"This is Water" speaks to that idea, but it seems disingenuous to claim that a liberal arts education is a particularly effective way of raising awareness. It often seems to take the automatic thoughts that he projects on the audience and replace them with other automatic thoughts, rather than providing tools for people to break that cycle in themselves and other people.
But, if I'm misunderstanding his point, please make me aware. David Foster Wallace is someone that other people I respect show respect to (Jason Wilkes in Burn Math Class), but this speech left me puzzled.
His point is that the liberal arts method of teaching critical thinking is designed to force the student to comprehend and empathically understand the lived experience of other individuals and their concomitant perspective in a given situation. If one is incapable of abstracting their perception from the context, they are forever doomed to only understand the world around them as-is.
The unenlightened fish sees only the world as he or she experiences it, but those equipped with the right cognitive skills are able to recognize the milieu or ether that constitutes the social world. The ability to recognize the "water" empowers the observer to be aware of the current and the current's effect on other fish.
This is his point about controlling one's internal voice in the grocery store line. The unenlightened fish will simply rage against the water, angry that it is muddied by those ahead swimming incorrectly. The enlightened fish understands that each fish is engaged in its own struggle against the current. That struggle is muddying the waters, and recognizing that fact allows the enlightened fish to understand why those ahead are stirring up the sediment. They are simply trying, as the enlightened fish is, to fight the current. Understanding this allows the enlightened fish to hold them blameless. Holding them blameless (or at least understanding them as fish) grants the power to control how one feels about the muddied waters and the responsible fish.
Hope that helps!
