The survey (an essay about tendencies in unprecedented times)

When I think of hobbies, surveys come to mind. Escaping the severity of current times would probably be easier for me if I played guitar, chess or bought a pair of rollerblades. But we all know the ways of entertainment are inscrutable, so a few weeks ago I launched one of my famous surveys. People around me know them well: I usually propose a hypothetical and ethically problematic situation and leave my respondents to solve it, treasuring the most amusing answers and occasionally sharing them over tea. This time, well, I guess I took things one step further.

Let's not get into hardcore philosophy and depart from a simple assumption, if you don't mind daring for the sake of having a good time. Let's say we all have our own  set of beliefs (or logbook of experiences) with which we navigate reality (or events around us). Something like an individual world-map that allows us to move around without getting too lost. Agree? Well done, that has saved us a few centuries of quarrels. Onto the survey now: I wanted to know how we add to our personal world-map, how we accommodate in it new, perhaps puzzling, or, as they like to say nowadays, 'unprecedented' events that occur – and if we do it at all.

I decided to limit the ways in which we integrate – or not – new stuff into our maps to three. It could have been two, or 13, but since it was my survey, I went for three. Apologies for the audacity: remember that surveys are my turn in karaoke. Ok, the skeleton of my survey looked like this:

Before an a priori inexplicable event that lingers in time you think you would...

1. Try to find an explanation. Most events are the effect of a cause. Causes should be within my reach – c'mon, I'm the knower of the universe – and isn't finding them kind of my duty as a decent, rational being anyhow? Plus, if I don't understand something, I frown way too much. Bad for wrinkles. 

2. Accept it. That's how sh*t happens now, so be it. I surrender to reality since not all events have a cause and, even if they do, we humans can't always comprehend them. Finding causes can't be what we're here for, dude. 'Roll with it' is my motto. Don't fight it; embrace it. Peace.

3. Ignore it. I believe most events have a cause and most causes can be understood by me, of course, but who says I need to waste my time finding the causes of everything? Plus, life is too short for things that don't make sense. YOLO, and close the door when you leave. I've got sensible things to deal with. Thanks. 

Obviously, I wasn't going to present the survey like this to my respondents. If I had done it, for a start no one would have wanted to take part, since there was a negative side to every answer. There was a risk they would have considered the image they were giving of themselves by picking one option or another, and you want people to be as spontaneous and sincere as possible. Also, what if it was too complicated to understand? I needed to come up with a more chewable scenario, something nerve-racking and mundane that would trigger an almost instinctive response. This is how I finally presented my survey:

 

Suppose you don't have a driving license or a car and one fine day you go out to the street and you see that all the cars are going in reverse: on the street, on the highway, everywhere.  You try to find out what's going on but no one gives you a satisfactory answer. A year goes by and things don't change.

What would you do?

 

1 Think that there has to be a reason and keep investigating until you find it

 

2 Accept that's the way things are and move on with your life

 

3 Try to forget about it because things that do not make sense bother you after a while

 

In a way, these options respond to three tendencies in regards to how we interact with unprecedented phenomena – or what you might want to simply call 'reality'. The first one being, 'I'd better understand what's going on to not get too lost in this world'; the second: 'I'd better accept what's going on to not get too lost in this world'; and finally,  'Too bad if I get lost in this world, I'm not going to waste my life trying to understand absurdities'. In other words, we can say there are two ways to approach the unexplained: either we integrate it into our experience (by explaining or simply accepting it), or we don't. That's it.

I must admit that the consequence of deliberately leaving stuff outside my world-map because it has already consumed too much time is unknown to me. Yes, as you might have guessed by now, I face-fall into the first tendency. I am a No 1. Hence my dedicating my free time to epistemology. Jokes aside, I wonder if No 3s are not No 1s fighting their nature in the hopes of maintaining some energy reservoir. I mean, let's face it: who's wearing themselves out more than anybody else here? The No 1 folk. Unlike No 3s, they conquer the unknown and experience great excitement when they finally scream 'eureka!', but the road to getting there is often steep, arduous and full of dangers that I'll describe later. 

