What Is Actually Going On In This Big Ol' World?
Today we are in a world that is at odds with itself. There is this battle going on, and it is not purely the battle between religions or political forces or of different moralities between people. It is even between the most simple opinions. It is even within us - in our conscience, in the fight between laziness and assertiveness among so many other things pertaining to our circumstances - an “inner conflict.” The world has shown to us through minor and major events, through relationships with strangers and with those close to us, that sometimes things can or can’t be trusted, and until truth is revealed to us through its natural consequence, or until we seek it, we don’t necessarily know.
Schrodinger’s cat is an excellent example of this. Although the paradoxical experiment went far beyond what I am explaining here, it reiterates the reality of how our approach to every thought, every decision we make, is dependent on willingness to find out consequences. This is how Schrodinger’s cat works:
Essentially, a cat is put in a box. An internal monitor is installed inside this box which, when triggered by radioactivity, is triggered, causing a flask filled with poison to shatter and release into the air. The really interesting part, and relevant for this discussion here, is that the cat, without opening the box, is either alive or dead. This is not literal in its meaning, rather we could assume either/or is possible (this is meant to represent quantum superposition, something that my scientific textbook in high school did not teach me - however, I digress…). Either/or is possible, until we decide to open the box and find the reality. And when we do this, when we are willing to potentially expose our discernments to the truth or reality of the matter, we may be shocked or surprised. But by not opening the box, the reality exists whether or not we want it to. The cat is not both dead and alive. It is one or the other.
The consequence (the reality) may be in line with how we see it. It may be against how we see it. And if we were wrong, if we chose ignorance (which at the age of capacity or competence is inevitable) in fear or rebellion of the reality, then at the end we can say nothing to excuse ourselves. Your belief that the cat is alive, that you can continue to believe so, is not founded on anything more than the extent to which you seek to find out. And the same goes for the belief that the cat is dead. Yes, it could be either. But it will never be both. If the cat is alive but we assume it’s dead, it may eventually die within the box because we refused to open it in fear of seeing the dead cat. If the cat is dead but we assume it’s alive, and we still do not open it, then that says nothing of our conscience either, in fact, it is cruel. This cat either a) deserves to be freed or b) deserves a proper burial in the backyard with the kids writing a beautiful and mis-spelt eulogy (“Farewell Mr Cat, you were luvd.”). If we leave the cat there in the box and refuse to open it, eventually, no matter what, the cat will be dead and rot and permeate our own realities.
The ultimate ignorance is the rejection of something you know
nothing about and refuse to investigate.
Why do I say these things? It is because fear and ignorance are worse than the realities themselves. To quote Josephine Lawrence, ‘any fear is always worse than the thing itself.’ And Franklin D Roosevelt likewise said that ‘the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.’ We should urge ourselves to replace fear with curiosity. Ignorance and fear, stubborn approaches that allow us no more than to assume that what we have faced in our experiences is enough to determine what is true enough to dictate our perceptions of everything else, is the worst way to honour the time that we have in this world, whether you believe that your time on earth is just a product of chance in the greatest meaning, or whether you were pre-destined to exist (the ultimatum we face today). It is also the worst way to treat our fellow man. The betterment (and inversely, the impairment) of others can often depend on ourselves. Your own experience has, at any point, the ability to create a sort of domino effect on others.
