We are taught from an early age that if a thing is contradictory, we must oppose it with logic and rational, apply an arithmetical approach to it and soon enough it will go away? This is rooted in our society’s obsession with the “scientific method” the philosophy that science holds all the answers, that the best efforts and the noblest pursuits of all mankind are scientific. That everything, everyone and every human action should be gauged by this and this method alone. That only this will lead us to a state of “cognitive assonance” a state of equilibrium where our internals is perfectly congruent with our actions and that the world will be a better place as a consequence of this approach.
So our first experiences are that we follow our desires dictated as they are by our sense. Typically, sweet-tasting foods are far better to our sense than bitter or bland foods, thus as small as we are we pursuing this biological drive with gusto. Our parents, of course, have other ideas and feed us foods that are good for our health and our growth. Yet, evolution has imbued in us the innate abilities to avoid sour or bitter-tasting foods like say berries, because there is a real chance they may be poisonous, but we are force-fed bitter-tasting foods anyways, which arguably goes against our primeval evolutionary coding hardwired into our brains. From those first experiences arise millions of experiences that gravitate against what we are taught and how we experience the world around us. We are quickly taught to obey authority, read, anyone older than us, but to develop critical thinking skills so we can question authority?
So here’s an analogy apropos your and my relationship with a government we elect to take power and manage our country. You interview this employee for an important managerial position; the candidate has zero previous experience but assures you they can do the job, an unheard-of thing to start with. The candidate then determines for you the employer what type of salary and benefits they wish to be remunerated with, and if you cannot afford it, your kids and even grandkids will foot the bill. Once the person is given the job by you, their first order of business is to make sure you pay them by putting in place a law that prohibits you from receiving your own salary before their portion is taking off. This extends to any business venture you may have, and should you have a dispute with your employee, they have the option of jailing in in a prison that you also paying for.
Your employee then spends much of their time and your money prancing around the country telling everyone who is interested to hear just how good they are without being subject to the normal performance appraisals you or any other employee is subject to. They then spend almost all of their time in a special building with an official-sounding name, parliament, creating laws that prohibit and curtails your freedom, making life difficult for you in general. This culminates in them being able to make wholly arbitrary decisions that defy explanation and logic but uses the sophist argument that other people think it is okay, therefore it must be okay. The behaviours of your current employee are considered normal by all the experts in our society and are in fact encouraged.
So emboldened by the newly acquired position is your employee that upon addressing them, you have to use special honorifics to demonstrate to them just how important their jobs are, it becomes near impossible for you to meet with them again in person unless a certain period of time has elapsed. This relationship completely inverts all other relationships and is so counterintuitive it is actually viewed as “logically sound” and makes sense to everyone because some clever people in a country you couldn’t identify on the map of the world said it is so, so it must be so. In fact, so fixed is this type of relationship that it is considered uncouth, uncivilised, unintelligent and taboo to even question the sensibility of this type of arrangement.
It is expected that we deny what we’ve been taught in our youth and accept a thing that makes no sense because this type of relationship pundits will argue is the best possible type of relationship ever conceived before or since……..
