The rational world

We exist in a rational world. Nature is ordered. It is a complex and often difficult to understand arrangement but it is predictable. Nature has cause and effect. We humans exist in the web of these assured outcomes but we have creativity and imagination. As a result, we live irrational lives. Either we are too arrogant to admit that we are specks of insignificant matter floating in the universal soup or we place our bets on probability. If the former, we would be faced with the utter futility of life. If the later, we might be semi-irrational, given that the riskier the behavior the greater the return. How else can you explain smoking cigarettes? Or, drinking excessively? Or, eating cheeseburgers as a staple in a diet? I speak with some experience in all three since, as embarrassing as it is to admit, I have done them all and so much more. I think that if we lived rational lives, most of what we know and love would disappear. Our politics would be mechanical. The advantage of that would be that none of us would have heard of Joe Biden. Newspapers and talk radio would have no audiences. Sitcoms and reality TV would disappear. In fact, most of what makes us human and severely irrational would vanish. It is our irrationality that makes living the crap shoot that it is. I gleaned these ideas from my farm. My cabbages never give a thought to rolling a number and cranking up the Grateful Dead. Rather, they bask in the Alabama sunshine and await with patience the day that I behead them. Never a whimper, never a regret. My chickens don’t seem to learn any lessons except the noises and movements that are associated with feeding. If they ever thought through their situation, I might well be mobbed by pissed off hens who work hard to lay eggs, only to have me steal them on a daily basis. Even the gorgeous flowers that are now abundant in the garden grow and blossom for no greater reason than to produce seed for next year’s crop. Wonder what they think when I cut them for ornamentation in my house? Do you think that makes them fret, why did I work so hard to grow only to wind up in a glass of water on some fool’s coffee table? I see no evidence that it matters to them. The cabbage, the chickens and the flowers live by a different set of rules. In their world, things are simple. If you get the right amount of nutrients, the right amount of rain, the right amount of sunlight, you will fulfill your destiny. If you don’t, you won’t. We humans make achieving our destiny considerably more problematic. We complicate the journey with emotions and desires and aspirations. We want more than our lot. We want more than the rational universe affords. It is our creativity and imagination that determines how we play out our hands. Nothing is predictable. It is completely luck. And, it is absolutely irrational.