There is something about the "human animal" that fascinates me. It seems to be a very base instinct and it is inherant, in varying degrees, in all of us. I don't think there's a word to describe this type of thing specifically, but it is there nonetheless, and it bothers me. It's sorta hard to explain, but I'll give it a try.
I can loosely define this behaviour as: the ability to subscribe to a specific ideology, without any concept of its specifics, or conception of the lack of knowledge there may be in its regard. OR: The ability to explain away things that we don't understand, and take our explanations as fact.
It seems to me, that humans have an innate need to be able to explain everything that happens around them, and put them into some nice sort of order. "I don't know" or "There's not enough information to make a definite decision" are not acceptable answers to any type of "heavy" question, and not even to the lighter ones a lot of the time. This phenomena is what creates religion. The concept of "we don't know, but we must have Faith that our religion is correct". The concept is also applicable to environmentalists inasmuchas: "The Ozone layer is going to be depleted and we're all gonna die, so we must discontinue burning fossil fuels and spraying anything from an aerosol can".
Your religion may or not be the "one path", and the Earth may or may not be destroyed by gamma rays from the sun, but I think that you cannot prove or disprove either contention due to lack of information. Does that make one side right and one side wrong? No. It only, means that we do not have enough info. Most folks can't handle that answer, so they subscribe to the previously mentioned ideologies in order to compensate for the lack of information. There is simply something in the human psyche that cannot deal with not knowing, about anything, so we must create something to explain what we don't know.
It's something inside us that makes us create an explanation for anything that we don't truly understand. If you look back at the Greek Mythologies, you can see it quite clearly. There is a God of Thunder, and a God of Lightning, and a God of War, and a God of Love. Two of those four are things that we don't honestly understand the nature of, and two of them we do... Now.
There is something about a person that makes him/her want to put things into specific versions of black and white. There are no indefinates, and if there are, we'll just explain them away. It's Fucking Universal.
I'll continue this thought when I'm a little more coherent than I am now. Later kiddies.
Posted by Johnny - Oh at April 28, 2005 12:00 AMyep
Posted by: _Jon at April 28, 2005 09:33 AMThis urge isn't necessarily a BAD thing. When Mendeleev created the periodic table, there were gaps in it and he predicted from that that there were elements yet to be discovered.
And he was right.
"I don't know" is ok if it leads you on to "but I'll find out" instead of "I'll just make shit up".
Posted by: Harvey at April 28, 2005 11:53 AMInteresting blogging the last few days...dark clouds looming, philosophical thoughts on love....ahhhh this sounds like a man that has had too much Johnny Walker, and has been in love.
Posted by: ArmyWifeToddlerMom at April 28, 2005 11:21 PMNot as much Johnny Walker as you'd think. I used to LOVE the stuff, but lately scotch gives me a terrible hangover, so I've switched to bourbon.
Posted by: Johnny - Oh at April 28, 2005 11:57 PMme too....bourbon seems to be the bad example booze pick....curious? Was I correct on the other account?
Posted by: ArmyWifeToddlerMom at April 29, 2005 11:43 PM