I think, therefore I'm confused

In today’s episode of "Oops, Humans Did It Again," we turn our magnifying glass toward the last 400 years of intellectual spelunking. It all began, rather regrettably, with one René Descartes, who bravely declared, “I think, therefore I am,” thus becoming the spiritual father of intellectualizing your problems.

And so, with a single thought, he unwittingly kickstarted our slow-motion unraveling and earning himself the dubious honor of being the very first inductee into our prestigious and mostly fictional Hall of Admirable Idiots Through History.

Yes, Descartes. The man who made it fashionable to separate mind from body and people from reality. Bravo, René. Bravo.

At the time of his very profound thought, our homeboy had 99 problems (but poverty ain’t one). Among them was war, oppression, abject misery, chronic humidity, a creeping suspicion that everything was a lie, and the unbearable obligation to attend parties and stay the whole time. Faced with such horrors, he did what any self-respecting introvert would do. He said he was busy and fled into the labyrinth of his own mind.

There in the candlelit echo chamber of his unprocessed trauma, he sought something comforting to cling to. What could be more reassuring than declaring with utmost certainty that you are the fixed point of the universe? Nothing says stability quite like shutting down the infinite mysteries of existence by making it all about you.

So he did what any deeply anxious overthinker would do. He scribbled something down as if it were chiseled into Mount Truth itself. “I think, therefore I am.” And then hoped to backwards-engineer his way back to God.

And the people rejoiced.

Just kidding, they absolutely hated him.

As intellectuals do, those five little words were tossed into the mind fire and promptly overcooked. There were reactions, then reactions to the reactions, then critiques of the reactions that had misunderstood the previous reactions entirely. Echoes bounced, ricochets rebounded, and somewhere in the distance, a lone academic coughed with significance.

But tragically, no drumbeat, no cello, not even a timid oboe dared make an appearance. It was all terribly serious. Eyebrows were furrowed. Careers were on the line. Tea was left to go cold. Friendships were severed.

Then finally, exhausted and over-caffeinated, it was all agreed it couldn’t be disproven with their own logic. So naturally they did what any reasonable society would do. They built laws, science, and revolutions on it.

To be fair, it worked pretty well for a while. Things were named, charts were drawn, some people who weren’t kings got to feel important and those other kings got a piece of humble pie.

And they backwards-engineered their way back to God and triumphantly rang their cowbells celebrating through the streets, “Have you heard the good news? God is the center after all! Victory is ours!”

The only hiccup, of course, was that logic has its limitations. Chief among them, it tends to crown whoever defines the words as the winner, regardless of whether they’ve made any sense at all.

And so, with noble intentions and increasingly ridiculous vocabularies, they rejected Descartes’ premise and then promptly turned around and identified with what they thought. The means began justifying the ends, usually at the expense of everyone not holding the dictionary or at least not holding it in Latin.

So then as intellectuals do, there were reactions, then reactions to the reactions, then critiques of the reactions that had misunderstood the previous reactions entirely. Echoes bounced, ricochets rebounded, and yes you’ve heard this already.

The people had 100 problems (and poverty was one). Much like Daddy Descartes had modeled for his philosophical children, there was endless, exhausting discussion about what was absolutely certain.

And the one thing that was certain to absolutely three people was that there was no God, life was meaningless, and objective truth couldn’t exist in their logic. So there was no truth, just a confusing smorgasbord of subjective truths, each more passionately defended than the last.

And to be fair, it worked pretty well for a while. Things were made, new boundaries were drawn, some people who weren’t rich got to be rich and those other rich people got a piece of humble pie.

So then as intellectuals do, there were reactions, then reactions to the reactions, then critiques of the reactions yada yada yada.

And we all know what eventually happens when the youngest sibling gets fed up with getting the short end of the stick—they flip the table, light the rulebook on fire, and declare themselves the new moral authority. “I think, therefore I am.”

And those pesky intellectuals did manage to make one thing absolutely certain—that nothing was certain. A truth quite real in the realm of reality.

But before anyone could mutter “patience is a virtue,” Granddaddy Descartes’ haunted ghost set about making everyone feel dreadfully fragile in their carefully crafted, self-made identities. Especially those poor souls whose sense of self wasn’t quite validated by the people who were, as it happens, perfectly okay not being an intellectual.

So then as intellectuals do, there were reactions, then reactions to the reactions, then critiques of the reactions that had misunderstood the previous reactions entirely. Echoes bounced, ricochets rebounded, and if you’re like me and don’t learn lessons the first time. Sometimes you won’t learn it the second time, either, and commit doing the same thing over and over again until you hit rock bottom and then you have no choice but to finally learn that lesson.

But tragically, no beat was dropped, no guitar solo, not even a timid triangle dared make an appearance. It was all terribly serious. Eyebrows were furrowed. Careers were on the line. Tea was left to go cold. Friendships were severed.

And yet we hadn’t quite mastered the uncertainty of no answers, or whether that’s not actually something our weird superiority complex and opposable thumbs were designed to do.

Maybe the world is pretty darn good just as it is, that our role isn’t to rearrange it to suit our comfort levels and that our sense of morality isn’t some neat little package anyone gets to define once and for all.

Maybe if we stop trying to change the world, we end up restoring it back to its original balance that is beyond our understanding.

And maybe our morality is like mechanical parts of a car—functional or dysfunctional (not justice or injustice). If we lose our temperance like the coolant of an engine, it’s only natural that we become a ticking time bomb. And instead of explain it away with logic or judgement, even though this scene is very funny:

we should learn to recognize when temperance is running dangerously low on coolant, refill it, and take a moment to check if other parts could use a little extra spiritual-grade WD-40.

We’re kind of like small children. Best when present and functional—busy building wholesome legacies from the carpet bag of our mind. And that, my friends, simply cannot happen when the blustering, self-important posture of “I think” keeps hogging the spotlight, while the humble “I am” waits patiently for its turn to go.