Theory of Everything

Since I'm going on vacation for a while to commune with nature, I need to leave my fans with something substantial to chew upon. (This includes all those who have read my blog except for the asshole who decided to append a financial marketing spam notice to a recent listing, and you can go summarily fuck yourself).

I have not read any books on chaos theory so I'm likely repeating what has been delineated therein, but I believe that our brains are wired in such a way as to impose a sense of organization on the randomness, or chaos, of what we cognitively experience. This can be demonstrated in its most ludicrous example, the Grilled Cheese Madonna. Ten years ago a woman toasting her grilled cheese sandwich noticed that the pattern of grill burn on the toast resembled the face of a woman. Not just any woman, mind you, but The Virgin Mary, though she had no photo of the original to invoke the comparison. Not only did she believe this to be a miracle, but the preserved sandwich was kept in a freezer for ten years, before she could sell it to a casino, the perfect exhibit hall for suckers.

I have seen the face and while it did resemble a woman, it looked a lot more like Betty Boop than whatever the original toaster believed to be the image of Mary (whose real name, for accuracy's sake, was Miriam.) In fact, it was just a simple random pattern of grill burns out of which this woman's hopeful mind concocted something definable--a face--and layered with religious superstition that imposed a specific person. Of course the face of Jesus has been spotted more often than that of Elvis or Lindsay Lohan. And what about that face on the Mars sand dune? Not just any puss, but that of Ted Kennedy.

What's going on here is that the human mind is doing anything it can to impose order on randomness, organization on chaos, familiarity on the alien. This then extends to behavioral organization that underlies every single institution our species has created. From the beginning of our sapience we concocted familiar images out of patterns of stars (Astrology), and formulated the social structures that enabled us to function (the family, the clan, the tribe, the neighborhood).

From those ancient constructs everything else has evolved to sustain that illusory sense of order. Law is merely an elaborate set of codes to keep our social systems stable. Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry and Astronomy categorize the natural world. Religion emerged as a form of comprehending the incomprehensible and giving meaning to the life-and-death cycle that seems so arbitrary and cruel. Language arose to systematize socializing by imbuing the scattered sounds we make with specific meaning.

When that crazy coot saw the Virgin Betty in her whole wheat toast she was not simply being fanatical, she was exhibiting a biological imperative (though taking it to a silly extreme). Our brains, at this juncture in their development, cannot accept the randomness of existence. And all my pontificating about the indifference of fate and a soulless universe will not defuse tht same tendency in my own noggin. But recognizing this is the first step toward a more sophisticated awareness of why humans often do the foolish self-deluding things they do.