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Anton Marco N.

Mercado - Section B Group 6 February 08, 2014



According to Michel Foucault, it should be our own curiosity that
enables us to be free from oneself, and not some fantasy formations
with bogus promises of liberation from a world of complacency and
docility. The challenges that we would be facing in trying to overcome
this system would be huge, and to overcome it, one must have courage.
Courage is standing your ground against opinions, opinions that are
formed by fleeting expressions of hope that the things that we are
engaging with today are not just fads. But we can not rely on courage
alone, we have to choose what we would like to become. When that
opportunity comes, we must take the tide of the educator and the
legislator, with education taking years and years, and legislation
forming consensus building practices. However, learning about these
things should not only be about the assimilation of information so
that well have enough of what is proper for us to know. What Foucault
wants is that we think for ourselves. We should have a passion for
furthering the boundaries of our knowledge. We cannot just be
complacent about what we already know, for even if we cannot know
everything, we must know what we can for without knowledge the future
is in vain. However, we must remember that having knowledge will never
be enough, we must also be able to think critically on our own. If
not, then we will just become another docile body waiting to be ruled,
like a sheep waiting for its shepherd only to be surprised by the very
fangs of a hungry wolf. One thing to keep in mind though, when
practicing knowledge, is that we must practice what is foreign to us.
Doing the same things over and over again not only dulls our ability
to think critically, it also puts us in a predicament that makes us
prone to becoming unimaginative, stagnating our growth as persons. To
be able to reach our full potential, we must explore our own limits
and go out of our comfort zones that we have so much treated as if it
was a cocoon but in fact it is a coffin that is waiting to be sealed.
The same thing applies in how we write our essays, especially for this
class. A good example of this would be writing as if we were brawling
with what we are writing, rather than just the cut and pasting that
forms cookie cutter mindsets among our mentalities. To be able to be
fully aware of the conditions on the ground, we must practice the
activity of thought, and not just any thought, but critical thinking
at its best. We must be able to see differently from what we can see.
We must expose our own selves to the apparatuses that empowers us to
think in different ways, and to see things in a different light. This
is important if we want to stop the cycle of stagnation in our lives,
and at least conjure up some surprises for ourselves here and there.
With this kind of thinking, we can produce not only for ourselves, but
also for others, a wealth of insight. We become original thinkers who
steps out of our own skins in order to get away from our stagnated
selves. However, right now it is us, the youth, that is considered to
be the most conformist people in the world. The first step into
breaking this stigma is that we have to overcome our obsession with
the self, our idolatrization of ourselves. In order to do this, we
must try to ask the right questions, and then the answers to our
inquiries will come one way or another.

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