Complex Things

Life is both simple and complex.

Everyone deals with life and either instinctively or through early learning we develop a set of skills that we use every day.  Walking, talking, observing, planning, and other almost automatic things that we do without thinking much about them at all.

These skills were the ones required to survive before we achieved a civilized status.  Of course some skill common among primitive people have been lost in our civilized world.  Generally most of us don't need to know how to make a fire, something that was essential to our ancestors.

Life gets complex as we attempt to answer the question why.

This may be the trait that makes us most unique on this planet, although we certainly see a certain amount of inquisitive behavior in other species.

I doubt that many animals, even those close to us genetically speaking, spend a lot of time figuring out how did they get here or why the sun rises and sets.  They have to deal with surviving on a daily basis.

It requires a certain degree of security to worry about things that you don't need today to survive.

We want answers that explain the world around us.  The answers are important and it is this quest for knowledge that led to the rise of our civilizations as we learned how to grow the right plants, exploit the right animals, build shelters that allowed us to populate even hostile portion of the planet and our continuing technological development.

Still, many if not most of us understand very little of how much of this works and we rely on people with knowledge to make things work.

We don't even know how to gather and kill our own food, let alone survive in the "wild".

We certainly don't understand how much of the things we use everyday actually work.

This complexity and lack of knowledge makes us susceptible to those who know or claim to know the answers.  It is this lack of knowledge that leads to both gullibility and suspicion.

We like politicians who give us simple answers.  It is reassuring to think that we can solve a problem simply by doing something simple.

Unfortunately it doesn't work so we start to suspect they are lying to us.  They are, some more than others, but we still go for it over and over.

Its just easier to go with the simple answer, we think we understand it.