Does man have the capacity to think an original thought? Are we all trained to think a certain way? Are we all sheep?

My father was a pilot in the strategic air command during the Cold War. He was trained, ready and willing to drop nuclear weapons on the earthly population. I remember, (I was between ten and fourteen years old), during the Sixties and early Seventies protests; he told me that communists were over here manipulating the young people into their actions. At the time, I was a little confused by that statement, because I felt that what the protesters were doing was right, and no communists, (that I knew of), had talked to me. And yet I looked up to my father and respected him to much to argue with him. So, I thought he may be right and I held distrust in my heart for what the students were doing. In later years, I talked to my father about the protests and he continued to state that communists had influenced the thoughts and actions of he protesters.

I remember thinking that he himself was so brain washed and manipulated by the government that he could not see the purity of the thoughts of the protesters. I believed that he, not them was being manipulated and controlled. It is now 1996 and I am still grappling with these thoughts.

I believe there is no original idea and no original thought. Every thought that you and I have is based upon your history, our communication and interaction with others. We build our thoughts and ideas by choosing among those presented to us. We think in words, and we have feelings. The feelings we have are biological, each of us have them, so they are not original. Every word you know is learned. It may be necessary to have to make up a word to communicate to others something before not known; hence the word “cyberspace”. Cyberspace in its self was not an original idea. Cyberspace is only a word to describe an environment or medium.

I remember reading of an experiment during the middle ages in Scotland. It was not known at the time weather language was inherited or learned. In order to find out, they put a baby in isolation and never spoke to it. Never even let it see them. According to the article this experiment lasted many years. How can we know the thoughts of this person? Is this person human? It would be an original idea if this isolated person had the idea of freedom.

When I first started working on the SOCOL 2 one of the seaman had told me that the white races needed to help each other in the face of being dominated by the other races. I was very much saddened by this statement, for I had always heard that the communist system had eliminated racial tension. As I have found out, there is much class structure and white male dominance in the soviet system. Women are not to be found in high positions of authority, and the laborer is looked down on by the “white collar” man. The military is in charge of running the country. I don’t know if it is the same all over Russia but here on the East coast there are check points every so often along the roads. Everyone must have an passport. It and the contents of your vehicle are checked.

The craziest situation is at the ship. Sometimes when we come into port there are guards stationed fore and aft and at the gang way. In order to get off the ship one must surrender ones passport. Even if you need only to walk twenty feet away to look at the ships draft you must surrender your passport. The guards are young kids and know nothing, yet they have an incredible amount of authority.