Many people have said that I have too many negatives.

Posted On January 11, 2023

Last Updated on June 1, 2024 by Daniel

Many people have said that I have too many negatives. They say I ask too many questions, uncomfortable questions — questions people don’t want to hear. Questions that make people feel uneasy.

I don’t do this on purpose. It’s just a matter of having a question pop into my mind and I ask about it.

Lately, I have been having this running monologue in my head about hubris. And it raises a few uncomfortable questions.

I think it’s important to look at hubris in comparison to arrogance.

They seem to be the same. But whereas arrogance tends to be one’s excessive pride relating to how they are better than others, hubris is an extreme self-belief in one’s abilities and may have nothing to do with others at all.

Hubris is a form of conceit. And since it is self-belief in one’s abilities, it takes on a narcissistic quality, a quality that has become a hallmark of the world in which we live.

Some have called this the Tic-Tok syndrome. Me, me, me. Look at me aren’t I pretty and smart and oh so now.

It doesn’t matter that I can’t count from one to ten. And it doesn’t matter if I don’t know how many letters there are in the English alphabet. Duh! I’m so with it.

I can pontificate about and repeat every 6pm news broadcast. News read to me off a teleprompter by a talking head. I don’t need to think or read or take the time to do some private research. It’s all spoon-fed to me for free. What could be more appropriate? Everything should be free of course.

I guess we have forgotten that there is “NO FREE LUNCH”.

Ah but I digress.

I did say this blog may go off on tangents.

So, I’ll get back on point.

We believe we have all the answers to everything. We can solve any problem go anywhere. Do anything and believe nothing operates outside of our clearly narrow thinking. Technology will save the day.

And yet we live on a 4.5-billion-year-old planet. Species have evolved and become extinct hundreds of times before humans even began walking upright. And yet most people would argue that humans have all the answers. They say that only the human mind can think, measure, and calculate.

Clearly processes have been at play long before humans developed a brain. And we give no heed whatsoever to the planet mind.

We say this can’t be. A planet can’t think. But how do we know? Nature works in mysterious and utterly amazing ways.

There was a time when humanity believed the earth was the center of the universe. But it took Galileo to point out the error of their thinking. Of course, in the face of religious power he recanted when they threatened him with the rack. Beware when you oppose the orthodoxy.

The earth is a tiny speck in the vastness of the universe floating around a sun whose boiling furnace has been on fire for billions of years.

Just think about that for a moment. Billions of years.

And now we sit and believe that this race of creatures has the power to destroy what has evolved over billions of years.

This is certainly a preposterous idea.

No doubt humanity is influencing the climate but so, too are the natural unknown workings of nature.

I’m not a climate change denier. It’s obvious that weather patterns all over the globe are changing.

But to have only one explanation for the climate change, an explanation that reeks of news bias. Public radio puts forth mindless explanations for every manner of chaos and the gullible mind laps it up like a cat lapping mild from a bowl.

We complain about corporate greed and yet believe every hair brained explanation for the climate changes offered up by the big corporate leaders.

And it wouldn’t be fair to leave out our illustrious political class.

But nature has no voice. It cannot speak and tell its story.

We bandy about the words the ‘laws of nature’ and the ‘laws of physics’ but to many people, these are only hackneyed phrases of a bygone era. Who needs the laws of nature or the laws of physic? They just get in the way of our mindless fun.

In the not-so-distant future I hope we will begin to develop a sincere appreciation for the nature we inhabit and move away from our utterly self-centered frame of reference.

If we did, we might learn some surprising lessons.

Wouldn’t that be novel?