Superlogical This, Superlogical That
I’ve often felt that reason and rationality are a great tyrrany, used to explain away the parts of the human psyche that can’t be explained by our behaviour. Ask an economist or a reader of The Economist: as Rational Actors, we ought to do this, so the fact that we don’t is just a quirk in the numbers, that pesky real world gumming up our laid-out plans. Part of our great discontentment lies in trying to cram everything into the spaces circumscribed by reason while having the primordial sense to know that it doesn’t work. We were not given the divine breath in order to be MBAs, lawmakers, and bureaucrats. I’m as tired of reason as I am of the concept of free-trade coffee. I’m trading it in for something else.
Say you’re a writer: you’re a vacuum, inhaling knowledge like it’s in the air around you. But today’s audience, they must first be met with logic and subject-predicate agreement before they can take in knowledge, so you off to a grammar school and learn the rules. But you forgot that your audience also has the intelligence of braised celery, so you take an axe to your syllable-count, because you’ll never sell otherwise. What’s this literary hoo-ha? Get to the point. If your thought cannot be expostulated in chopped-up and boiled-down English, you are basically shit. Say “basically” a lot too, sounds authoritative. People want chunky information of the easiest digestion, like a pill. Or a suppository. The thoughtful writer would even take it down to the reader’s house and shove it up their ass for them.
Here’s a rational fastball for you, and if we are all so bloody logical, answer me this: how come when you go to bed, you hug your pillow like it’s a living, breathing person? How come you surreptitiously press at that sore on your cheek to feel and revel in the pulse of pain? And how come you imagine your home getting robbed? I know you all do that one, especially you ground floor dwellers. Someone mentions off-hand the technique used to pick a lock, or shows you a twisted coat hanger, and your mind sets off. And why not your apartment? A nondescript building tucked away behind a hotel in downtown Montreal. Such a filthy little decoy! Oh, we’ll just tuck behind this hotel while diplomats file in and out because nobody would ever suspect us here…slip in under the camera. I’m off for work and my lock is jimmied clean open, my laptop’s gone, TV gone, silverware gone, fridge completely raided, CD tower flopped over onto a pile of its own discs, and I’m sitting at my cubicle thirty blocks away, not doing a god damned thing. I should go home, or call the superintendent. Duck out a little early and go home. When I walk up to my door it’ll still be open a crack…
You cannot be human without these thoughts. The rational mind tells us it’s wasted energy, you’ll never “meet” your goals that way. Look, I like reason, but it’s clear that it’s not enough to explain away the world. A coworker, same age as me, today told me I was stupid for taking a philosophy class in my spare time, because “What’s that gonna get [me]? Now, finance…”
Finance! What the. I like to think that there was once a time in human history when performing simple arithmetic operations repeatedly until you died was a form of torture. We’re becoming a nation of voluntary bean-counters. Then I drank an espresso and thought about HTML for a bit and it went away.
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(2 comments)
HTML! As the cure for human suffering! Hear, Hear! Well…..maybe XHTML. Unclosed tags don’t calm the soul. Mmmmmmm, standards.
It’s the money, mang. And we’ve always done torturous things for money. And not enough that will make us happy.
Good for you and your useless philosophy class.