You are a freak, yes you, you are a freak.
Dont take it personally, I am a freak too. In fact take a good look around, there is plenty of freaks about. And its not just the living things, the landscapes, the clouds, the universe, all freaks.
Best guess on the origins of the universe at the moment is that its a freak of nature, a flux. If God made us he probably did not have much of a choice in the matter.
Then there is the earth, in the sweet spot with just the right conditions that life could crawl out of the sea and stand up and one day be you and me. Its all pretty much an accident.
Dont like the sound of all this? I for one am thankful for my blessings, I am happy to call myself a freak, the scum of the universe. Its a good place to be, in the sewer looking up at the stars (you should know which freak said that..or is it gutter? never mind)
The we get to human history, we are told that it is shaped and has a structure and destiny too it (well at least the Socialists do, and a few on the right) this too is a freak. It takes about 1 minute to pick any point in history a date and see that the events around what formed that event where in fact accidents and luck.
Winston Churchill should never have lived through the Boer War. Watson and Crick should have lost the race to the double helix, the list is endless. If you ever wanted to write a book its pretty easy to write any counter factual of history and change the names, many do.
This is a bit of a problem for us modern Humans. We see an ordered world of schools, hospitals, food on supermarket shelves, the idea this could all be an accident and cannot be relied upon in the future fills us with dread and fear. The future would be uncertain and we don't like uncertainty do we?
Luck plays a big hand in our lives, we like to think it was 'hard work' and 'perseverance', 'skill' and 'guile' when we happened upon the right place at the right time.
That is not to diminish the idea of hard work. hard work matters if you can muster the energy then the unlucky parts of your life will be easier to manage.
In this freakish world intelligence matters but not in the way you think it matters. True intelligence is not what you know or how well you understand it. Its about the things you don't know and how well you perceive them, and the risks therein that come with the things you do know.
This is the reason we find ourselves in the state we are in. We got over confident and misunderstood risks that we were storing up, we were masters of the universe, no more boom and bust, the riddle of history solved, quantified and classed as a science, which as with History ,Politics, Economics and Finance are not in anyway sciences, but strangely pretend to be so in our schools and universities.
This might seem a little odd, that's because it is odd, its freakish.
Good luck with the anti-knowledge, I have struggled all my life with it but even a glimpse within its mysterious orb is the most satisfying thing that you could wish for. A beauty like no other.
