The "way-it-is" fallacy

You can't expect me to do anything about all this crap ... that's just the way it is.

Do you ever hear that one? I hear it a lot. It's one of the things that ticks me off maybe more than anything else. If we look at the big three of human existence - religion, politics and economics - there is not a single thing about any one of them that is just-the-way-it-is. Over the past couple of months, I've spent a lot of time and effort trying to show just why this is the case. This is stuff we (and by "we" I mean every single one of us, without exception) humans have simply made up. There is no natural law of religion, like there is, say, a law of gravitation, or that there are three states of matter (solid, liquid, gas).

Each religion is a collection of beliefs and doctrines that human beings have - at a minimum - collected, organized and attempted to implement. In all of the Scriptures of all the religions that I've read, there was never anything anywhere that said how to do it. For the most part, they were simply collections of how one should be and how one should act. Some human being or some collection of human beings - perhaps over time even - specified what that "how" should be.

Every political system, from the divine right of monarchy to democratically elected officials is a human construct. Somebody, or some group of people, sat down, formulated some principles and others have tended to follow them. Again, there is no law of politics, there is nothing that says there even has to be politics, but that we have to have as much as we do, that we have to do it in a particular way ... well, that's just something we decided to do, not something we can't do anything about.

And my favorite, economics ... there is no natural law of money or credit or anything of the sort. As a so-called "science" (which I personally think it is anything but), it's barely 250 years old, and all of the problems that we have since we've talked about it this way haven't been solved. I mean, what good is a science if it can't solve problems. It is, as currently portrayed, practiced and propagated, is the most worthless of all. Yet, it is the one that we have placed most centrally in our thinking, and it is the one that everybody feels most helpless in dealing with.

Why? I don't know. But each and every one of these three significant parts of our lives are anything but something that is just that way. No, in simplest terms: we made them up. There manifestations and expression in our lives are simply how we "decided" to organize our existence. We could just as easily have thought of something else, but we didn't. This simple realization that much of what pains us about life are simply fictions, is tough for a lot to folks to swallow. It takes courage to admit that maybe we didn't do as well on these as we could have. I don't really think that's a problem at all.

If we don't like something, if we see that something isn't working, then we are free to change it. That is how it really is.