But let's talk about No 2 a bit. Two of the most important people in my life belong to that profile, and – I'm not going to lie – they exasperate the life out of me, and leave me thrashing about, hopping like a tick next to their composure. I envy them so much... I wish I could be just like them, to go with the flow and then to sleep. But I suspect we don't really get to choose our tendencies, I suspect we just acquire them during our early years when the dice of nature and nurture are rolled, so... I can't just fake it until I make a No 2 and surrender to reality without a good ol' explanation. I'm just a poor No 1, trapped in my anthropocentric beliefs, thinking the answers are out there, just at the tip of my fingers, doomed to a constant search.

At this point you must all suspect No 1 is the prototypical Western Kid, and you might be right. Darwin, Newton, Copernicus didn't just let it be. Scientists, philosophers, doctors, poets have always had questions. Why the weight? Why the being? Why the illness? Why the heartbreak? The answer my friend is blowing in the wind... and I'm gonna catch it! But let's also give No 2s their credits, shall we? Yoga wouldn't exist without them, eastern philosophy, epiphanies, nirvanas, Yogananda, Krishnamurti, Rumi, the Bhagavad Gita, synchronised walking, I mean... they conquered peace within. We owe them a wider sense of love and comfort and the acknowledgment of an incomparable harmony. How about No 3s? Oh, well. I want to believe it's thanks to threes that in the midst of all this ecstasy we open the tap and there's still running water. They're there finishing books and keeping focus on a lot of things without attempting to integrate into their maps everything they come across. The world runs on threes and we must honour their sacrifice of leaving a chunk of reality outside their radar. It mustn't be easy – from a No 1 perspective, of course. Shout out to threes. Respect. 

What were the results of my survey? Well, I had a sample of 50 individuals. A mix of men and women, students, relatives and friends aged 20 to 70, with various academic backgrounds, mostly from Europe, North America and the Middle East. Here's what happened:

60% answered No 1

40% didn't (24% went for No 2 and 16% for No 3)

'What!?' That was the most common reaction among No 1s when I broke the news to them. Most of them, unlike twos, had been quick and sharp when giving their answer, and had accompanied it with something along the lines of, 'Of course, No 1', or 'Option 1, is there any other sensible choice?'. It didn't come as a surprise that many were shocked by what they considered a worrying lack of curiosity in their peers. However, the majority of No 2s gave unrequested justifications to their answers and, when given the results, didn't seem particularly surprised. Why were No 1s so sure of themselves and No 2s so apologetic? Probably, I concluded, due to cultural pressure. Perhaps if I had conducted my survey in a non-Western latitude, the majority would have shifted to No 2. Yes, believe it or not, No 1 seems to be the politically correct response to my hypothetical scenario in current Western society. The Enlightenment did its thing and it lasted. Maybe ones are so sure of their ways because their tendency is backed up by an educational system that praises the scientific method, rationalism, and an incorruptible faith in the cause-effect nature of all there is. This belief in explanatory causes and a quasi-divine call to find them fits neatly into the anthropocentric – and, let's be honest, arrogant – worldview of the Western being and their desire to leave no stone unturned. The Abrahamic cultures of my respondents sit well in No 1 chairs too. After all, God is cause. A majority of ones, once again, might have not been the case if the religious backgrounds of my respondents were mostly rooted in Eastern beliefs – prone perhaps to a No 2 take on God and its manifestations. 

So far, the survey's results seemed to confirm what I could have guessed if I had for once had the patience to sit and reflect silently, but... one sec, how come!? I reviewed those who answered No 1. The denialists were all there!! **WARNING** **RED ALERT** **ELON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM** Ok, let me explain. Many of you might have a lot of reasonable arguments by now to question the sample of my survey – or even my survey as a whole – given the fact that my respondents were basically my acquaintances, people I had consciously or unconsciously selected and with whom I had discussed many other topics. This can bias the already biased attempt of any anthropological research even more. But not all was wrong with it. I knew these people, and I knew that a group of them are what they nowadays like to call 'denialists'. A denialist is 'a person who denies the existence, truth, or validity of something despite proof or strong evidence that it is real, true, or valid' according to Merriam-Webster. Yes, I have friends like that, relatives like that and even students like that. They might think the globe is not getting warmer, that the financial crisis is exclusively due to immigration or that hospitals have actually been empty all this time. How come they, just like many cautious and empirical respondents, all went for No 1? Finally, I sat and reflected silently. These are the conclusions I drew:

An event pops. A No 1 instinctively proceeds to search for its causes to integrate it in his or her experience. The event in question might have one simple cause that's easy to trace back. No 1 might find it.

