It’s hard to live in tension between what we ‘know’ and the unknown

By David McElroy · April 8, 2018

When I was a child, I expected the world to make sense. Because I believed that, I saw reason. I saw patterns. I saw order.

The longer I live, the more those patterns look like chaos and randomness to me. Over the course of my adult life, I’ve had to throw away so many things I was taught as objective truth. The more of my certainty I’ve had to give up, the more fragile and scary life feels.

The uncertainty makes me feel disoriented. The feeling makes me long for the solidity of my previous certainty — but I can’t close my eyes to the chaos, because it appears to be the truth.

Why do people believe absurd things? Why do some people believe the world is flat? Why do others believe in strange conspiracies? I think it’s because the things people believe make it easier for them to feel certain about something.

If someone believes that the Earth is the center of everything — and that it somehow rests on a firm foundation instead of being a rock hurtling through the vastness of space — that can allow him to feel more secure somehow. He doesn’t reason that out, of course, but something in his gut feels better if he believes that. The world feels more orderly to him. So he ignores evidence to the contrary. He believes what he needs to believe.

If someone believes there is a conspiracy of evil people — whether he thinks it’s evil bankers or big businessman or whoever — this allows himself to feel better about his life. He doesn’t have to take responsibility for what’s wrong with the life he lives. He doesn’t even have to feel as though the world (or his country) is out of control. He can choose to believe there is a lot of control — and he feels more comfortable thinking there is evil control than no control at all.

I was taught that we live in an age of reason. I was taught that our political leaders cared about us and that they made decisions about what would be best for everyone. I was taught that we were entering an era when poverty would be banished and humans would live in peaceful brotherhood.

The reality I face is far different.

I know from experience how crooked the political world is. I know how little connection there is between politicians’ rhetoric and their true motivations. (I used to write their words, remember.) I know that there is brutal poverty all around me. Even though the world is slowly getting richer — and the worst of the poor are better off than they once were — I know that almost none of the people I see every day even acknowledge that poverty exists. I know that people around the world continue to kill each other for the flimsiest of reasons.

I was taught certainty about all sorts of things, including theology. This has caused me serious anguish over the years as I’ve struggled to find the truth between what I had been taught and what I can experience of a Creator I know as God.

When it comes to metaphysical truth, it’s easiest to go one direction or the other — to either claim absolute faith in whatever some man preached from a pulpit or else reject everything but what science can prove. I can’t do either one of those.

I am terrified at the uncertainty I face. As I say “I don’t know” to more and more things in this world — in order to be honest with myself and others — I’m left disoriented. I don’t have many of the foundational “truths” which seemed so firm and so obvious when I was young.

Instead, what I’m left with is a huge gap between what I believe I know and what I know that I don’t know. The easy choice is to live in one of those extremes — what I believe I know or in the conviction that we know nothing except what we can see or touch or measure.

Instead, I live in the gap between those two kind of certainty. It’s a very scary place.

I want certainty to believe in. I still have faith that there is certainty. I have faith that there will be patterns in the randomness. I have faith that objective truth is still out there to be found beyond this life.

In the meantime, I find less and less about this world makes sense. Man’s ability to reason is vastly overestimated — and his tendency toward self-deception is vastly underestimated. I see a world of chaos and it makes me feel very disoriented.

I hate looking at the chaos, because I long for order. I hate admitting my uncertainty, because I desperately need certainty. I hate seeing all the ugliness, because I long for beauty.

But truth is more important than my discomfort. The world is full of chaos. It’s uncertain and seems random. It seems ugly and hateful.

I cling to my spirit’s faith that in the truth I will find patterns and certainty and beauty and love. It’s the only way I can deal with a world which disappoints and disorients me every single day.

My hope is that my faith in my Creator will lead me to truth in the end.

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I received the first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine Monday — and I’m happy to report that I’m neither dead nor a zombie controlled by Bill Gates and Co. Eligibility was recently opened in Alabama to everyone who’s 16 or older, so I signed up for the Pfizer vaccine at a site run by a local university. I know this is a political issue for a lot of people, but that honestly baffles me. We can disagree about whether such a vaccine should be mandatory — which I’m against — but as a voluntary choice, it seems like an easy choice now that it’s been safely given to millions of people. Is it a perfect preventative? Of course not. But the decision seemed obvious to me when looking at the statistics and evidence. I haven’t had any of the side effects that some people have experienced, but that’s supposed to be more of an issue after the second dose, which I’ll get on May 3. In the meantime, I’ll let you know if I grow a third arm — or if the secret microchip kicks in and someone starts trying to control me remotely. All kidding aside, getting the vaccine seems like a rational voluntary choice to me.

