So many ideas, so little to say.

Sometimes it's hard to think of anything witty.  I have two or three posts in the can that suck.
All of them.

One has something to do with the correlation of religion and conspiracy theories.  You know, believing that the thing that controls your destiny is hidden behind a curtain. And that simple curtain is the only thing that separates you from DEATH.  Therefore the holy of holies, because you are aware of it, empowers you, though it must never be revealed... some shit like that.

So today's post is pretty lowbrow stuff.

I had another one whipped up that was a rather loosely tethered collection of ideas that led to the notion that the human capacity for creative thought and pattern recognition has been the driving force in our evolution for the last half a million years or more.  Because those faculties have improved the chances of reproduction for all those individuals toting them about, we have big blood filled skulls, a great deal of motoric responsiveness in our faces and an unquenchable desire to know more things.  Knowing more things, figuring out more and better ways to do things has been the deciding factor in human adaptation.  Therefore, we are all fitted with this hole in our world where the stuff we know is out there, but cannot see or understand itches at us.  That itch is the drive to evolve.  The itch to procreate in dolphins, apes, monkeys and most other mammals is so great that they will masturbate, screw stationary objects, etc. just like that mating urge, we are all itching to know more, we can't help it. Novelty, as it exists as a sensation of wonder, is the product of the brain releasing opioids.  New things get us high, if we have a framework to recognize them in. Thought defines us.  They define our desire to understand one another.

But that post turns into a discussion of narcotization and the feeling of being overwhelmed by bad news or ugly circumstances or dark realities and how such a reaction must also be evolutionarily derived. That process turns the itch into fear, pain and hopelessness that can be salved with either faith or hedonism.

Then again we could try an honest attempt at admitting that we don't know everything and that simply trying to figure things out has worked for a long time.  Figuring things out, which is to say learning, teaching and communicating, has allowed us to survive plagues, an ice age and (so far) mutually assured destruction. Bad as things might be, this isn't an ice age.  But trying to extoll the impossible virtues of cooperation is crazy, pinko communist talk... I know.

At any rate, that isn't much of a post either. So I guess this isn't much of a post... less so even.  Oh well.

With that said, I'd like to close with the following from Ambrose Bierce.

Mad, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence; not conforming to standards of thought, speech and action derived by the conformants from study of themselves; at odds with the majority; in short, unusual. It is noteworthy that persons are pronounced has by officials destitute of evidence that themselves are sane.

                   - The Devil's Dictionary