Wednesday 17 December 2014

How does any of this happen?

Turning off quality controls now...
A lot of the time the world doesn't make sense at all, or more specifically the people don't make sense. It's very hard for a river to not make sense, or a boulder, but people take to it naturally it seems. A religious group besieges a school in Pakistan and 145 people are killed. Torture is used by the so-called liberal countries of the world to extract information. Intolerance, inequality, and divisiveness seems to reign supreme and what gets done about it all? At least Cuba and the US seem to be putting the past behind them, which is one good thing, even as Russia becomes more and more of a problem.

The hardest thing to understand in the people of the world is the apparently widespread inability to accept plurality of beliefs. Person A believes in one thing and Person B in another, and so do they agree to disagree, or even engage in a friendly debate? No, because A and/or B is incapable of accepting plurality of thought and they fight to the death. Madness, and it's even worse when it comes to matters of the faith! You would think that when it comes to unprovable beliefs people would get along in a shared house of tolerance but no...

Actually I have a crackpot theory about fanaticism and religious intolerance, which states that intolerance and fanaticism is broadly linked to insecurity within the fanatic. People who truly believe in something wouldn't need to go mad in attacking other people's faiths; It's much like the man in his mid-life crisis trying to act young and convince other people to bury his own rampant insecurities. I'll have to watch out for this myself, and try not to start buying sports bikes and giant sombreros in 2019. End of crackpot theory, which may well already exist out there anyway. Of course this theory doesn't allow for people driven by massive egos but that's another story.

This inability with plurality is inexplicable on many levels, as a lot of human behaviour can be. How do all these terrible things happen? And why? How do companies get so ridiculously big that they lose all touch with morality? What is the deal with professionals charging hundred of pounds per hour? Why does any of it make sense? Maybe it doesn't make sense, and trying to find a reason drives people insane? You can't help but feel bad for Obama, trapped in the middle of a sea of lunatics, fully aware that a rotten person could get much more done in his job than a decent one. See, there is political comment sometimes, superficial though it might be.

Somehow optimism lives on though. Good things do happen, and life does go on. People help other people and random acts of kindness continue. It's easy to forget when the news is filled with bad things and neglects the good, but pluses do exist. Plurality does exist, too. Non-fanatical people from different beliefs can and do coexist and even get on together. If you can understand that liking something isn't equivalent to it being good, or believing something isn't the same as it being absolutely true then the world is truly a fascinating place of variety, wonder and diversity. Just watch out for the ones who can't see that, or watch beautiful clouds on happy summer evenings and be dazzled, or smell a flower on the road less travelled.

O.

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