There’s an awful lot we don’t understand. We assume we exist within some sort of “grand scheme” where free-will rules the day. That our destiny is bound to where the whim of our conscious reality takes us. As we all travel in this fashion, in 9 billion different directions at once, we hope it’ll all just kind of . . . work out.
We seek structure from leaders that we choose to represent us who stopped representing anyone but themselves decades ago. We seek purpose, and a fair living, from jobs that solely provide purpose and wealth to executives and investors. We seek direction and fulfillment from our places of worship, only to compare their teachings against our reality as reported on by the nightly news, forming a laughable delta between what God expected, and what we’ve allowed ourselves to become.
There’s an awful lot we don’t understand about our nature, and its place within the grand scheme. Biologists can talk about what we’re made of. Cosmologists can talk about where we are within the known universe. Physicists can talk about how long we’ve been around and make reasonable guesses as to where the basic elements that make us up came from.
But nobody can talk about why any of us are here. Nobody has any idea how consciousness works or what reality truly is or how any of it fits into the great mystery that is time itself. But nothing exists without an underlying reason. Just because we don’t understand it, doesn’t mean it’s not something to be understood.
It would be one thing to simply go along not understand things peacefully. We could iteratively work toward unlocking those secrets at our leisure. But instead of working toward sensical answers as to why we’re here and what our societal purpose is, we’ve instead manufactured rationalizations for all of it. Where there’s room to figure out what our origins truly are, we’ve invented religions and Gods to fill in those gaps. Where there’s room to figure out what our collective purpose as a civilization truly is, we’ve allowed educational institutions, corporations, and governments to compartmentalize us individually, into lifetimes of service toward their comparatively trivial ends.
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.“
—- Mark Twain
We can go on like this, manufacturing purpose and direction based on what a few listless leadership bodies have decided to impose upon us. But for how long? How long before something fundamental to our nature that we’ve never bothered to understand rises up to correct us? There are always, inevitable consequences to continuing in the wrong direction. You don’t need to watch more than ten minutes of the nightly news to understand how badly we’ve messed this grand experiment up.
What if this grand experiment isn’t ours alone? What if there’s only so far that our fundamentally flawed nature can take us in the wrong direction? What if we’ve already crossed that line and awoken something our collective nightmare has always promised?
—- The Corroding, by Ty Tracey