Think! bossiness

From The Free Society website

“Think! Recycle.” Good old Chiltern Council. There was I selfishly not thinking. I might, heavens above, have thrown a plastic bottle into the wrong bin. What a useful message to have on the side of a refuse lorry.
“Think! Watch your speed.” That got, me, that one. I was doing my normal 70 miles an hour on my cut-through, taking the kids to school (no point hanging about) and noticed that sign out of the corner of my eye. Brakes went on then I can tell you, what with me not thinking and all.
“Think! Don’t drink and drive.” Eight-thirty in the morning, after I’d dropped the children off, I was just on the point of leaving the motorway, popping down the offie, bashing the door down, half-inching a bottle of Scotch and knocking it back before starting work – I’m an ambulance driver, you know. Sets you up, half a bottle of Scotch. Silly me. Thank the Lord for the Highways Agency for putting me right on that one.
Indeed, are we not fortunate, in the first decade of the 21st century, to have so many people telling us to think?
That nice podgy Jamie Oliver has been touring our schools telling the (mainly skinny) school children to stop eating sausages. Naturally we’ve been told in no uncertain terms to stop smoking. Politicians are selflessly flying the world to the best air-conditioned hotels to attend global warming conferences to make sure the rest of desist from flying, driving, using plastic bags, eating meat. Campaigners are making sure we buy only fair trade coffee and bananas (although this isn’t particularly fair on the coffee growers who don’t have the support of a western charity telling them how to be fair trade coffee growers).
We’re told too not to be sexist, racist, homophobic. Not once, every day. Much of a child’s geography schoolwork now consists of being told that naughty naughty loggers are chopping down trees in the rain forest, a region an inhospitable region full of things that will kill you they’re told would be paradise, were it not for us (adopt tone of contempt here) greedy Westerners.
None of this has anything to do with thinking. This is to do with bossing us about. Patronising us. The exhortation Think! is letting you know that as far as the authorities are concerned you’re going about your life in some sort of gormless Neanderthal stupor that requires someone of greater intelligence and sensibility (theirs) to pull you out of.
But thinking is based upon drawing on an aggregation of facts and acting upon them. It’s called growing up.
In a free society, we educate our children by giving them the tools which to think and then put them out into the world to become responsible adults. In repressive societies run by men with moustaches, we brainwash them into believing a set of value judgments we have decided are absolutes by which we have to live. And then, not trusting them to be adults, we keep thrusting them down their throats by using patronising posters.
We should be horrified at the one that ours is most starting to resemble.