Joe Sixpack and the unexamined life

I am going to guess that the tighter outfits were the ones with more stress like guys in combat, or maybe even if they have a tough sergeant or captain or whatever.  You know, having a common enemy brings people together, like you said how people fighting a war generally unite but once the war is over they go back to hating whatever group they hated before.  Like I said, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, but once the enemy is vanquished that friend goes back to being my enemy.

I remember the Vietnam vets talking about that single tour of Vietnam thing.  Some thought it hurt the war effort because instead of concentrating on defeating the enemy people were concentrating on getting through their tour alive.  This makes some sense to me and I wonder how and why they came up with that formulation, maybe the Beaglesonian military expert knows the answer.

I think we are making a mistake in calling these guys 'workers.'  Workers implies a sort of blue collar, joe sixpack kind of guy, and I don't think we are talking about that.  I think what we are talking about are kind of quiet guys who go to work and go home, and don't make many waves, guys you never read about in the newspapers, but they could be really rich guys or really poor guys.

Guys like you or me, anybody tells us anything, and then asks us what we think about it, and almost everytime we have something to say about it.  But the guys I am talking about, the boring guys, are the guys who just shrug their shoulders, either they think this is some way of playing it safe and not offending anybody or else they are not in the habit of thinking anything and are not about to start now.

I remember running into a lot of guys like that doing my temp jobs.  We could talk about the job we were doing, or the weather, or of course sports, but when it came to something interesting, when it came to what do you think about this, generally something about religion or politics or philosophy, they had nothing to say.

Maybe philosophy.  I keep going back to Socrate's the unexamined life is not worth living.  So you see he had the same problem too.  He was surrounded by guys who when he asked them about free will vs determinism for instance, didn't know and didn't care.  It's not like Socrates cared which way they thought, he just wanted to start a conversation.  Here he was in Greece the center of Thinking Clearly, at the time when Thinking Clearly was just getting started and he tries to get a rise out of Joe Exi Paketo (Joe Sixpack according to Google translate) and all the guy wants to talk about is who does he think is going to win the Olympics.  It must have pissed Socrates off.

It pissed me off too, trying to have an interesting conversation and running into that wall of indifference.  I wanted to shake them, shout in their ears, "How can you lead that unexamined life?"  The next thing you know, nobody wanted to talk to me.

I guess that's what I mean by quest, philosophy.  Not so much the naval contemplation, seems like most people who do that are just following a fad, following instructions in some strange book without really thinking about it much.

That's what I think.