Who’s ever had 95 good theses all at once?
A man with one new idea can start a creed, a cult, an ideology. A man with a hundred, a thousand, starts nothing. He might perhaps awake a dormant mind, but if he does the triumph will simultaneously mark the limit of his own influence, for this is the opposite of conversion, the opposite of creating a following.
One says, “I believe this, this and this to be true,” and always with a certain dishonesty. The will to overcome with one’s beliefs lies at the root of all such talk.
What happens when the simplicity of one’s goals and the complexity of the means adopted to achieve them becomes too great? Is it too much to kill the dragon to spend a night with the maiden? To write an encyclopedia in order to obtain a mention in one?
In 4th grade the flower first introduced me to the circularity of existence. The color, the shape, its efficient decadence, all to lure the bee and create another flower. Must there not be more? The attempt to impart meaning through evolutionary reasoning failed entirely for me. It is no reason for something to exist to extend itself. If anything, two copies needs even more justification than one. And for a species, perhaps an infinite. A flower may be beautiful, but in responding so and planting more are we not not simply made tools in this futile enterprise? This was no more effective in resolving an abstruse subject in my mind than when I was five and asked the Catholic parents of a friend of mine who had gotten chicken pox why this seemed to happen to us all at that age (I hadn’t yet heard of chicken pox parties). “Because God is testing us,” said the mother. “Yes, but why do we get chicken pox?”
Behavioral scientists like to perform experiments like giving chimpanzees and ravens a little stick or some blades of grass and making them try to fish an apple out of a bucket or pull a lure off a clothesline. It’s supposed to show their tool-making and problem-solving to be quite high for animals but still considerably subhuman. But I wonder how well the people you see hanging around outside 7-11 or Wal-Mart would do with a little stick and a few blades of grass. Without the accumulated collective knowledge that resides in the more advanced tools that let us avoid such predicaments in general. And how would they do if they had never heard tell of any previous possibly relevant situation? I don’t deny that a real cognitive gap between the species seems to exist, but I wonder how much the facility of language magnifies it to the point of blinding us to its real magnitude, such that in accomplishing the little tasks of daily life we like to see ourselves as capable individual problem-solvers when in fact a horde, an army, the collected mass of past humanity provides a precedent, a mode of operations for almost all of them.