It is an eternal struggle to learn how to be thankful and grateful in a world that all too often fails to meet our expectations. Good things happen to some. Bad things happen to others. Both sets of events may happen to us.
How do we manage to make sense of that nonsense?
It is certainly human to expect that things could or should be different.
Learn from the Tale of the Turkey
The skeptic philosopher, Nassim Nicoloas Taleb, explores many aspects of our human quandary in his best selling book The Black Swan – The Impact of the HIGHLY IMPROBABLE. It is worth a read. It is a book probably best consumed in bite sized pieces.
Our modern tendency to misapply Gaussian methodologies and tools (the bell curve) in incorrect economic, scientific, and social contexts is the case in point and for which Taleb is most well-known.
Taleb employs an apt illustration of our inductive problem that was first proposed by Bertrand Russell - philosopher, logician, mathematician, and public intellectual.
The Tale of the Turkey is paraphrased here:
For a thousand days the turkey is well fed and tended by human beings.
Life is both comfortable and predictable.
On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving a major event occurs.
As the Red Queen put it, "Off with his head!"
There is little data is the turkey’s first thousand days that offers him any hope of predicting or even understanding the consequences of a human holiday.
In the real world these improbable events occur.
People are not naturally, well-equipped to deal with the problem of The Black Swan.
“How can we know the future, given knowledge of the past; or more generally, how can we figure out properties of the (infinite) unknown based on the (finite) known?
The "nature" of the improbable is certainly not confined to the negative and potentially disastrous.
“When I ask people to name three recently implemented technologies the most impact our world today, they usually propose the computer, the Internet, and the laser.
All three were unplanned, unpredicted, and unappreciated upon their discovery, and remained unappreciated well after their initial use.
They were consequential. They were Black Swans." - Nassim Nicoloas Taleb
Our critical thinking skills do not "insure" that we will choose to Learn from the Tale of the Turkey.
Call It the Human Gravity
Our lustful inclination is to prefer the expected. Maybe you noticed?
This lust does not quite manage to ever contain our reactionary responses to the unexpected.
Many past and current and past political and/or cultural activists proudly embrace the power of expectation. The illusion of expectation, the suggestion of intention, and the violence of accusation becomes the source of their power.
We call this the Politics of Envy.
It is no surprise that those evil roots lie in the bottom-to-top, Thou Shalt Nots expressed in the Ten Commandments.
Yes. Belief in Our Expectation is a Sin
Why?
Jesus clearly tells us our expectation-based thinking is evil.
His words are good enough for us to take this seriously as much as the idea and its consequence truly does disturb us.
We must recognize that it should disturb us.
Intentionally, we don’t quote you chapter and verse here.
To look for His words does us all far more good.
We should also recognize that our expectation-centered thinking doesn’t work for us as individuals or members of society to accomplish anything of real significance or consequence. At best it may help us get by.
There is a built-in psychological death spiral of Expectation, Intention, and Accusation coupled to the Politics of Envy.
This Human Gravity and Humanism
You are a humanist if you believe that Hope and Faith equate to Expectation and Intention.
Humanists often struggle to recognize the fundamental differences here.
Why? Doing so undermines the foundations of their self-made justification - their faith with a small “f”.
The humanist must insist based on their self-imposed, personalized perspective this vital argument, that is at the center of all human lives, is merely about semantics and/or forms of relevance.
The humanist is confined, by definition, to live in a philosophical, two-dimensional Flatland.
Then a Turkey Day -the Black Swan event - happens.
Got my tee shirt.
Happy Thanksgiving