Thinking, properly understood as a drug, requires some explanation and quite a lot of justification, if we are to choose the right pill.  Trust me; you do want to choose wisely.  What is thinking?  Why is it a drug?

Because thinking requires emotional force on the part of the individual, it demands power.  Where is the power to be generated?  Unlike the voyeur monk’s power, produced by plugging-in to something without, the thinker’s power comes strictly from within.  No help.  No welfare state.  No technology.  The very act of generating the power is an act of CREATION.  Let us do a test right here, right now.  This moment is our proving ground.  Will you play along?  Do not be afraid or insecure, nobody’s watching.  I hope.

TEST PROTOCOL
1. Re-Read closely the last paragraph.
2. Breathe Deep.
3. Read the following question: What the hell am I doing with my life?
4. Move six feet away from your screen.
5. Close your eyes and do not open them until you have completely answered the question in protocol 3.
6. Return, temporarily, to your screen.  Thank you for taking the test.

Well?  How did that feel?  Certainly you felt something.  This is what I mean by emotional force.  The question you answered could not have been searched via an engine outside of yourself.  This is what I mean by self-generated power being an act of creation.  If having your eyes closed while answering the question was akin to the taste of medicine (see Cross-eyed and Painless), good, now you may start to understand why thinking is a drug and more especially why thinking is a stimulant.  Always discomforting going down, awkward palate in the first instant, but loads of excitement around the corner.  Think about it.  No one outside of yourself (thus no one outside of your control) can demand that you “take your medicine” anymore.  You have creative control over your thinking.  This dynamic is a MORAL GOOD.  This dynamic is a weapon to combat the voyeurs for their own good.  But they will not understand this initially.  Things could get ugly, but so be it, things are already ugly.    

Share the test above with your friends, even if they are the most information indoctrinated voyeurs.  They will likely be receptive because we are agreeing to play on their own turf, of course their turf being the screen.  But please, while we play on their turf, we do not and will never, play by their feckless lack of rules.  We will never again take their medicine.
        

This is the opening salvo in defense of the very nearly lost great art of thinking.  Between the “good,” indolent need to believe anything and the myopic arrogance to doubt everything lay the new, fundamentally monastic, dull-eyed voyeurs.  Quite literally, their eyes are more akin to the catatonic, Chinese-made Anglo dolls with grim smiles peddled at the local Wal-Mart at low, low prices than real, vibrant animate eyes.  These voyeurs-- maybe even you--pose the clear and present danger to all true investigation, curiosity, and aesthetics.  The voyeurs watch, scan, scroll, and secure almost know-thing for themselves—no seizure, no earning, no struggle, in short, no material reality at all.  Their existence is a false and vapid cocoon maintained by unthinking, nurtured by unthinking, rewarded by self-congratulation.

Hence, their new monasteries are singular, insular, and dangerously alienating, connected only by ones, zeroes and the monotone droning hum of white noise.  Go on, listen really carefully.  I wager you can hear it now louder than you might like to admit.  Admittedly, it is a dastardly and needful thing that I do even this moment.  It is exactly this perverse and deeply ironic disconnection from the sensual that makes the voyeuristic information zealots so exceedingly recalcitrant and nearly impossible to engage in honest argument.  For they have so totally and completely framed themselves as being informed, “plugged-in” and beyond reproach that, truly, on blind faith alone, they ABSOLUTELY BELIEVE in their stunted frame.  [I should make clear that this framing takes place within a broader regime of banality that loudly applauds them for this exact framing.]  In this respect, an unnatural religion has been created, forged if you will, like all sadistic, absolute religions across time.  All religions wound, often industriously, always without apology.

And here is where this opening salvo, without ricochet, hits the mark.  The modern voyeurs, like all prodigious watchers, tend to most often miss what is just before their nose as they transfix on the given fetish at a point certain in the visual field.  In the modern dilemma, this overlooking is insidious and disturbing because what they transfix upon is the screen, either little or big, in their hand or on their bed, eighteen to twenty inches (do the measurement right now) in front of their face.  What they are missing is the FACT that data and information, pasted on a screen, is not KNOWLEDGE.

The mass confusion and consequent delusion, produced by the mis or mal identification of data and information for knowledge has now so diseased our politics, art, and community that direct action is necessary, redux matters, and the time is now, if ever.  The offensive, but sadly also reactionary, stimulant I have in mind, is thinking.