Why I Am a Liberal …Part 3

 Note: This is part of an ongoing effort to define what it is we want, what we are fighting for as liberal/Progressive /Democrats. As we take power after the next election I believe we should define who we are and what we stand for. Both so people know what they are voting for, and so that we do not lose our principles to the glamor of power, as the Conservatives have.



Part One, Part Two

Humans are an unbelievably  tiny and unimaginably ignorant specks of consciousness in an incomprehensibly vast and nearly impenetrably mysterious universe.

We would do well to remember that on a daily basis.

But we can’t, really.

Because we have to do the laundry and the dishes and feed the pooties and fuel the engine, the sack of meat, that carries our itsy-bitsy spark around on this slightly larger speck of consciousness we like to call planet earth. To keep the engine running and avoid death (whatever the hell that is, see words six and seven in the opening sentence) we need to harvest fuel. Harvesting fuel used to mean just that, stumbling around looking for things to fuel the engine, the body. To the point where some brave soul decided to be the first one to eat an oyster! Things of course, have changed. Imagine 7 billion people wandering around looking for oysters or portobellos or okra. But I digress. Nowadays, harvesting mostly consists of driving to a building, spending a third of the day conducting activities that someone else deems valuable and then periodically getting handed a piece of paper. That you then take to another building and give to them. In return for which they hand you other pieces of paper. Which you can then take to other buildings and hand that paper to them after you have harvested your food in the aisles of that building. Sometimes you even get change!

In order to have the people in the first building give you that piece of paper though, they have to be convinced that you…..know something. You have to at least act like you know what you are doing, convincingly.  These days, in order to harvest the fuel to power the engine that carries your consciousness around, you have to assert knowledge. (One of the ways to do this is to go to yet another building and listen to other people assert knowledge, if you listen long enough…they give you another piece of paper called a diploma.) It is only by asserting knowledge that you can harvest the fuel needed to survive.

In addition to  harvesting fuel, we have another biological imperative, Reproduction. In order to convince a member of the opposite sex (who came up with THAT idea?) that your sack of meat and their sack of meat should combine to perform the rather awkward and inelegant (as it is most commonly performed) act that leads to fulfilling this undeniable, pressing biological function, you must assert knowledge.

So, evolution and biology insist that we assert a certain level of  knowledge. At the very least, the practical knowledge of how to convince other people we have knowledge. Even if we don’t. For instance, I blog. I push little buttons on a little box in a certain order. I then push other buttons that somehow transmit this combination of button pushing to your little box. I don’t actually know how any of this works. But I have trained myself to push the right buttons. Apparently, some people like absorbing the order in which I push buttons and they occasionally push buttons on their little boxes  to assert additional knowledge, or occassionally, in an order that I then interpret as praise for my button pushing. Our tiny specks of consciousness thus connect….to mutually  assert knowledge and to praise each other for the knowledge asserted. Without us REALLY understanding how. Or even why. Except of course, that it feels good both to assert knowledge and to have others praise you for asserting knowledge. Even though in the larger scheme of things, on the universal scale, or even when it comes to how all this stuff that we use everyday actually works…..we don’t know shit. Most of our knowledge boils down to…..when I do this, that happens.

When it comes to actual, real, understanding of this thing that we call the universe and how it actually works, we are objectively little more than ….in fact we ARE just….clever, trained monkeys. In evolutionary time, we are but an eyeblink away from our ancestors sitting around in a circle on the savanna staring out at the impenetrable night and hoping not to get eaten before sunrise.

Yet in order to function in the outside world, we have to pretend that we know stuff. We have to assert that we are powerful enough to not be eaten. We are forced to present a brave front. We are driven by the biological imperative of mating to convince/fool the other monkeys that we deserve greater social status. Admitting ignorance or weakness lead to the lessening of this status, and possibly even being eaten! AND never getting laid the chance to reproduce.

The vast majority of human behavior is attributable to these conditions. The physical structure of the human brain starts with what is referred to as “the reptile brain.” Fight or flight, pure instinct and survival. Then on top of that the animal brain developed, as partially described above. On top of that and incredibly recently, the human brain, the cortex. evolved. At least that is what folks who wish to assert knowledge tell us. 500 years or so ago, the cortex had only gotten as far as to tell us that there was a god-thing that made us, that we should worship “him” lest he smite us, and that the sun revolved around the earth.  400 years ago we ‘discovered’ gravity. Up to 250 years or so ago the cortex asserted the knowledge that Kings ruled by divine right, that these humans were somehow the agent of  the god-thing and therefore we were required to obey them. Just a century and a half ago we were finally able to harness electricity and learned to communicate with each other over long distances. It was just over a century ago that Einstein published the Theory of Relativity. Less than a lifetime ago, we exploded a nuclear bomb, not knowing whether or not the reaction it produced would stop, or consume the entire world, or even the entire universe! All we really knew is that we needed a better way to kill each other. Because we were sure that the knowledge that we were asserting was better than the other folks knowledge. That our way was the right way. if you are going to kill millions opf people, you better damn well BELIEVE you know what you are doing. Even if you don’t.

And really, we don’t.

We don’t know jackshit. No matter what we assert. Or how hard we assert it. Yet we are forced to continue asserting…forced to pretend…that we really know what the fuck we are doing.

And yet today there are two of these barely evolved apes who are required to assert that they have the knowledge to lead the most powerful nation on this already and increasingly complex, rapidly changing planet. A nation that has a HUGE amount of those nuc-u-ler thingees just sitting around waiting to be used, (enough to destroy the habitabilty of the entire planet) shepherd it into an INCREDIBLY uncertain future, a future we don’t really understand at all.

Yet must pretend we do understand…….. in order to function.

One of these men represents the part of humanity that wants to understand, to learn, to know what little we can know now, and to increase that knowledge as much as possible.

One of them represents the part of humanity that seems to think knowledge is bad, science is bad, education is bad, learning new things is bad. That all we really need to do is worship the god-thing correctly and that then everything will be okay. Oh…..and that we should probably kill all of the people that HE thinks don’t worship the god-thing correctly, or at least, subjugate them to his will.

Each of these men is in a popularity contest to decide which of their barely grasped assertions of knowledge the human race should pursue and be ruled by. The one who wins will have a huge role in determining the future of the entire human race and the planet.

That is why I am a Liberal.