Of the many things I enjoy doing, thinking deep thoughts and solving puzzles are two of my favorites. As I was walking home from breakfast this morning, I found myself thinking about our world and just how wrong things seem to be.
It may sound cynical, but I’m 100% convinced that our world is well and truly broken beyond the point of repair (though not beyond the point of rebuilding, a fine point)…and I think I finally understand one of the key reasons it is the way it is.
To sum it up, our world is broken due to faulty education, because we’re taught from an early age that some things are impossible.
Monsters in the closet? Impossible. Superheroes and super powers and mutants? Impossible. Big foot, Loch Ness monsters, and Ghosts? Impossible. Flying cars, fusion at room temperature, exceeding the speed of light? Impossible. Impossible, impossible, impossible.
And that’s an absolute load of shit.
Nothing, and I mean nothing, is impossible. Improbable, yes, perhaps highly improbable, but not impossible, and the two are far too often confused.
If our Universe is truly infinite, and all evidence suggests that it is, then possibility must be equally infinite. I think it’s pretty safe to say that all things are possible.
This is a long exposure shot of “empty space”…and, it’s not so empty. In fact, not only was it not empty, but it turned out to be full of galaxies, each in turn full of billions and billions of stars, each potentially representing a solar system of planets much like ours. That’s a LOT of possibility 🙂
Unless, of course, you believe otherwise. And while your lack of belief doesn’t change what is and isn’t possible from the Universe’s perspective, when you believe something to be impossible then for you it becomes so because you’ve effectively narrowed your reality.
If YOU don’t believe you can do something, then you can’t.
The worst part is, not only are we taught that many things are impossible, but the very willingness to believe that anything IS possible is literally stamped out of us through formal education, fear and mindless traditions.
Despite all our recent advances, I guess you could actually say our world is broken due to a lack of innovation. Our greatest problems will require innovation on a grand scale, and more than just a little of the “impossible” to achieve.
Alas, innovation on a grand scale is so rare because the “experts” in the fields that need innovating the most, the very people who are looked to for solutions to our greatest problems, are themselves coming from a place that quite literally prevents them from approaching old problems in new ways. They’re taught to think about new problems in old ways.
How about an example: cancer. Why, why haven’t we cured cancer yet?
Believe it or not, I actually have the answer to that 🙂 Cancer has yet to be cured because the people working on it are approaching it from a foundation of what is and isn’t possible. And yes, I realize that science and medicine operate on a system of rules, but advances are rarely made without breaking rules, without trying things that “just can’t possibly work”.
What if I decided that I wanted to be able to fly and shoot laser beams from my eyes, like a combination of Rogue and Cyclops from X-Men? Impossible, right? WRONG!
Just because it hasn’t been done doesn’t make it impossible, only improbable. If that was really something I wanted to achieve, I believe I could find a way, because I refuse to accept anything as impossible.
Do you know the difference between correlation and causation? The government, the media and most of the major corporations in the world think and hope that you don’t, and from what I can see of our world I’d say they’re right.
Correlation is when two things appear to be related. Causation is when one thing is caused by another. For example, “Every day people die. Every day, the sun rises and sets. Therefore, the rising and setting of the sun causes people to die.” That’s correlation, NOT causation, not to mention really bad logic.
So much of what we hear, what we’re taught, and even so much of our “reality” is based on correlation disguised as causation. And despite the absolute lack of logic, so many people just swallow what they’re fed. Yummy! Please sir, may I have some more?
Great leaps forward come from people who have no concept of impossible vs. possible, because they truly believe that anything is possible. These people are almost always labeled as troublemakers, mavericks or even heretics, though in hindsight they’re seen as geniuses.
Our world is broken because too many people have given in and allowed others to define reality and possibility for them. They’ve been pressured to abandon imagination, to become realistic.
Logic and imagination are NOT mutually exclusive.
Finally, after thousands of years of being stuck in the same old rut, I think we’re approaching an epochal shift. Knowledge and technology have converged and are advancing so quickly that they may finally outpace attempts to define possibility and reality.
It may take a generation or two, but things are changing…and damn it all, I want to be a part of that, because IÂ feel a profound need to not waste my life, and to help set people free.
There’s a hell of a puzzle out there to solve, and I’ve got an itch!
