I am a macroscopic particle, bouncing around the social universe.

Do you ever try to understand yourself? To explain yourself? It’s probably a futile act.

There are limits to the ability of a system to understand itself. But “understanding” is a slippery concept. “Understand” basically means “describe accurately and mechanistically”. Which is awkward, for a person. Most people don’t want to consider themselves as machines. Even if most of their behaviour can be couched in terms of goals, directions, and strategies for pursuing and achieving goals. Goal pursuit is pretty easy to understand as a mechanical process. Even if that is very reductive.

A description is a model. A map. A symbolic representation. No description is ever complete. For a system to describe itself, wouldn’t it also have to describe its ability to model itself? Would it include a description of the system that describes, as well as the other systems that are described by that system? Does it recurse forever? Or does it converge at a finite size?

Practically speaking, we must make do with a simplified model.

This is even more true when we try to understand the world around us. We certainly cannot have a complete and accurate description of everything that matters in our environment. All the people. All the social systems. All the institutions. All the cultural trends and forces. The human built environment of cities and towns, transportation systems, logistics, and on and on. What about the natural world? Climate, weather, geographic topology. That would require knowing all the branches of science, none of which are complete.

So we have to make meta-models, higher level abstractions that describe the nature of these systems, leaving out the details, which can be extrapolated or interpreted as needed. The trick we have learned, as people, is to be intellectually lazy, to some degree. But that requires working out what we might need to know in a crisis, versus what we have the luxury to learn only when the need arises.

This is the toughest challenge of any sentient being: what should I do with my free time? Enjoy myself? Or prepare for the unexpected?

How do we navigate a complex world that we can never hope to understand? How do we accept our limitations? How do we avoid pointless suffering, even if we can’t avoid all the perils? How do we learn to accept that some suffering is inevitable? Though we can’t know which suffering is unavoidable. We just have to wait and see.

Life is perilous. I think some people get fixated on one threat so that they don’t have to think about the plethora of threats that they will never be able to deal with, at least, not alone.

The point of society is to collectively prepare for a larger variety of potential threats. Society is the original insurance policy. We can work together to build up our surpluses, our rainy day funds, and rely on one another when disaster strikes.

So what do you do when it seems like society is falling apart? When fragments of that society seem to be defecting? When they renounce their accountability, their share of responsibility for the social pact? Because they believe—rightly or wrongly—that they have enough already, and don’t need the rest of society. Or, worse, that they have enough to enable them to dominate the rest of society, in order to enslave them, and extract wealth from them, thereby giving themselves an income in perpetuity, while others have nothing.

It’s a pickle. The only things that keep societies together are identification—borne of empathy and seeing oneself in others, which creates an emotional drive to protect them—and risk of reprisal. Who knows how bad things will get if they try to defect, or dominate, and their attempt fails?

Well, I’m just one person. We each have to navigate this tumultuous log jam, as it floats down a raging river, through a steep-sided canyon, towards a roiling (or is that “boiling”?) ocean. We’re all trying to avoid being crushed or drowned, or both. How long we can stay on one log, or dextrously leap to another one? How can we find deeper meaning and satisfaction when we are so preoccupied?

I’m relatively fortunate. No, I’m empirically fortunate. I have everything I need, except for confidence that the world isn’t going to disintegrate beneath my feet. Which makes it very hard to concentrate on anything else.