Jargogled Impressions.

The physiology of our desires leaves a bad taste in my mouth sometimes. There are ways in which we concern ourselves over our station in life that has nothing to do with what we really want. It’s funny how common it is that people do not realize their wants are being driven by something other than their own conscious thinking. The world that the modern ways of capitalism has built for us is one in which increasing set of wants and desires are good and are in the path towards the over-sized evolution that we have undergone over the past millennium. Denying us these desires then, its inferred often, is going against the core tenets of evolution and is morally, ethically, socially, and personally wrong.

How did we come to this pass? I bet we started down this journey as a stepping stone towards being more interesting and involved in what we were seeing in the world around us. That led us, naturally, to the things and the “stuff” that we need to indulge these curiosities. The more we bought these stuffs the more the logic was turned upside down. Eventually, the mere act of buying and learning more about the things that we made and developed superseded those that we saw in the natural world around us. And that was a bummer.

There has been a seismic shift in how we treat the nature around us. There’s this realization of the depths of nature, of its insatiable appetite for cooling the innards of human minds, of there being an inner core that is so hidden from us that they invoke curiosity and fascination. All of these in aggregation has meant that we have actively begun our journey back into the folds of the mother earth. Currently, we are considerably far away from really understanding the ecology that sustains us at both the macro (weather patterns, habitats, geographical diversities, migrations, etc.) and the micro (cellular functions, symbiosis, etc.) levels. But the direction that I see us moving suggests that the fascination for the deep and the unknown, venturing into the inner lives of trees and of animals that also live on the world we call ours, and deciphering the language they speak would become a more ingrained and sought-after passion for people. Especially for those Gen X and Gen Y generations who have grown up amid an unprecedented war on the environment that helps us live and thrive.

It seems to be a human pastime to act like a parasite on the resources that help us survive. The way we treat our atmosphere and our surroundings, relying on our own constructs and comforts, instead of what has already provided for, makes us akin to those foolish Parisians in the French Revolution who led their siege in the dismal and tragic hopes of seceding from their master. Well, nature is our master and the sooner we realize that the better it would be for us.

We have a natural dislike for anything that seems to encroach upon our freedom. Even when that freedom is self-constructed and artificial that we have enforced upon ourselves. And our definition of freedom has devolved into those million tiny shards of consumer goods and right to speech that we have forgotten what it was that we were aiming to achieve freedom for. What does that say about our rational and logical minds I wonder.

It surprises me to find the levels to which we can stoop to discredit the facts surrounding the havoc we have casted on the things that supports us – the all-giving, calm, and ferocious nature around us. Factfulness, as we have learnt from Hans Rosling, suffers from several idiosyncratic human biases that refuses to subside even when confronted with irrefutable data. Our ways of being in effect, comes in the way of our ways of becoming. We harbor irrational attachments to the days of yore while being myopic to what stares us in the face. We lend lower weight to the things that we don’t see, even when the signs all point to the one direction. It’s almost as if, surrounding ourselves with the things that we desire and covet, we draw boundaries around our levels of comprehension and in a way, cordon off our own freedom.

Truth has always been a tool of the powerful. The way history is the tool of the winner. Bending the perimeters around what constitutes the truth keeps the powerful in power. Data doesn’t help – neither then when it was sealed off from the commoners, nor now when the deluge has drowned them. In fact, data, as an extension of truth, becomes a mere tool willing to be manipulated at will and on cue.

Empirical science, a product of mankind, suffers from the same fate. Falsifiability is a core tenet of this inherently human discipline. Scientists test theories by attempting to falsify them. Falsification of a theory is driven by a) consistency with our concept of rational and logical thought process, b) its adherence to the scientific theories we know and approve of, c) its direct comparison with the familiar and the known theories we are comfortable knowing, and d) a statistically significant method to prove its applicability. We test new theories, essentially, on the bedrock of older theories. And therefore, our theories stay in a state of permanent flux. Science thrives on providing an answer to the questions, regardless of the ephemerality of it. If a system of theories that support, say the assertion of “human’s invincibility through its enterprise and innovation that will counteract the calamitous climate change”, is developed, then we begin the slow descent of mankind into a cesspool of self-installed echo chamber that will only get dismantled when its too late. If a system of theories says certain events (like global climate catastrophe) can’t happen and they do, it’s only then that the believers will accept that the theories are falsified. Till that point of time though, the myth of the logicality of science will continue un-tampered.

I am surprised about my recent propensity to doubt the human sciences and vest my leaning towards the Lindy-tested systems of faith and ancient religions. Faith that prescribes the enlightened understanding of the lack of single, irreducible truth, of believing in the chasm between clarity and incomprehensibility, of ensuring oneness with the nature that surrounds us. Merging in, instead of standing out. These concepts have baked themselves into the doctrines of faith and religion via centuries of evolution. And who’s to say that the concept of evolution, an intrinsically human system of theories, cannot create a paradox in and of itself.