Five Philosophical Arguments as Illustrated by Tom Cruise’s Divorce

1. “It is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.” John Stuart Mill said this to illustrate that it’s better to indulge in high order thinking with an open mind but not have a totally cakewalk life than it is to have all of your basic needs fulfilled but no mental capability. Think of it like this…  you can be married to Tom Cruise and have lots of money and attention but you have to turn your brain off to the fact that he’s a total creepster cult ass freak, or you can be a lonely, less rich single mother but able to think for yourself. Truly wise philosophers would pick the latter.

2. Tabula rasa vs. innate ideas. John Locke thought we were born as blank slates with no knowledge already ‘in’ us. This influenced many of his beliefs including the fact that the only way to truly know something was through experience. Rene Descartes thought the opposite, that there were already certain basic concepts on your mind at the time of birth, and you built off of that. Suri Cruise with her dead wolf eyes and penchant for standing around looking like an expensive ragdoll has proven John Locke’s theory.

3. “I think therefore I am.” Descartes again, trying to prove a related theory that one can know with certainty that one’s self exists because that self is a thinking thing. (I bet you’re totally bummed because you’d heard that phrase before and didn’t realize it meant something so lame, right?) Anyway, seems like word on the street/People.com is that Katie made a snap decision to leave Tom. Not really sure what happened—maybe she met someone else or saw a vision of the Virgin Mary drawing her back to Catholicism or maybe she found Tom’s secret drawer of naked pics of Matthew McConaughey—but regardless it seems like she was like “oh hey I’m a real person I can actually make this decision for myself.”

4. A gadfly to the people of Athens. Socrates called himself a ‘gadfly’ (sort of like a horsefly) to the people of Athens because he thought his god-given role in life was to mentally bite people (like an annoying fly) by asking people questions in order to expose that they were ignorant, so that they could devote their life to philosophy to learn more. Kind of an a-hole. Tom Cruise’s god-given role was to captivate our attention by annoyingly jumping on a couch and telling the entire world about his relationship, only to prove how ignorant we were for caring when it unceremoniously ended a couple years later.

5. “Nasty, brutish and short.” Thomas Hobbes used this phrase to describe what life would be like in a society without government. Not only does this literally describe TomKat’s marriage, but also proves why it’s a wonderful thing we have divorce lawyers!