Hanlon’s razor states:
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
And I agree with this. You see, most of the people I interact with everyday believe that everyone is against them. If the president is out to lunch instead of running the country (all the similarities to real people are coincidental!) or if the pencil-pusher behind the desk in a government office or bank don’t do their job well, or if the taxi driver in the adjacent lane suddenly decides to cut off their path, all of them assume that the said 4th parties are being intentionally and brutally malignant. But in my experience, the answer is probably a lot simpler: it’s stupidity! The main drive of people in their day to day life is not personal gain or evil schemes; it’s stupidity and laziness.
It’s a depressing notion, to think that the world is turning because someone is not thinking or not doing something, but that’s basically true. On a higher level, it’s frightening. But more than fear, it leads to sadness. You cannot do anything for this world. It is doomed. We are doomed. There’s no utopia at the end of the road, except when you take the blue pill.
Maybe that’s why all of the sane people in the world can stay sane; because they know that they have a escape. They can take the blue pill to end the story, to wake up in their bed the following day and live out their lives like nothing is wrong. Most of them can’t however. But there’s an escape for them too: the Reaper’s scythe.
How cruel would it be if there was a life after death, whether it was the day of reckoning, the afterlife, reincarnation, Cylon downloading, anything. Is one lifetime not enough torture and punishment for any sane and sentient being? What if there is? What if we are mere puppets to satisfy the need of a god for cruelty? Would it be worse than being god’s unwanted children? Worse than being stupid mistakes, left unnoticed on a pebble in the sky, results of a random cosmic event? Of course not!
Look where I started and where I was lead to.
| اگر غم را چو آتش دود بودي | ||
| جهان تاريک بودي جاودانه | ||
| در اين گيتي سراسر گر بگردي | ||
| خردمندي نيابي شادمانه |
Printer-friendly version
MatGill | 21-Jan-08 at 6:42 am | Permalink
The two most common elements in the universe, hydrogen and stupidity, both started with the Big Bang and are doomed to coexist until the Big Crunch, if there is any of course.
yzt | 16-Feb-08 at 4:10 pm | Permalink
I hope there is one! But wouldn’t it be followed by another Big Bang and the spread of stupidity into the universe again? There’s no hope at all!