Confusion and Insecurity

I suspect that human confusion and belligerent insecurity may be irreducible. This is not to say that these things are endemic or necessary properties of either ourselves, or of the world more generally. It is to suggest that our historical development and evolutionary inheritance has so profoundly entangled intelligence with uncertainty that we are not only not smart enough to release ourselves from an adversarial past and destructive destiny that perpetually threatens us with aggression and apocalyptic conflict, but that our minds and intelligence as much as the communication technologies we inhabit require signals of doubt and uncertainty. We are critically dependent upon unresolvable contradictions that persist precisely because it is in the long shadow of their intractable persistence that we reflexively individuate and orient ourselves towards them as intelligence and teleological purpose. As problem-solvers, we are critically dependent upon problems and where we find none, we are almost guaranteed to invent them.