Practicality Is Now Our Great Idol

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"Practicality is now our great idol, which all powers and talents must serve. Anything that is not obviously practical has little value in today's world." I believe this statement represents, to a great extent, the prevailing state of mind of modern society, esspecially that of western society. This state of mind may, in some cases, originate from pure pragmatism, and in this case constitute a way of life. However, I believe that nowdays this "practicality" is mostly due to financial reasons which are a derivative of a the capitalistic society we live in. Many examples arise in academic contexts, where pure intellectual curiosity is not sufficient any more to justify an academic research and the utilization of financial resources needed. A recent example is the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Many people question it's practical value and wonder about the large amounts of money being spent on this project for no apperent practical reason. However, I believe this practical state of mind, and the longing for applicability are exaggerated and may even be dangerous, since, no matter how much we try, we can't always predict the the exact outcomes of our actoins. Therefore, even if we accept the ideal of practicality, we don't know a priori what practical use may be risen from a non practical point of origin, or vice versa. This notion is manifested in the CERN example, which, aside of its pure intellectual achievments, has contributed a great deal to technological progress, and was in its previous incarnation the birth place of the World Wide Web, which is one of the most important inventions of our time and is undaoutfually of practical use, but was in some sense a byproduct of this project, rather than a preliminary goal . In conclusion, I believe that this state of mind of practicality constitute in some sense a short term vision, that is, it
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