The unexamined life

Unlike Socrates, I think the unexamined or unexamining life can be worth living, but only by those who can live it. Whether some daimon or some demon compels it, others must examine, and if that examining is uninstructed and unaccompanied, it is a torment that twists and cripples thought. I have often thought that many of the strangest elaborations of religion must have their origin in the undirected examinations of compelled minds. Even a land-bound peasant or a stone age tribesman may be born with such a mind, and lacking any lightning-rod to direct his inspirations harmlessly, his mind must instead blaze up and burn without relief. The intricacies of pre-modern magic, medicine, and mythology testify to the perverse ingenuity devoted to them. As there are fewer and fewer living men with whom life may be examined, those who must examine their lives draw ever closer to the savage's desperate isolation of mind. The great rise in conspiracy theories may in part come from that loss of all prior thought.

In Xenophon's Memorabilia, Socrates describes just the union of society and learning that is the rightly directed use and the satisfaction of a compelled mind:

The treasures of the wise of old, written and bequeathed in their books, I unfold and peruse in common with my friends. If our eye light upon any good thing we cull it eagerly, and regard it as great gain if we may but grow in friendship with one another.