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Tap..tap..tap..We are blind creatures tapping through life

Richard Feynman, now deceased, was a theoretical physicist and professor of physics at MIT gave to his students the following description of what physics is all about :

“We can imagine that this complicated array of moving things which constitutes “the world” is something like a great chess game being played by the gods, and we are observers of the game. We do not know what the rules of the game are; all we are allowed to do is to watch the playing. Of course, if we watch long enough, we may eventually catch on to a few of the rules. The rules of the game are what we mean by fundamental physics. Even if we know every rule, however…what we really can explain in terms of those rules is very limited, because almost all situations are so enormously complicated that we cannot follow the plays of the game using the rules, much less tell what is going to happen next. We must, therefore, limit ourselves to the more basic question of the rules of the game. If we know the rules, we consider that we “understand” the world.”

The natural sciences, especially physics, have been very successful at learning the rules of the game. Our didactic (teaching by telling) educational system has been very successful at teaching these rules to their students. The students have been very successful at using these rules and the algorithms and paradigms developed from these rules in developing the high tech economy that we have. We have not been equally as successful in matters regarding the human sciences; thus we kill and destroy constantly.

We are animals who can no longer depend on our animal instinct—we must depend upon our self and on others who, in turn, lean on us—life is overwhelming and the world is infinitely expanding and beyond our comprehension—we survive by chewing off chunks, narrow small digestible chunks—we must become oblivious of the rest or we are consumed by the enormity—Becker says “repression is normal self-protection and creative self-restriction” is our substitute for instinct—this is the meaning of partialization—we partialize the world—the well-adjusted man or woman partializes the world so that s/he can normalize anxiety.

The Holy Roman Empire, i.e. the Catholic Church, packaged life so that the uncritical could exist within the womb of dogma. This lasted for a millennium; post Enlightenment humans became too sophisticated for such slavish attachment and thus we moderns must create our own zone of normalcy.

We have become sophisticated enough to have removed from our life the total domination that the Church had over us but we have not yet discovered how to replace that all encompassing grasp with something more suitably designed to allow us to live together with our overwhelming technology.

They “tranquilize themselves with the trivial”.—Kierkegaard

How can we become intellectually sophisticated enough to survive our own technological success?