In a misguided attempt to get ahead on blog posts, I’m going to work on why the world is messed up today. (Hint: it’s a fast one!)
So here’s the thing; I finished reading this book called “Risk” which I bought about two years ago and which has since been relegated to the “to read” shelf. I finally got around to it. The main points in this book make me re-evaluate why we’re messed up (which we are); we (North American Types) are currently the safest, longest lived, richest, best educated people in the history of the human race. Everything is in our corner. Canadians have that bonus Health Care scenario. So why are we all so terrified all the time. The book cited the fact that due to fear of airlines after the 9/11 attacks, 1500 extra people died in traffic collisions in the US alone due to the excess traffic congestion.
What the hell people?
The gist of everything is that we still use our gut more than we’d like to admit, (I should probably throw my “Rational Animal” post up in here before this one) and that as rational as we believe we are it’s all a lie. We’re all messed up because we’re designed to believe everything we hear, see and smell. As evolution goes, the charming folks that decided on clothing and eating food with forks are still babies. We’ve barely done anything in the world evolutionarily. We’re the hominids that hunt bison and discuss that the fruit on the first shrub looks tasty but actually killed Lois over there. The second bush is where the good food is. That’s still how we work.
Ironically, the really rational people out there are derided as having no human instincts...even though that’s sort of our downfall. You’ll find them in Asperger’s cases and the surprisingly brilliant. In a lot of the second class you can almost see the switch turn. You know these people too. They’re the ones you ask when you want the logical choice. They’re the ones you go to with a quandary and start the question with “you’re the most rational person I know...” They flip a switch in their brains to “rational” and dispel any emotional arguments you try to throw in the pot to confuse things.
And then, after all that...we do what we want anyways. Mostly because we’re weak and think we know what’s best for ourselves. Fact of the matter is that we don’t. Left to our own devices we’d often make the wrong choice (see that post about freedom and autonomy) because we throw emotions into everything, and those guys are messy pigs. They apply weight to things that may have no absolute consequence and apply very little to that which really matters in the discussion. What happens in the end is that we buy things we don’t need, we make a choice we ultimately regret, we employ the hindsight principle. That’s the annoying guy you spill your past to who says “well, hindsight’s 20/20” Sure it is. You have information you could never gain in the moment. What
What the jackass comment is trying to point out is that none of us really know what’s going on.
Or maybe he’s trying to be a jackass. That one’s hard to say, though it is a shocking realization to know that everyone is just faking it in the world, trying to make it all look like they’ve got it under control. Nobody does, nobody ever does. Nobody ever has. That’s the important part here. Hominid woke up every morning and said “hey, I didn’t get killed overnight. Cool.” and went on existing, because he was too fucking busy to worry about what it all means. He had to make sure he ate that day, found some safe water and kept his family safe, and with good reason. We “modern folk” have too much spare time. It’s the one thing we desperately want and we waste it with thinking. We’re really new at this step. We’re not used to not seeing our buddies trying to be killed every day. So we’re wasting the time that we would be using to stay alive by hanging around on the internet (guilty as charged) and trying to wax poetic on the weirdness of our existence. We’re not changing anything, we’re basically in the same spot as when Gutenberg invented the printing press. Only difference is that time has elapsed so new things that our brains don’t instinctively understand exist.
This is getting sort of ramble-y. Posse out.
