time it is necessary for a decision to be made by a majority, if the individuals have no opportunity to make informed decisions, the entire human world with all its incredible advances is at risk.

Another contradiction appears: how do open minds find the means to overpower the closed ones?

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Challenge: How Do Open Minds Find the Means to Overpower the Closed Ones?

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