HOW THE WORLD WORKS

This is something I’ve tried before but it’s always muddled out in a mess. It is probably the biggest idea one could contemplate, how the world works. How a fork works is easy; you snag some food on the pointy end, hang on to the other end and transfer the morsel into your mouth. The world is another story. To go there one must be ready to create a library or limit the scope to a manageable, few paragraphs. I failed in previous attempts to limit the scope sufficiently.

The first thing is make the distinction between the physical earth; core, mantle, continents, seas and atmosphere, as opposed to the human experience. Matter comes in several forms; solid, liquid, gas and plasma. They behave predictably, in compliance with natural laws such as gravity, conservation of matter and energy, electromagnetism, thermodynamics and such. With all of those laws stirring the pot, although not succinctly a law; things change. Tectonic plates migrate, ice ages come and go, so do mountain ranges and the climate changes. The planet has been on its evolutionary path for billions of years. People, as we know them have only been around for a million years or so.

For people, a working world not only includes the physical part but it also requires the human experience. Human nature can be reduced to four words: Seek Pleasure, Avoid Pain. We are sentient creatures, self aware. Not only do we think, we think about thinking (Metacognition). Self awareness includes the knowledge of mortality. We know in advance that someday, we don’t know when, but in the end we die and it’s scary to think about. From an evolutionary standpoint, the human experience 50,000 years ago was, without a doubt, scary and dangerous. There was something about everything that generated fear. There was something about the human triumphs of cooperation and language that facilitated a creative process. We invented tools that allowed us to advance as a culture, toward civilization. Back when humans recognized that the shape of one stick was better suited for digging while another stick would make a better weapon, they were asking themselves, why and how does that work? But their knowledge base was limited to what they could see with the naked eye and could be explained by their experience. Everything that couldn’t be explained was attributed to a mystical, supernatural entity and there was a lot of that. But they were creators, they invented tools and gave birth to ideas. It seemed perfectly natural, everything must have been created, otherwise how did it get here, but by whom? Evolution from families to clans to tribes required extensive cooperation and supression of selfish desire, which ran contrary to more basic instincts. The demands of new culture were met in part by the invention of religion. It provided a basis for order and control. The pillars of morality; authority, the sacred, caring & protecting, fairness, of loyalty and belonging created a matrix for hunter-gatherers to become farmers, city builders with highly specialized roles for each person. We have evolved to cooperate within larger and larger groups while our groups tend to compete against each other. Those moral pillars, and they certainly differ from group to group, are critical to the success of each group. Iindividuals who find themselves belonging to more than one group, to competing groups discover that staying grounded, consistent with a moral compass can be a challenge. 

In the past 15,000 years culture and population density have spiked but as individuals, we are still wrestling with the same moral dilemmas. Technology has accelerated us into a no-man’s land but thinking about thinking and the burden of mortality still leave us asking; Why, and how does that work? Regardless of how profoundly we believe we are independent agents and free thinkers, we don’t get to make many independent decisions. We have been programmed from infancy by the culture we have cooked in. Upgrading that operating system is difficult and in some cases, impossible. Still we take great pride in our big brains and the perception that we do as we please. If it were possible to take your collective, moral construct and subject it to the same kind of objectivity that is inherent with critical thought and scientific inquiry, then there would be a glimmer of hope for at least some kind of intellectual independence. But the best research available tells us that we are emotional first while rationality lags behind. Logic stems from an emotional presisposition. It’s easy to believe that we control the mindd but it works at unavilable levels, above our security clearance and beyond our pay grade. That’s when we simply think we are thinking. Seek Pleasure, Avoid Pain. Carl Jung, Philosopher-Psychologist put it into context better than I can. “There is neither good nor bad, right nor wrong. There is only what makes sense and what does not.” It’s how our world works. 

If you can get out of the Divine Creator/Righteous People mentality it’s a lot easier to feel good about the amazingly talented animal in the mirror. We’re not much different than hatchlings who imprint on the first creature they see, only we think aobut it and take credit for the big brain. It doesn’t make it any easier to feel comfortable with the end of life but then, the world is still a scary, dangerous place.