Example: there are cucumbers on the beach. Local cucumber farmers have been throwing tons of their product on the nearby motorway for a while to protest against price drops. Our No 1 doesn't just accept the presence of cucumbers on the sand and carry on with their walk. Nor do they ignore said cucumbers. Our No 1 faces the cucumbers in all their out-of-placeness and ends up connecting their presence with the protests, understanding finally why the cucumbers are there. 

Good for No 1: they're going to enrich their world-map and have a better sense of the state of things in the local area. But, what if, instead of cucumbers in the beach, our No 1 bumps into an international financial crisis? What if there is not just one simple cause, but an entangled skein of complex causes behind it? And what if our No 1 doesn't have the knowledge, the tools or the time to disentangle it? What's he gonna do? Do you think he's going to embark on life-consuming research that would imply years of theoretical studies and empirical observation? Some of our celebrated No 1s undoubtedly do and did, but I'm afraid our average No 1 won't, or won't always do it. Still, the need for an explanation will bug our guy and have him frowning. He just won't let it go and stay lost in the forest. He needs explanations to be able to sleep tonight, so he's going to make a cut in the tangled mess and extract an accessible, yet fragmented and incomplete piece of cause. He's going to reduce the explanation to something in his reach that would allow him some peace of mind and his daily dose of forehead straightening. Hence, the ones who attribute the financial crisis exclusively to immigration, environmental activism to George Soros's plotting and the current situation to 5G chose No 1 too.

There you go: the average No 1 seems to be at a higher risk than the other two profiles of being wrong, very wrong, very very wrong in the drawing of his conclusions and world map. His set of beliefs, his logbook of experiences are constantly relying on explanatory principles that might misrepresent and reduce what's actually happening. No 1 can be Newton or Pasteur, but No 1 can also be Bolsonaro or his convinced supporters and the first kind makes a small fraction of us, while the second kind... makes an army. Damnit!

We're in deep trouble here, since according to my results, 60% of my acquaintances have No 1 tendencies. My culture is a No 1. I myself am a No 1! Argh!! I'm in serious danger to be dead wrong about pretty much everything I thought I had explained – including my lovely survey! Oh, heavens... why do I, as a No 1, even exist? How have humans survived this long with so many stubborn, arrogant and likely-to-get-it-wrong individuals among them? No 2, please, come and help me. Inhale, exhale... All right, that's better. Maybe... we've survived because we're not the only type that there is? Maybe thanks to the important prevalence of the countercultural No 2s and 3s among us? Maybe because they balance out our obsession with explaining things (often partially or totally incorrectly)? Maybe because just as biodiversity makes our existence possible as a species, neurodiversity makes it so as a society? Ok, ok, I'm not going to get too excited again, now that I know that I might be oversimplifying the causes, but, isn't all this a bit of cheer? 

If we were all No 1s the world might look a lot more like Bolsonaro's utopia than Pandora in Avatar, that's to say if we existed and hadn't killed each other already many years ago. But if we were all No 2s, I doubt very much we would have a global life expectancy of 72 years, assuming, again, we had managed to keep ourselves alive on this planet. And if we were all No 3s... well, we wouldn't have antibiotics or labour pranayama... who would have made it in a world like that!? Not you, not me. Ask your mum.

So, here it is. The final – perhaps right or possibly wrong – conclusion of my survey is that, given an unprecedented event and given how dangerously wrong many cause-seekers might be, we'd better be thankful for the prevalence of those who simply accept it and those too busy to think about it. There is not really a desirable predominant profile that, as a society, could save us from destruction, but rather a balance that would. Nature, unlike us, balances, is wiser than even the best No 1s and a lot more trustworthy. Perhaps, at an individual level, we could copy Nature a bit and – without fighting our tendencies too much – keep our inner cause-seeker, our acceptance soul and our practical streak as awake and in balance as possible. We need them all to avoid succumbing to this pickle. Now, if you excuse me, I'm going to the beach to meditate and get some cucumbers for my salad.