Isolation, then knowledge.

"It’s a simple idea really. To view something as an object of knowledge, to know it, is to see it as something distinct from oneself. Our first parents, however, because they were fully one with divinity and all creation could view nothing as separate from them and therefore could not know anything. Adam and Eve lacked the alienation inherent in the process of knowing – what philosophers call epistemological space. Without that distance they could only be, they could never know. We are doomed to knowing, as well as being, so all our paradises can only be artificial."

Therefore, one needs to be isolated outside in order to evaluate and see everything in it’s totality and see the thing as it “is”. One cannot observe society from the middle of it’s “circles” and expose it’s weaknesses for it would be plain suicide for that individual to do so for society is based on the “consensus truth”, the set of truths that ensures that it will run smoothly and that everyone is safe. Disagreeing with the consensus truth will make one a threat to the safety of the society and that is why there are those social outcasts, ridiculed by the general society. Recognize yourself and your identity in the midst of a society which tells you what you are and what you should do. It is then that you could be alienated from society and start your examination of yourself and your society.

With these facts on mind, we can hope to explain the alienation of the author. The author, seeing mistakes, inefficiencies and the sick cycle of events that are wrong but are preserved for they are tradition and in the vernacular “ang nakasanayan na”, has distanced himself from a specific circle/society and from this started hurling questions towards the consensus truths it has managed to establish in it’s 40-something years of existence. We now ask his friends to understand him in his fits of madness and in the times that he denounces the various injustices and inefficiencies of the circles described here.

-Inspired by Howard V. Hendrix’s Lightpaths and dedicated to SHIM Hae-won (not her true name) who is the most industrious and dedicated junior board running for a position in the economics society student council. We hope that she wins and starts the eventual restructuring of the often annoying and un-entertaining (at least entertain me!) campaign strategy of the said student council candidates.