“Why?”
“Because.”
Seems pointless, doesn’t it? When children ask too many whys, at some point an adult comes out with this gem. An exasperated: “Because!”. Or, “Because I say so.”
This seem rather unfair. Who made you the boss? Well, they’re your parent, that is part of the answer. They’re not beholden to your demands for explanation. Go explore the world, figure things out for yourself. Instead of getting angry at the unfairness of adults not explaining things to you, it’s more the case that you should judge for yourself and no amount of explaining will work. It takes life experience to figure things out, and we’re all just on our personal journeys. I suspect that the older you get, the more you’ll shrug and go “Because”.
You see, “Because” is a subjective reply. It’s a shorthand. “I’ve looked at the situation and I’ve judged it based on what I know. I can’t explain my entire life to you, it would take too long, there are just too many variables. This is my judgment in my personal life and so there. You want it differently? Fine, go ahead. I’m not budging, I know what I’ve learned so far.” Except you don’t want to let children go ahead and do things that are stupid and/or might hurt them. But maybe, in some situations where they can’t really hurt themselves too much, you should just let them. Paradoxically, the because-people, if they express themselves angrily or impatiently, tend to transfer the opposite to their children. If you want your children to judge for themselves, you can’t just snap “Because” at them. It signals to them that you have the right to judge and they don’t. You want them to grow up and get their own handle on “Because”. How can you do that without taking it from their hands and doing it for them? Show, don’t tell, seems to be the best method. “Because” is enough, but only if there’s a felt sense of life experience behind it. If you don’t snap it at them, which breaks the connection.
“Because” is a subjective reply. It’s simply: Because I’ve seen that it works, or Because I’ve seen that it doesn’t work, or Because I want to, or Because I don’t want to. You don’t need more. Why? Hah. Well, because it’s up to you do judge for yourself. It’s up to you to define your own game. “Because” is the final say. So is: “I don’t feel like it” or “You want it, that’s fine, but I don’t, and that’s also fine.”. Underneath “Because” is also an acceptance of the way the world really works, how things really are, the things that cannot be explained in response to “Why?”. When you dig down deep enough, keep asking why why why, then you’ll eventually find a lot of truth about the world, but there is no bottom to the whys. It’s whys all the way down, and at some point you’ll have to conclude: “Because the world works that way, and ignoring the rules is dangerous.”
There’s something to be said for objectivity: It’s the aim to know as much as God does. It’s the aim to know everything there is to know. Except you can’t. You’re limited, by definition, because you’re just one human being, with your own unique traits and experience. You will encounter certain things in your life, due to who you are and how you behave. And so you get a unique set of circumstances and rules for your personal life. It’s not just about figuring out Life, capital L, it’s about figuring out the rules of your life, undercase. Subjectivity is about humility. About realizing that you can’t know everything and you don’t have to. You don’t have to aim to be objectively perfect, you just have to aim to improve yourself as much as you can to your own best judgment.
Assuming that the tribe is healthy, there are ways of doing things. But those ways of doing things stem from a long line of people who used their personal subjective observations. In the long run, it means that the truth is in there, somewhere, because the test of time is that bad ideas don’t survive. But in the meantime, you can most definitely get into a situation where bad ideas thrive. Bad ideas are very successful on the short term and they wreak havoc on society. How to get back to sanity? I believe there are some basics that are correct, if you want to go on about objectivity, but you don’t have to go far to find them, just look at the definition of Sin and you’re just about there. Don’t lie. Don’t steal. Don’t be greedy. Don’t be lazy. Don’t be vengeful. And so forth. Just getting those right is the work of a lifetime, mostly because of your unique circumstances that most likely, in this age, conditioned you to ignore a specific set of them. But here’s where subjectivity comes in again. Live long enough and you’ll see patterns. You, with your own two eyes. And furthermore, do your best to wake up, to learn, to get better and at some point you’ll have seen things that nobody but your very best friends will ever believe. The objectivity-activists will ridicule you, or worse, you’ll ridicule yourself, because you don’t have objective proof. You don’t need objective proof, for anything! You need to look with your own two eyes at all the evidence you can find. First, get the basics right (that smart people thousands of years ago wrote down and tried to preserve for their descendants). Then, get beyond the basics and subjectivity becomes more important than objectivity. To whom? To you. It’s the ones with an agenda who will push “objectivity” as a replacement for “Don’t do what you want” and will also push “subjectivity” as a replacement for “Do what I want”. When objectively, your personal subjectivity is what every individual must practice. N=1.
And if you adhere to this viewpoint, you are obligated to stop telling other people what to do, think, say or feel, just as they cannot tell you what to do, think, say or feel. Pretty damn difficult if you are a fish that has no word for water but spent your entire life swimming in an ocean of pressure into thinking what another person tells you to think. And the thing is, of course, how do you figure anything out if you don’t talk to people? It’s an iterative process, it seems. Going back and forth between other people’s experiences and you own, between subjectivity and objectivity, and trying to integrate that into a whole. It’s a lot of work.
Objectivity has its place. There most definitely are truths and untruths. Some things are blatant lies, no matter how much the other person stamps their feet and insists that you ought to respect the nonsense that comes out of their mouth. No, you just look with your own two eyes, and believe that there is such a thing as ultimate truth, but that you cannot be God. You cannot know everything. Objectivity is the unreachable asymptote. Only God can be objective, because he has all the facts. But it’s a mistake to suspend your own judgment and assume that many subjective reports together can make up objectivity. There are too many unreliable sources, too many people who see what they want to see instead of what is really there. There’s too much noise. So what do you do if “objectivity” turns out to be lots of people shouting truths, half-truths and untruths about? If you don’t have all the facts of the entire universe (and you never do), then you’re better off sticking with your small world and the things you’ve seen, sensed, experienced or felt for yourself. So, you use what you have: You must use your personal senses to come to truth. There are too many people who abuse both words, “objective” and “subjective”, and demand that they get their own way.
Strive to find the truth, but know that it’s an asymptote you’ll never reach.
Why?
Because.