The time game

There a quite a few people I know who yearn for the "good old days", you know, those times when the world was still OK. Most people are referring to their childhoods, and for those I've known since then, I can tell you that the times then weren't all that great.

But, we think they were (or at least like to think they were). Our perception of them over the passage of times makes them appear that they were. Most of all, we wish they were. Hindsight is 20-20. Time heals all wounds. Or, as Heraclitus noted, Time is a game played beautifully by children.

We are, however, no longer children. The relentlessness of the seeming endless march through morning, noon, and night. Our continual obsession with the past, our total ignorance of the present, and our self-induced fear of the future haunt us mercilessly. And we think that somehow time moves unerringly from some point in the past toward that most-feared point in the future, death. Then we remember, sometimes only fleeting, how beautifully we played the game of time when we were children.

What bothers most of us and what bothers us most is the fact that it seems to be moving faster, that it seems to be slipping away from us. We invented clocks to mark the hours and somehow know that a minute then was really no different from a minute now, but it certainly seems different. We all know that as we grow older our sensation of time accelerates, and given the fact that our lives are now driven by the clock, it seems all the worst. And then we find ourselves wasting time, even (ruthlessly) killing time ... how sick do we have to get before we realize that we've that we no longer have any idea how the time game is played.

So here we are, all grown up; our own persons; doing our own thing and making our own decisions; pretending to be large and in charge, bragging that we've paid our dues and know how to play the game ... but that's a much different game we think we know how to play. Sure, there are lots of folks who can play the get-what-you-want game, the pulling-the-wool game, the talk-big game, the act-brave game, and many more besides. But the real game, the most important game of all is the one we forgot how to play.

Too bad, too sad, it was the most fun game of all.

The whole hole

If one opinion is as good as any other, then none of them has any value. Things without value cannot serve as the basis for Values. And so, here we are in a valueless world. How great is that?

In a desperate attempt to salvage something from it all, we've reverted to "worth" as a replacement. After all, the words are very similar in meaning, so the transition hasn't been all that difficult. Unfortunately, the words only appear to be similar in meaning. But what else can we do?

Not much. We are not allowed to have values anymore because the opponents of my values decry them as mere opinions. And everyone who doesn't share my values, well, they're just not worth talking to. (And if you stop for just a second to look at how "values" and "worth" were used in that last sentence, you'd realize how little the two words have to do with one another.) And that's precisely what happens. We no longer talk to ... we only talk at.

Political debate has become nothing more than the repeating of positions until the other either agrees or stops listening. Religious debate has become nothing more than the repeating of tenants of faith until the other agrees or stops listening. Educational debate has become nothing more than repeating of alleged principles until the other agrees or stops listening. In the end, what they share is the fact that there is nothing more than opinion being spouted, and no one is listening.

Perhaps the most effective marketer of all time, Josef Goebbels, is well known for his adage: if you repeat the lie often enough, the people will believe it. And that's where we are, whether we like it or not, and whether we want to admit it or not. Everybody's bought into the same lie: opinions matter.

Here we are at the beginning of the 21st century, and all we have to offer the world are opinions: economies are better than societies; my god is bigger than your god; my students are smarter than yours; my team is better than your team; my clique is cooler than your clique; my ... well, you can fill in the blank.

Almost 2,000,000 years of human history (or roughly 6,000 for you fundamentalists) and that's all we have to show for ourselves. Don't we have reason to be proud?

Deeper in the hole

Opinions are not restricted to just the political sphere. That's where we encounter them quite often, and it is there that it's most apparent that we're dealing with opinions, but, truth be told, they're everywhere ... in every major sphere of life.

Let's take economics. We love to talk about that, don't we? Like I've said so often, we traded in our society for an economy, so all we ever talk about anymore is how much stuff costs? Who's going to pay for that? Why do I have to pay so many taxes? And it's all based on what? Right – opinions. Free markets: opinion. They don't exist; never have. Add one cent of government subsidies to anything and that market is no longer free. Which aspect of our economy is unaffected? None. Who are the biggest advocates of free-market economics? Those who receive the biggest subsidies: banks, defense contractors, private equity speculators ... and more and more the broad masses of people without much of anything, for they've bought into the opinion that if it's free, I have a chance too.

