|
Reader question: Please explain “distinguish the wheat from the chaff” in this sentence - Many of us become unwilling to take the mental and spiritual effort required to distinguish the wheat from the chaff of what we’re hearing. My comments: The wheat stands for the good and valuable, the chaff the bad and worthless. To paraphrase the speaker, we don’t know what’s good for us. We believe in hearsay – We hear others say and believe it without questioning. Many of us are like that, says the speaker. Most of us as a matter of fact. Granted, that society trains us not to ask uncomfortable questions. Hence we are wont to take things for granted. But most of our problems, the way I see it at any rate, are self-inflicted. All of our problems in fact, if you think a bit about it. The point is we can’t blame for society for our problems – potential ignorance in this case. Society is what it is and many people say there’s nothing we can do about it. Well, that’s probably true that we as insignificant, anonymous individuals can’t do much about society at large. But that’s neither here nor there because we as individuals should not be looking to change society as our primary goal in the first place. What we should set as a goal is to change ourselves – become a better informed individual and every day become a better person. | 
