On Thinking About "One Size Fits All"

One size fits all - I like the feel of this phrase.

Sometimes I simply like to evaluate these North American sayings. Eventually we'll stop creating proverbs or even cliches; we'll just have commercials. Lingo. Jargon.

It's maddening to think about the endless inconsistencies that trouble any philosophy. Perhaps it is merely a product of being an undergraduate, struggling to grasp the weight of hundreds of years of thinking - how every idea comes from other splintered ideas, all native to different times and spaces. Scholarship, or at least my experience with it, is chocked full of disconnected ideas. We seem to break things apart to better understand them. You'll hear about some thing's political relevance, or its social relevance, its relevance to the environment or to economics, rarely do you discuss an idea as such. Perhaps we do this in philosophy. Philosophy seems to be the only discipline capable of getting down to brass tacks and committing itself to the honest toil of human thought.

I'm going somewhere with this: I think we've taken this 'one size fits all' attitude and mapped it all over ourselves. It seeps into all our institutions and habits.

I'm getting a 'one size fits all' education.

I write 'one size fits all' songs.

At a time when we are allegedly expanding our borders and constantly coming face to face with new realities, we are boiling everything down to a lowest common denominator, cause' we're lazy. All of our sub-dividing makes real consideration impossible. If I look at a group of people and gather up a series of characteristics they all seem to share I marginalize them and my own knowledge. It's bigger than stereotyping - it's in everything. We are incapable of seeing the big picture.

It's those fucking microwaves. Maybe I'm not as lazy cause I never had one. But we can get anything warmed up in a couple minutes. The Internet - we can watch or buy or listen to whatever we want in a couple minutes, which is fine. However, when we can't figure something out in a couple minutes - when we stare into the vast abyss of all our unsolved problems we cower, searching frantically for a way to speed up our enlightenment, which seems inherently counter productive.

I hope I'm not turning myself into some kind of moch-guru-blog-guy. You know, the kind of person who clutters the Internet with "wisdom" - I'm just thinking out loud here. 'One size fits all' is an interesting concept, especially when you look at it not just as a slogan or a manufacturing tool, but in its relation to everything it touches.