I get a lot of email from readers. Some of it is fascinating and useful. Some of it is full of confessions that people want to share with a stranger. Some people write to ask advice. What’s really surprising, though, is the small percentage that seems to come from mentally unbalanced people. When I started using the metaphor about being an alien — the tagline at the top of each page here — it never occurred to me that I’d start hearing from people who took it seriously. But every few months, I get a strange email — such as the one above from a few months back — from someone who seems to think I’m claiming to be an actual alien. The first time it happened, I laughed. By the time it became a semi-regular thing, I was simply appalled. For the record, I can provide no proof that I’m an alien, because … well … it’s just a metaphor. I do feel like an alien among human beings, but as far as I know, I’m just as earthbound as you are. It’s just a metaphor. Honest. Or at least, that’s what my lizard-beast overlords told me to say.

After Tampa Bay, Fla., musician Colt Clark had all of his gigs canceled last year for months on end, the entire family felt trapped at home as most of the world was on quarantine lockdown. His wife, Aubree, had an idea that would let Colt make music and involve the whole family in making music videos to share with their friends and family on Facebook. Aubree is a photographer and homeschooling mom to a daughter and two sons, who range in age from 6 to 11. After their friends started asking to share the videos, they made the performances public — and a few of them are now on YouTube, where they go by the name of Colt Clark and the Quarantine Kids. The younger son, Becket, is on drums. The older boy, Cash, plays keyboards, strings and guitars. Dad supplies lead vocals and plays guitar, while 6-year-old Bellamy mostly dances but sometimes does backup vocals. There’s even a dog who makes an occasional appearance. The Clark family has just raised the bar for what I need to create with my future children. And best of all, they seem to be having a great time together. I hope they make you as happy as they make me.

Have you ever wondered how the social media world works for so-called “influencers”? I find it comical, so I thought I’d share with you. I frequently get offers such as what I’m about to describe. And if I’m getting such offers — as a relative nobody in the online world — you can only imagine what people with huge audiences are offered. It starts with an email appealing to my ego: “We came across your online presence and we LOVE your style. We’d love to have you as one of our Brand Ambassadors. To celebrate our new [Brand Name] collection, we want to give you a FREE Watch so you can post a picture of you wearing it and drive more exposure to our brand.” Did you hear that? They love me. They want me to be seen wearing their cheap $59 watch so other people will think, “If this amazing influencer wears that, surely I should buy one.” They even offer me commissions on the watches sold from people clicking from my site. So the next time you see some alleged “influencer” touting something online or on social media, remember that this is what it’s probably all about. It’s laughable.

Modern culture is going insane. The latest evidence comes from the effort to redefine children’s author Dr. Seuss as a racist whose books should be banned. Why? Because a few images in those books don’t meet modern political standards. The drawing you see here is one of those “dangerously racist images,” and it comes from the Dr. Seuss classic, “And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street.” The book catalogs all the wild diversity seen by a child on one street, including the offending drawing of a Chinese boy. What’s racist about it? Apparently, it was racist to show the boy eating rice, wearing a funny hat, using chopsticks and (worst of all) having eyes represented by a slit. (The bearded man near him has dots for eyes, but that’s apparently OK.) In other words, the stereotypes are considered racist today. (Oddly, the culture warriors who fret over such things are never concerned if a white southerner is depicted as ignorant trash living in a trailer. Some stereotypes are great, especially if the left hates those people anyway.) Theodore Geisel — the name of the real-life Dr. Seuss — was a product of his time and nobody at that time would have seen any of this as racist. Using stereotypes and exaggerations is how artists depict differences in simple ways. You can argue that it’s better to achieve the end result in a different way, but it’s insane to pretend that everybody from the past should have his work erased because it doesn’t match the preferences of modern leftists. Unfortunately, the company that publishes Dr. Seuss books has caved to the insane people — and six of his popular works will no longer be published. The world has simply gone insane.

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