Or, what about religion? We've got at least two related religions running around claiming sole access to the truth: Christianity and Islam. In both cases, however, it is just one variety of the religion that dominates the discussion, namely the fundamentalists. What gets me is that they both claim the same source for their rightness: the Big Guy Himself. What are the claims then really based on: opinion, what one has chosen to believe.

Or, education? We don't even teach facts anymore. No one learns to write, to express thoughts, to think critically, to debate ... why? Because it's all politically incorrect. Since when has political anything been the determiner of what we need to learn in order to be conscientious citizens? Oh, I almost forgot: citizens are members of a society, and we don't have a society anymore, just an economy, and how educated do you have to be in order to consume? Consumers shouldn't be too smart, they might not buy my stuff.

We're a lot farther down the hole than we like to admit, aren't we?

Beside the hole

For those of you who have been suffering through these "hole" posts (not post holes ... please note the difference), you have to be asking yourself about this time, just where is all of this leading. All I can say is that that is a another excellent question. Nevertheless, I'm going to try and answer it, and to do so, I'm going to make use of two very popular words ... at least popular these days ... for the simple reason that they will be used in a sense much closer to their original intent than is thought of today.

What have we got? Fundamentally, our beliefs drive our opinions, regardless of the facts; what is more, the facts, in and of themselves, are of little value, they just are. On the one hand, then, we have those who believe in the stability of their beliefs, that their beliefs are the right beliefs, that the reason anything functions as well as it does is because of how they believe. We'll call these folks "conservatives"; that is, those who think that things should pretty much stay the way they are. On the other hand, we have those who believe that just because a lot of folks believe something doesn't necessarily make it right; there could be different things to believe at different times or in different places. We'll call these people "relativists". (Gotcha, didn't I? Admit it, you thought I was going to write something very different.)

What's wrong with this picture? What should be wrong with it, you may be asking. It looks just fine to me. Well, if we stop and reflect for just a moment, why should there be only two positions to take on this: conservatism and relativism? Why isn't there another, if not other, way(s) of looking at all of this? Well, there is. And it's what we're going to call, for lack of a better word, realism. Yes, it's just that simple to redefine somebody else's words. We should never forget that language is just that: language, a way of expressing our understanding of reality. And, in deference to the master, George Carlin, I might add we can't say things in our own words, just in those words that everyone else uses as well.

So, there we have it: conservatives, relativists, and realists. How do we know who's right? Can we know what's right? How do we decide what's right? Those are the pressing questions for the moment. The short answer is: we don't.

Back to the hole

Facts in and of themselves are just that, facts. Opinions, even informed opinions, are just opinions. They don't tell us what is good, bad or indifferent. They really don't tell us anything (other than what is or how something thinks about something). But, in the end, they're really not all that helpful. Why?

At bottom, what makes a difference is really only that which matters, that which has meaning. But meaning for whom? How do we determine what something means. This is a much more difficult question, believe me. It may even be the most difficult question of all. Why? Because when all is said and done, we find meaning in those things that we believe.

This may sound banal, and to a certain extent it is, but it is nevertheless deep, and not everyone is ready to dive into that deepness. What am I talking about? Let's say, just for the sake of argument, Joan believes in free-market capitalism. How does she interpret the "facts" about starvation in the world? Let's say, for example, that Tom believes in a redistribution of wealth, if necessary, forced. How does he interpret those same facts? Who's "right"?

Yes, here's the rub. What the facts tell us, what they mean, depend, in the end on what we believe, in particular how we believe the world functions, whether money or G-d is at the root of all things, what we believe democracy to be or what we understand when we use the words "freedom" or "liberty" or "government" or "wealth" or any number of other abstract concepts that can't be corralled in fact or statistics or numbers.

No, in the end, it is our beliefs that drive our thinking, our understanding of numbers, our interpretation of reality, our opinions and our knowledge. Everybody can't be right, and everybody can't be wrong. But, the biggest part of our unending discussions don't center around facts, or statistics, or anything, except what we believe ... and we tend to congregate with those who believe the things that we do too.

I only bring this up because while we think we are being oh so convincing in our argumentation, that we are so persuasive in our presentations, in fact we are merely telling others what it is we believe. And the question that immediately presents itself, of course, is why is that what you (or I) believe better than what somebody else believes? Yes, just why should that be?