Wednesday 6 October 2004

Pic of the day: I just happened to have this picture of one of my City of Heroes Character designs from the beta testing. I found it appropriate...

Strangers on Earth

I was reflecting on how I felt like a stranger in our society. There is plenty to say about that, but then I also considered whether others too felt like this. They may have less reason for it, but that won't take away the feeling. Feeling and reason are not strongly connected by default, and it takes a long time for them to align, if ever. Ironically, for me it may be more reason than feeling. I like this world, a misfit though I may be here.

There is a popular book called "Men are from Mars, women are from Venus." (The author is named Gray, which is ironic since the most famous group of sinister aliens in popular conspiracy theory are called Grays. Yes, there are people who actually believe in that stuff.) In the case of that book, it is not to be taken literally. It just goes to say that men and women act and feel so differently, you would not believe they lived in the same world. And in a manner of speaking, they don't.

***

I think you will agree that we don't all see the world the same way. Someone who is color blind will never see quite the same as the rest, but it is still a complete world to him. I myself remember being nearsighted for several years ... or rather, I remember not knowing that I was nearsighted. I thought it was the normal human condition to see trees as vague green shapes, not being able to see the individual leaves until you actually arrived at the tree. Then one day for fun I borrowed my cousin's glasses for a few moments, and suddenly the world changed. I realized that I had been living in a limited world for years.

Just like our physical perceptions may limit us so we don't see the world the way it is, so we can also be limited in other ways. This could be actual limits to our brain, but often we simply lack the "software" – the concepts and the knowledge needed to connect the facts into a meaningful pattern. Often facts can be connected in different ways, which make sense separately, but which don't make the same sense. I have mentioned one episode a few years ago, where I was sitting waiting for the bus, peacefully drinking my Solo (a famous Norwegian orange soda), when I noticed a young girl looking at me. She kept looking with an expression on her face that I don't often see these days, but recognized from before: Desire. Flattering but a bit unsettling, out of the blue like that. Until she got up and came over ... not to me, but to the nearby kiosk and bought her own Solo.

It is easy to jump to conclusion based in incomplete data, and in large matters our data are always incomplete. Only the most trivial things can be described completely. You can learn how to wash dishes with near perfection, but not how to live a human life. When it is complete, you are dead. Until then, we know and understand only bits and pieces. So it makes sense that people connect the dots into different patterns. Men may have a tendency to think one way and women another, but also different cultures view the world differently. Hundreds of millions of Muslims honestly believe that Jews destroyed the World Trade Center, while hundreds of millions of Christians believe that Muslims did it. Few of these have any reason to know, except what their government- sanctioned newspapers and TV have told them. In this case, one of the different views happens to be right, but this is not because of any inherent excellence in the people who were lucky enough to be served the correct version.

There is a lot of this, that we just happened to be born at the right place and the right time. I fully agree with Shaw, that this is the supreme foundation of nationalism: The belief that one country is better than others because I happen to be born there. This is obvious from the fact that people who happen to be born elsewhere believe that THEIR inferior country is better than OUR superior country. Poor deluded fools. Good thing we were born at the right side of the invisible line that separate the supreme humans from the lesser ones.

But this is not enough. Even though we belong to the best nation of the world, many of us feel out of place there. Not because we are not up to its standard, but because it is not up to ours. (As the saying goes: "I've upped my standards, now up yours.") There are different explanations of why we feel like visitors and strangers on Earth. The most common here in the western world at least is probably religion. The Bible is pretty clear that Christians belong to the Kingdom of Heaven, and our stay in this sinful world is temporary. Some Christians seem to think that we have diplomatic immunity, but this rarely falls in good soil with the more secular circles. Like when the young man refused to pay his gasoline at the pump, because, as he said, "Jesus has paid my debt!"

Of course, many places are teeming with Christians and some of them still feel out of place. Admittedly some of these get worried that there may be something wrong about them. But many also conclude that there must be something wrong with most of the rest. They can't be real Christians (and indeed they are not, in the sense that in the Bible the term was reserved for disciples, people who actually took up the lifestyle of Jesus, but who does that nowadays?) So we get various churches, denominations and sects. Some believe that the Kingdom of Heaven belong to those who keep the Sabbath in the right way, some that it is those who have been baptized in the right way, while some think it has to do with knowing the correct name of God or Jesus and whether or not these are the same. As one man reputedly said: "In this town only I and my wife have the right faith, and I have my doubts about her as well."

To outsiders, some of these differences seem esoteric at best. There are those who feel so far removed from society as if they belonged to a different species. There are people, some of which I have met online, who quite seriously believe they are an animal trapped in a human body by some kind of cosmic mistake or burden of karma. And not necessarily an animal from the local fauna, but for instance a dragon. It must be quite painful for a dragon to be limited to this feeble, short-lived form. The dating scene is also limited, to say the least. I suppose the elves are able to adapt better, since the two species are fairly similar and also compatible in that other sense. (Let it be known that when I use Porcupine Boy as a online handle, it is purely symbolic, referring to my emotional distance, and does not imply that I have designs on any female porcupines I may meet in the garden.)

***

As you can see, it is not just I who feel sometimes as if I'm on the wrong planet. But regular readers will have noticed that I may be more different than most. I'll come back to that later, God willing. (I expect most of you to be atheists, but I'm not – I hope – and "evolution willing" doesn't have the same ring to it, does it?)