What is deemed, intellectual progress depends entirely on men’s continual mental entanglements and disagreements. For the mental world to survive and thrive, ideas cannot be left be since ideas left to themselves quickly perish.
Men, by nature, cannot leave one another alone mentally. They are instinctively driven to constantly pick at one another’s thoughts. Men are intended to respond to one another’s thoughts as surely as does a cat to a swung string. Men’s ordinary mind simply cannot contain itself and will reflexively reach out and take a swipe at almost any thought swung before it. (In the realm of the mind, if the lion and lamb do lay down together they will still be arguing. The Land Of Thought, The Peaceable Kingdom is not nor ever will be).
Men are combination doers and story-tellers, and if your aim is to be something more, then if what someone else is doing is not physically infringing on your life – leave them alone. Specifically: leave their story-telling alone. What another does can be of consequence to your life. The stories they tell can only be if you respond to them. If you are so ordinary as to mistake words for deeds, you are the seeming for the actual.
Leave everyone alone mentally. Let everyone be free to tell and believe whatever stories strike their fancy. This will leave you finally free to see.
J.