I remember when I reached the stage of my adolescence when I learned how flawed and fragile everything is. I remember when it hit me, that authority of any kind is rife with failure, and that the global issues of war, climate change, and destruction of the environment threaten the entire world. It's difficult to cope with the realization that you're alive during a mass extinction event brought about by your own species, and to watch the hapless beings in positions of power as they not only hinder progress, but promote the damaging behavior. When you learn of the problems of the world and focus on them, it can feel like you're watching the world descend into chaos and despair, and you just want to scream out to everyone.
A world rife with flaws and problems gives us purpose, though. If everything was already perfect, and there was no room for improvement of this world, what would be the point of any individuals' existence? What would be the purpose in gifting individuals with sentience, if it cannot be used for something productive? Humans each want a life that feels meaningful, with the exception of a few deadbeats. That cannot be achieved in a perfect, or an ideal, world.
Why, then, do people propose solutions as if the world operates ideally? Why do we propose plans, scientific theories, and economic systems that operate as if nature, human intent, or the mechanisms within will operate in an ideal way? Capitalists wantonly believe that a purely capitalist system will help every market just by the equilibrium of supply and demand, but it leaves education and healthcare systems in shambles. Communists wantonly believe that human nature will allow for a complete extinction of competitive drive, and that people will somehow abandon their natural tendency to try and take more than their fair share. Why do we publish the ideal gas law, which erroneously assumes that gases will behave in ways that suit our limited understanding? Well, I guess that's just it-- our limited ability to understand things leads us to draw simplistic conclusions that might be partially or mostly correct, when the truth is much more nuanced. Sometimes the truth is more nuanced than we can understand with the current extent of modern science; other times, it is more nuanced than we care to understand with our limited effort, which is to say that the culprit is intellectual laziness. Humans love to generalize, and settle for an inferior understanding even when a complete understanding is within reach.
Assuming an ideal world leaves incomplete generalizations that fail to assess an entire situation. People love to propose short-sighted equations about people: all women are crazy people; all Mexicans are hard-working; all African Americans are fans of rap; all homosexuals are disenfranchised. Generalizations like these at their best possess only partial accuracy, and actions built upon them can be very harmful to a wide array of people. But generalizations like these are the result of an idealist assumption, that a law you propose about the universe can boil down to a simple equation. People who live by these generalizations possess a kind of wanton arrogance, an entitlement to a simple world with simple conclusions. We don't live in a simple world, and we don't deserve to live in such a place. If we learn all the knowledge in the world, we exhaust the possibilities to learn more, and the quest to learn more concludes, depriving us of our purpose. If we run out of information to learn, and we run out of problems to solve, the hope of a being to give its life meaning dies. When we are born with the purpose to leave the world's lifeforms healthier, happier, and smarter than they were, we are deprived of our purpose by the existence of complete health, complete happiness, and complete knowledge.
Perception is the input to the human brain, and judgments are the output. Our brains take in information, and then make decisions and allegories based on what we've observed. And from incomplete analyses, incomplete judgments are born. People love to tell the world how it works, spitting out judgments limited in their scope, because of how limited their understanding has become. How do we expect to reach an adequate conclusion about the state of the entire world, when the world bears complexity that is impossible to completely grasp?
Don't you see the idiocy in telling the world what's up, when the world IS what's up?
At this point, this post is another ode to skepticism, as you can see. It's also an ode to cutting down on intellectual arrogance, when the entire body of human knowledge is a fraction of a percent of what we can learn about the universe. But my point here is to remind everyone that the world isn't perfect, but it's good enough to grant you the ultimate gift of all: the gift of life. In a world that gives us the gift of a complex mind, a capable body, and the opportunity to do all we can do with these things, we have to remind ourselves that we have received the best gift known to us, of everything in the entire universe! No other beings documented in the entire universe have the capabilities that we have. No other creature has a mind powerful enough to organize civilizations, create language, or give birth to institutional systems that help people. We could have been given the life of a rabbit, a snake, a scorpion, or even a protozoa, yet instead, we were given this!
With the ability to write, carry things, and grasp things with our hands, we possess the most dexterity of any animal on Earth, making us incredibly lucky. And the existence of such a model as this was not intently crafted according to some design or ideal image, as far as science as concerned. After billions of years of entropy, the right ingredients somehow came together to allow for the existence of an organism, with enough complexity to accomplish all we can accomplish today. In much the same way that an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite amount of typewriters can randomly generate the complete works of William Shakespeare, a universe, after a nearly infinite number of tries, allowed for the gift of a lifeform with this much complexity. As far as we know, we were not created intentionally; we just randomly formed after quadrillions upon quadrillions of attempts. And the universe did not make quadrillions of attempts, just for us to fail to sanctify this ultimate gift of life as a human. We must cherish our lives, and each other's lives.
The act of cherishing life on this planet comes at odds with idealists, because idealists will consider the discrepancy between a human's viability and its perfection, before they will consider the discrepancy between its greatness and its nonexistence. That is to say, idealists will consider how far something is from perfection, before they consider the progress it has made since being born from nothing. Thus, in the context of human evolution, an idealist will scorn human life due to its inability to reach supernatural perfection, before they will give a human life credit for how much it has grown since its birth. Demanding perfection from a human being is harmful, and it leads to an unnecessarily dissatisfied perspective on the world at large. Billions of years of happenstance created us from nothing; we cannot take this for granted.
Compare this to the Christian notion that we were created in the image of an ideal, all-powerful god, to fall from the perfect realm called Heaven to Earth, where we now roam. This idea is a useful tool for rulers and leaders, in that it motivates people (or subjects) by convincing them that access to the ideal realm of Heaven is attainable, through service to your fellow humans, or in historical contexts, service to your ruler. But this notion misleads people by convincing them that a perfect existence is somehow attainable in the afterlife, when we know that perfection does not exist and cannot exist. What does Heaven look like? Everyone has a different idea of what Heaven is like, and in the first place, no one can fully flesh out their image of Heaven, since it's impossible to imagine any plane of existence without imperfections and problems that require solutions.
If we stick solely to science, the plane of existence as a human is the best plane of existence we have discovered. We have more opportunities and capabilities than any other lifeform discovered on Earth, which is the only place we have detected any life. Yet, idealistic people like my former self somehow demand more, and often they spend so much time demanding more that they forget to feel gratitude for what they already have.
Despite what I just said, there is no reason to feel shame for demanding a better existence. Those who demand a better existence are the ones who help humanity to secure a better existence, and the act of improving a human's existence is what gives our lives purpose. An idealist is a person who has set his or her eyes on the prize; an idealist who puts plans into action to reach that prize is a purposed individual. If ideas plus action results in progress for humanity, then an idealist has half of the equation correct. The idealists who deserve scorn are the ones who demand progress but do nothing to exact it, whether the progress is intended for another person, the scope of humanity, or for themselves. Don't just dream-- reach for your dreams. You were given more capability to reach your dreams than 99.9% of the organisms living today. What a shame if these capabilities were ignored. Furthermore, if you settle for an incomplete knock-off version of your dreams, feel free to keep going, but still make sure to revere your achievement to that point. Do not expect perfection, from yourself, or from others; instead, expect each human to perform the perfectly noble task of inching toward it. You will not push yourself or another individual to perfection, nor will your actions result in a perfect world, for your breadth is that of just a speck among the vastness of the cosmos. But if you impact the world in even an incrementally positive way, you have done the work of one of many other specks pushing the collective toward a better place. That better place will not be Heaven, nor will it be any other manifestation of the ideal; but, it will be a vast improvement on what is already the most perfect plane of existence ever witnessed by any lifeform in the universe.
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