Happily Unpredictable

We peo­ple are amaz­ing lit­tle units of the cre­ation. We have great capac­i­ties and lim­i­ta­tions all at the same time. The mix can be a bit frus­trat­ing. It is easy to expect too much or too lit­tle from our­selves or oth­ers. There is also a temp­ta­tion to gen­er­al­ize. Peo­ple are lit­tle cap­sules of indi­vid­u­al­ity with occa­sional com­mon tastes. The worst cru­el­ties of his­tory have come from “lead­ers” try­ing to make us all the same.

No two peo­ple (includ­ing iden­ti­cal twins) are exactly alike. I think the Cre­ator is telling us some­thing in this fact. We are appar­ently not sup­posed to be exactly alike — ever. Vari­ety is a God-thing while uni­for­mity seems to be a human pref­er­ence (prob­a­bly the result of our own insecurities).

I enjoy teach­ing social phi­los­o­phy, but I teach it with a smile. For all of the efforts of soci­ol­o­gists to build elab­o­rate mod­els based on race, age, gen­der, tastes, geog­ra­phy, and genes it is ulti­mately a sci­ence that has to bow to com­plete indi­vid­u­al­ity. There are excep­tions to all of the categories.

It is like the lit­tle quote I once found about lab­o­ra­tory mice: “All fac­tors being equal in an exper­i­ment, a lab­o­ra­tory mouse will do what­ever it darn well pleases.” The attempt to find pre­dictabil­ity among peo­ple — based on ani­mal mod­els — has proven to be futile. Even ani­mals will not do what you think they will do.

I do not know exactly what I am doing today — and nei­ther do you. What is ahead of us is an imag­i­nary esti­mate at best. Thank God it is not bor­ingly predictable.