Analyze. Question. Change. Live.

"Stop analyzing!"

This is the refrain of many who spend even a small amount of time in my company.

I answer truthfully: "I can't." But there is another answer, just as truthful, that I don't say: "I won't."

The most important feature of life, what differentiates it from the natural processes of the mechanical universe, is that it changes-- randomly, unpredictably. A star will go on burning hydrogen for billions of years along a path predicted by scientists millenia ago; but life cannot be tracked, plotted, equated so easily-- or in fact at all.

Life pushes forward, always. It struggles against control, towards freedom, breaking away by any means necessary. It seeks its own path.

Life is change, and stasis is death. To remain still and constant and unchanged-- that is death. This is the meaning behind carpe diem, whatever its literal translation.

Applied to intelligence, this imperative manifests thusly: always question. Always analyze. Never be satisfied with the conclusions of others-- or even your own. Always know for yourself. Don't trust anything or anyone. Evaluate and reevaluate everything you think you know, and do it again and again. (See the world through a child's eyes.)

Sound cynical? Selfish? Distrustful, at least? It is, all of it. That is why love is so powerful, why faith and mercy mean so much: because they are the opposite of the biological imperative to change and question. Our biology makes us selfish creatures, and to exist otherwise requires a conscious act of willpower--

--except when we override our biology with convention, custom, tradition, and societal imperative: don't question. Don't analyze. Accept what you are told. Do only as much work as necessary. Be happy with what you have. We encourage not only a physical but a mental laziness, teaching people to take the easy way out in the short term to their detriment in the long term.

Truth lies in the difference between what we're told and what we're shown, between the hero's words and the hero's actions, between the news report and the reality. A movie tells us its main character is the good guy; but his actions, when we look at them, demonstrate otherwise. A reporter claims that a crime happened one way, when the available evidence suggests an entirely different, less scandalous conclusion.

Blind faith isn't true faith; that requires understanding. Believing what we're told without question is stupidity, and laziness, and apathy, sins giftwrapped in a pretty package for people to placate themselves with.

Complacency, not terrorists or wars or even internal strife, is what destroys empires, because it is what destroys human beings. When we stop questioning, analyzing, changing, living-- that's when a soul dies, not when a body is buried six feet under. And when the foundation rots, even the grandest structures can be toppled by the slightest of winds.