I hate updating my website. It is a chore. So, I put it off, depriving the literal handful of bots who visit it on a good day access to the latest flowering of my thought.
It is not because it is hard – it is one of those off-the-shelf freebies which even idiots can master – but because it is frustrating. Several times during the process, the site will become unresponsive and I will be left twiddling my thumbs looking at a box on my screen. Whatever other optional extras my parents chose when they were ordering me, they failed to tick the box labelled “Patience”. I put it off because I know it will annoy me and I would prefer not to be annoyed.
Computers are wonderful things, but they have also introduced a whole new range of frustrations into human life. Our ancestors never saw a message saying “Page Not Found”, nor did they have to insert an image into a Word document. Let’s not even get started on printers.
But their lives were not without their own inconveniences. Things didn’t work. They didn’t do what our ancestors wanted. They were every bit as aware as we are that, given the choice between obeying our wishes or the laws of physics, inanimate objects will unerringly choose the latter.
We cannot tell when people first made this discovery. Perhaps the caveman who invented the wheel noticed it had an unfortunate habit of not staying where he left it, particularly on uneven ground. But it is a discovery each of us comes to early – no matter how much force our chubby infant fingers apply, that triangle shape just isn’t going into the round hole.
Donald Rumsfeld famously talked about “Known Unknowns”; the habitual unwillingness of the physical world to conform to our wishes seems, by contrast, to be an “Unknown Known”. We understand that objects will obey the laws of physics, but when things don’t do what we want, we rarely turn to them for an explanation. They are being unco-operative. They are going wrong. One more try and they’ll do what we want. If all else fails, just do it harder. A push here, a shove there and soon enough you’re Basil Fawlty giving your broken-down car a “damn good thrashing” with a branch.
Even those who don’t go the full Fawlty get frustrated, get annoyed. Things not doing what we want upsets us. It is wrong, almost an injustice. And none of us likes to feel wronged. Sometimes we adapt our behaviour and hold a grudge – you should have worked the first time – sometimes, as with my website, we adapt our behaviour to avoid holding a grudge – the lack of traffic from bots seems a small price to pay for serenity. Not only should the world work in the way we want, it should work in such a way as to make us feel good.
Our senses make us the centre of our worlds – we see what is around us, we feel what is near us, we taste what is inside us. Everything is positioned with reference to ourselves. Our minds, however, make us the centre of the world. Since we are the pole around which it turns, it must turn for our benefit, do what we want in the way that we want. Other people we can, perhaps, excuse for their misdemeanours; they are similar enough to ourselves to have some portion of Free Will. Inanimate things we cannot. They have no will of their own. As far as we know, they exist only with reference to us. Quite frankly, they’re letting us down. And they’re letting themselves down.
Put that way, the idea sounds deeply silly. We know the world was here before us. We know it obeys God’s Law, the unfolding of Divine Reason or just the laws of physics. There is no ill-will in an inanimate object not doing what we want. No slight intended. It is inanimate – the clue is in the question. But however deeply we know this intellectually, it is never the first explanation we reach for when something goes wrong. Our initial instinct is that the world is there to do our bidding, to satisfy our desires. Few of us espouse solipsism, most of us behave solipsistically.
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so,” said Mark Twain. We can debate how true this is – it was not knowing that 9/11 was being planned which sparked Mr Rumsfeld’s famous dictum – but it certainly has some truth in it. We are continually annoyed, frustrated and sometimes hurt because we expect the world to behave in a way we know we have no reason to expect. And we never learn. Not, at least, at the level of principle. You may no longer try to force a triangle into a circular hole, but you will still be annoyed when a “push” door doesn’t open if you pull it, or when the plug gets yanked out of the socket when you try to vacuum the furthest reaches of the room.
Although they lived centuries before the laws of physics were formulated, it was the Daoists of Ancient China who offered a way out of the conundrum they pose. The Dao was going to unfold the way it was going to unfold. You could not predict it nor could you forestall it. All you could do was surrender and adapt to it. Align yourself with its direction and practice wu-wei – the actionless action. No struggle, no desire, just harmonious being. “Do that which consists in taking no action, and order will prevail.”
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He is now also on Substack, where you are welcome to follow him.
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“There is no ill-will in an inanimate object not doing what we want.”
Well, in my lack of charity, I tend to disagree. I call said inanimate objects every name under the sun for not doing what I want – my computer, for example, when it refuses to obey my will by firing up without delay, or failing to end the latest “freeze”, gets it in the neck, figuratively speaking. The kind of language (non-English) which I usually reserve for other drivers when I’m out on the road, is delivered in dollops when my computer plays up or I trip over the vacuum cable.
Anyway, a thought-provoking article; it made me realise just how unreasonable to the point of irrationality, I can be on (too many) occasions! Many thanks.