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The Room, The Pendulum, And The Spider
How a simple metaphor can help thoughtful people avoid the pitfall of perpetual disappointment
A very dear friend of mine is afflicted with a charming but ultimately frustrating predisposition: she believes that people are fundamentally capable of seeing the obvious and performing basic reasoning. While I personally adore her persistent optimism about our species, I can’t help but observe the bathos consequent on the fact her beliefs regularly and very firmly run into stolid reality, leaving her emotionally bruised every time.
Intellectually she understands that our species evolved to do as little thinking as possible because during 95% of our evolutionary history this was the most adaptive strategy. Attempting to think burns precious calories that far more often were needed to power muscles for tasks such as foraging for food or fleeing from predators. What little thinking we humans do perform is usually restricted to the realm of social competition, for every group animal’s main task is to out-compete its peers in order to improve its chances of mating and thereby passing on its genes. We creatures are, after all, pace Richard Dawkins, simply the means whereby genes ease themselves forward along the endless slope of time.
