Remember folks; when navigating your way through emergency landing maneuvering, it’s always best to focus on the ground, not the turbulence.

It is a fundamental motivator to know how to keep one’s “eye on the prize” in times of need

This is an excellent insight to have, especially when one pairs the wisdom with other key take away’s, like one of my personal favorites; Don’t Panic, as you have multiple contingencies of reason helping to prop up one cohesive structure of reasoning with each passing posit. All of this is terribly relevant, as this does mark the last Words of Wisdom for 2025, as we are just days away from the year officially closing out. The emergency landing citation is more in reference to how in the last few weeks, a lot of best laid plans were totally thrown off balance, and I had to go a completely different route than originally intended. But as I brought attention too, this ended up being an easy problem to surmount, as I appropriately focused on the ground in my emergency landing rather than the turbulence. How one copes with stress and ultimately, how focused they remain with a cool head in moments of panic, helps reveal a lot about the depth of nature in regards to content of character, and is definitely an excellent way to get to know oneself in the process.

In spite of how nifty the idea behind that emergency landing focus really is, it doesn’t even represent my desired topic of interest involved with the actual Words of Wisdom today…making all that just a fun freebie, so cheers to that. With that in mind, we continue now onto the main course, that being Collective Individualism, the last Words of Wisdom for 2025, and the beginning of a philosophical project of mine moving forward.

In my efforts to continue to cultivate not only my own ethical system, but in refining my own sense of practiced morality, I figured it was about high time to throw my own hat into the ring, in developing my own philosophical thought process, in order to best enhance my own relative distance to understanding, application, theory, execution, and sense of self, in helping achieve a greater end for humanity at large. This of course, in any minimized, focused, compartmentalized acknowledgement, leads me to point out that this article represents merely the first step, in what will otherwise be a lifelong project, so in no way, shape, or form does this represent a completed thought, merely the earliest stages of a proposal as it were, but we must start somewhere. I suppose one could say this process even started more or less with my initial posits found within a previous Words of Wisdom entitled: “memes to an end”, as if this philosophy pans out, it would represent an excellent “meme” to pass on to the next generation, in helping them navigate their own sense of self, in cultivating a much better tomorrow in the process.

So yes, Collective Individualism entails a rational thought process of care, and springs from the initial thought “Empathy is the greatest wisdom”, which is an idea I’ve had kicking around my head for awhile now. I of course, am only one of many who have observed such a reality before, but I’m not sure how many have more succinctly landed on just that isolated thought and concocted an entire thought process solely around it, though you can find plenty of precedent in thought processes in both Greek philosophy, and in Kantian ethics that dive into similar notions, so this insight had been kicking around in some form for thousands of years.

Right, so if empathy is the greatest wisdom, that must mean that caring requires a knowledge and thought on some level, as we must relate the notion of care to the process of contemplation, which I think is a fair notion to surmise, as I don’t think it’s a stretch of reason to say one can’t really start caring about another without first understanding what care even is, the idea of others, a development of sense of self, going through the strokes of comprehending the basics of what morality entails, how ethical systems help shape society, etc. So, while one can definitely care without needing to go through a college level course in logic or the humanities, one needs to exercise some genuine notion of critical thinking and concern involving concepts of worth and value proposition, in order to put forth the notion of why caring matters in the first place. Err, I mean, the very notion of caring., it depends on just how fundamental and which basic building block of existence of nitty gritty we really want to get into, of course, but for the sake of some expediency, let us accept the notion we have agreed to understand the basics of language and sense of self, and are capable of rational thought enough to successfully grapple with the notion of care in a productive manner.

From here, we can now lay the extraordinarily basic groundwork of how empathy relates to wisdom, in reference to the idea of self, the other, and how both combined, coalesce into the moment I refer to as “Self-in-other”, which will be a key pivot point moving forward. This is due to the notion that in the idea of “empathy being the greatest wisdom”, one will need to have an empathetic perspective, in putting their own selves into another person’s body, to best serve the “I-in-them”, as it relates to the concept of “Collective Individualism”, as the whole point relates to the notion that we can all collectively be ourselves, which allows us to salvage the idea of individualism, without giving up on a sense of pluralism at the same time.

…and with all of that said, I look at the clock and realize I must wrap it up to meet my midnight deadline, but no worries. This marks the beginning of an excellent journey of philosophy that lays before us, and one person’s ending is another person’s beginning, so what better way to end 2025, then by starting on a new road of better understanding in the realm of philosophy.

As always, take care of yourself, and others.

-Pashford