Let me begin this Sub-Chapter on Creative Change by repeating a saying I once heard (I can’t remember when or where) that the two most important days in our lives are the day we’re born and the day we realise why we were born.
What is our purpose on this Earth anyway?
Socrates the Greek philosopher is reported to have said that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’.
I don’t think that Socrates (or anyone else) has the last word on whether or not our lives are worth living – but the saying has survived over twenty-four centuries so perhaps it struck a chord with people who write books and decide what to include in them and what not.
I assume that Socrates, wise man that he was, intended that his statement would encourage us ordinary people to reflect on and examine our lives. But hidden within it is there an implication that there are people who don’t examine their lives?
The danger is that such a statement could be used (perhaps has been – for all I know) by powerful people to decide whether or not entire races’ lives are worth living.
For example, in the centuries of European colonialism of the Americas and subsequent slavery, where black people were thought to be inferior to white people, and could be enslaved, bullied, bought, sold, owned, killed with impunity and had zero rights, Socrates’ statement about whose lives were worth living may have been interpreted by power-hungry narcissists who promoted the pseudo-science of eugenics to maintain that there were people who did not have enough intelligence to examine their lives so to speak.
Therefore it was a lot easier to convince people in the colonising countries that the lives of people in colonised countries were not worth living.
I don’t know this – I am merely speculating on the evidence of hundreds of years of exploitation and my experience of growing up in a country that was colonised – but the fact that the statement has survived so long, and is remembered (if not revered) by philosophers is telling in itself.