15 February 2004

But Would We Have It Any Other Way?

You know, it occurs to me that, almost as a universal whole, humanity has to be one of the single most functionally dysfunctional species ever to walk the face of Old Mother Earth.

Think about it. As a species we have bought into this fallacy that there is a wrong way to feel, and that if our emotions take us in a certain direction then there must, by logical extension, be something wrong with us. We've bought into the fallacy that if your life and your actions don't conform to some random and arbitrary universal model then you aren't normal and something must be wrong with you. The only thing that these fallacies accomplish is to bring pain and suffering into our lives, and we know it. Yet, we keep going out and looking for these so called irregularities, those areas in which our lives don't quite measure up to the lives of those around us.

In order to justify the conclusion that there must be some standard of normalcy we have invented a whole new arm of science to govern human emotion, and while psychology is useful in explaining the logic behind certain kinds of human behavior it is otherwise essentially useless in that it seeks to look for ways to cure these so-called abnormalities, and I'm just not sure that they're something that needs to be cured.

Consider what kind of society we would have if all of us lived the exact same life in the exact same way, if there was no individuality in our lives. What would we celebrate? Whom would we revere and revile? What would our lives be like if we experienced no pain, no longing, no loneliness? What would our lives be worth the instant we realized that we were perfectly fine because our lives conformed to the same arbitrary statistical norm as everyone else's lives?

I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's okay to be Fucked up because there probably isn't really anything wrong with you at all, you're just having a bad day. Or perhaps you're having an entire string of them.

Sometimes our pain can be instructional. We can look back at all the ways in which our actions caused us to regret certain consequences and then make sure that we never do those things again. Pain is a teacher and we need our pain, but what happens when the source of your pain and suffering is the one thing you want more than anything else in this world?

The human heart is a tricky thing. We're capable of dizzying heights of emotion, the likes of which no other species can possibly know. We're capable of great intuition, great sadness, great rage, and, when we're at our best, great love. Sometimes these affairs of the heart don't quite work out, though, and we take our pain and suffering and move on, vow to do better the next time. But what happens when that one person who caused you so much pain is the one person that you want more than anything else in this world? There has to be something wrong with that, doesn't there? And, by extension, doesn't that mean there has to be something wrong with you?

Thus, we get back to the Great Fallacy. We're convinced that some kinds of feelings are just plain wrong, and that's the Fallacy. There is no wrong way to feel, but certain actions taken as a result of those feelings can be wrong. Michael Jackson is a perfect example. I can't think of a more Fucked up individual on this planet, and now he's going to pay a very heavy price for his particular dysfunction.

The other Great Fallacy is that there must be some kind of logical reason why we feel the way that we do. This Fallacy comes to us courtesy of the study of psychology, and it is so totally off base that I begin to laugh at the mere thought of it. There isn't always going to be a logical reason why we feel the way we do. Indeed, sometimes the reason why we feel what we do is so illogical and so irrational as to make us double over in fits of laughter. And guess what, there's nothing wrong with that. But we're convinced that there is something wrong and we put ourselves through sheer hell trying to root out the problem so that it never happens again, when there's no real problem in the first place.

And yet, in spite of all the emotional fallacies that we subscribe to, in spite of all the grief and sadness that we put ourselves through, we still manage to accomplish great things. We have poets and thinkers and dreamers, artists and craftsmen of such beautiful skill that it brings tears to the eyes. We've composed music, landed men on the moon, written literature. And those among us who have accomplished these great things have done so because they've learned to make their particular dysfunction work for them, they've learned to overcome all the things that society tells them is wrong with them.

So I ask you, would we really have it any other way?