We shape our minds by active responses to our immediate environments and maybe to greater realms of Creation. Even without active responses, something like a flabby mind takes shape. The flabby mind of a modern man is invincibly ignorant in the sense that it’s shaped to what’s pushed into it by the public school system and the mainstream media, including our movies and popular books. This mainstream view, at least in the United States, serves the purpose of avoiding true thought, especially that which might resemble moral contemplation. It’s pseudo-knowledge feeding into spastic thought and it presents more of the appearance of a mind than the reality. It’s not quite the reality of a mind because it’s shaped to a distorted version of reality, not a reality directly perceived and not one mediated by reliable witnesses and teachers but rather a pseudo-reality which is constructed for a certain sort of public consensus.
It’s the formation of a consensus, of a herd-like mind, which has always been important to the American citizenry as we know from the early testimony of reliable witnesses and commentators of the quality of Tocqueville and Hawthorne and Melville moving through Mark Twain and on to Ray Bradbury and Hannah Arendt and other thinkers linked by their insight into the modern moral character.
The American citizenry did this to their collective self and their individual selves and then various sorts of predatory or exploitive men took advantage of this herd of creatures with mutilated moral characters and minds. The exploiters hijacked the process and began to direct the herd-thought and herd-memory, the herd’s understanding of history and of the world in general, towards purposes of their own, though their efforts and their visions of a desired herdview were probably not well-focused and not always consistent between the different groups of exploiters. This is to say that the American exploitive class doesn’t really seem to think more effectively than the common members of the herd, though some in the exploitive class are clearheaded enough to run complex criminal conspiracies. A J.P. Morgan or a Lyndon Johnson can certainly see a well-defined opportunity and can map out a path to reach that opportunity with all due brutality.
But let’s return to discussion of the state of the minds of individual members of the herd. A passive body has flabby muscles and a passive brain has a flabby mind.
What can lead us to be passive rather than active in shaping our minds? Why would we accept a filtered and agenda-laden view of our environments and respond to that rather than to reality? We could guess that some behave in such a passive way because they believe that their minds as they currently exist are what they inherently are, are what they must be, are all they can be. That isn’t likely to be the whole answer, but it might be a good part of a more complete answer.
Sure enough, there is an article, How Your Brain Reacts to Mistakes Depends On Your Mindset, which deals with a study that shows that human beings who have this fatalistic view of their own minds don’t learn well from their mistakes.
We should try to shape our minds as well as possible, shaping them with active responses to valid perceptions of what lies around us, including such things as an understanding of history derived from books, maybe even movies, that give us some information about the social attitudes in Boston during the Colonial Period or the political behaviors of good and virtuous popes who found themselves embedded in webs of deceit and thievery, or the types of men who seek careers in powerful and centralized governments — those with the moral characters of gangsters according to Lord Acton, the 19th century historian.
Yet, we should remember that the Bible, and much else that testifies to the nature of human beings, testify that some of us are shepherds and some are sheep. We can speak of those who fill an official spot in a hierarchy as being shepherds and often they do fill an important role just by going through rote behavior even if they aren’t active enough to be true shepherds. Then there are those who are more natural in the role of being shepherds or at least of being sheep willing to go ahead of the flock to check out new pastures.
We need shepherds, and leader sheep, to teach the sheep to be better than what the power-elite wish them to be. First of all, the sheep in the main part of the flock need to be told they’re being shaped to the desires of their would-be butchers. Then they can be told that they can do better. Finally, they can be taught about better pastures around them and maybe even be taught how to explore new regions.
Most of all, we all need to learn that we’re going to be resurrected to share the life of the Shepherd, Jesus Christ, not to be bleating sheep for time without end. We all need to shape ourselves to the goal of being shepherds in at least some ways, most especially, in choosing to be active in our responses to what lies around us, to what was created by God. In this way, we actively respond to God Himself.