Deliberate Alienation: Surrealism and Magical Realism Critical thinking is a terrible thing.

Deliberate Alienation: Surrealism and Magical Realism Critical thinking is a terrible thing.

At least, that seems to be a popular opinion. We live in an age where people are willing to look to anyone but themselves for advice on what they should think. Rather than figure out what their own opinions are, they trust the thinly-veiled slant of the television newscasters, the politics-masquerading-as-reporting of magazines like Time and Newsweek. There are fashion shows and magazines that tell you what you think is stylish. Children in grade school and high school are actually discouraged from thinking differently from their peers or from their teachers. Even television commercials or assigned readings in school that encourage positive behavior are only promoting this phenomenon of mental laziness: whether people are told to think good things or told to think bad things is unimportant; either way they're still not doing their own thinking.

Lest we become a culture of zombies, it seems important somehow to stop this disturbing trend. But how to combat this kind of apathy? Any appeal to the brain-dead must require them to use that very organ which they are allowing to atrophy.

Perhaps some shock therapy is in order. There's a reason our language contains the phrase "to slap some sense into" someone. I propose that the best way to cure such mental apathy is to attack it. By presenting the individual with an apparent reality which contradicts or prevents what s/he is familiar or comfortable with, one would force him/her to spend the necessary cognitive effort to correct or reconcile the discrepancy, or risk existing in an utterly absurd, impossible, and nonsensical world. Purposely inducing cognitive dissonance may be the best...

... middle of paper ...

...e Old Man and the Wormhole." Available online: http://justice.loyola.edu/~mcoffey/ce/wormhole.html , May 9, 2000.

Beckett, Samuel. Waiting For Godot. (New York: Grove Press, 1956.)

Borges, Jorge Luis. Ficciones. (New York: Grove Press, 1962.)

García Màrquez, Gabriel, trans. Gregory Rabassa. One Hundred Years of Solitude. (New York: Harper & Row, 1998.)

Magritte, René. Painting: Le Prêtre Marié (The Married Priest). 1961. Available online: http://www.magritte.com/3_detail.cfm?ID=253 , May 9, 2000.

O'Brien, Dan. "Borges Rides the Cyclone." In Ketchin, Susan, and Neil Giordano, eds. 25 and Under/Fiction. (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997.)

Sartre, Jean-Paul, trans. S. W. Allen. Black Orpheus. (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1948.)

Sartre, Jean-Paul, trans. Lloyd Alexander. The Wall. (New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1975.)