Question Authority

My father told me that. When I was a teenager, I fell under the spell of those two words – because ‘the Man’ didn’t have my best interests at heart. He had an agenda. I had to ask questions!

Lo, all these years later, I still question everything.  I know it must seem a paradox: I’m a skeptic who is trying to find the truth in unorthodox ways.  Sometimes even I can’t wrap my own head around that.

But let’s take it apart.  The world shows us a picture of reality.  That picture is actually an interpretation of reality.  Whatever the world is, we define it to keep it manageable.  That means that we emphasize some parts, and barely acknowledge or ignore other parts.  That’s perfectly acceptable – our minds couldn’t parse all the information out there on a constant basis. We would have to break it down.  The perfect example of this is ‘burn-out’ – an overload of information that’s gone on for too long.

I talk a lot about logic because I like it.  It’s dependable.  It’s pretty constant.  But logic can’t explain everything.  If it could, there would never be blog posts or conversations about the ‘why  and the what‘ of it all.  After years of trying to get to the bottom of this very paradox, I finally came to MY conclusion:  Logic can only take you so far down the path of your life.  At some point, you have to let go of its hand, sit it down by the side of the road and continue going on your search.  Don’t lose your way back to Logic, though – you’ll need him often throughout your lifetime.

Notice that I didn’t say you should leave your Common Sense back there with little “Logic.”  Because now your common sense has to really kick into overdrive.  Let’s take an example:

I recently watched the movie, “Australia” about a make-shift family trying to survive World War 2 coming to the shores of that continent.  In one scene, the family must cross the Never-Never, a desert wasteland that we’re told cannot be crossed under threat of certain death.  An Aboriginal guide appears and leads them to the other side.  He does this by singing to the rocks and to the water that they are trying to find.  And he listens for those things to sing back to him, telling him which way to go.

Of course, they all arrive safe and sound on the other end of the Never-Never, but let’s pretend that the movie is real.  Logic says that this amazing feat was an accident – a fluke – it couldn’t be done the way it had been portrayed.  OK – that’s logic talking.

Common sense says that they arrived at their destination against all odds, so there might be something to this singing thing.  Level-headed westerners would want to see it done again and again.  We like our scientific proof, and surely, if I can get scientific proof (using the scientific method), I’m all for it.  But the more interesting stories in life seldom work that way.

So now what?  Well, throughout the movie, the Aboriginal guide sings to affect change many times.  And each time the outcome he seeks is the one he receives.  Same method, different application.  Common sense says that’s probably acceptable.  Logic says it’s not.

Let’s pretend our lives are a movie.  Let’s pretend that we can star in whatever DVD we want.  Then, let’s pretend the movie is real.  What’s to stop us from choosing the movie that suits our agenda?  Poor, poor me likes to watch the movie where I was unfairly treated.  Angry me likes to watch the movie where I vanquish all the people in my way.  Altruistic me watches the movie where I save the day.

If our search has gotten us this far, perhaps we can start to think about this “I” who is choosing the movies that we call our lives.  What is ‘my’ agenda?  Whose interests am ‘I’ serving?  What’s ‘my’ payoff?

Tagged as: Australia, Common Sense, Logic, Never-Never, Question Authority