Complicated

Could you kill  both to eliminate one?

As the Firesign Theatre once said, ‘Everything you know is wrong.’

Whenever I dig even a little bit deeper into anything that I am supposed to believe without question, I find ambiguity.

‘Everything I know is wrong,’ to turn the phrase on its head.

True, it is not always wrong-better than I thought, nor is it always wrong-worse than I thought. It is just wrong-different than I thought.

Wrong-different is a gateway to understanding, though straight and narrow. And the introduction of more information leads to more understanding, left and right, up and down, forwards and backwards. Not so searingly straight or squeakily narrow now, is it? And then comes more bewilderment. And the realization that I cannot possibly understand this thing, no matter the cost or expenditure of mental energy. It just keeps becoming more wrong-wrong than I thought.

Things are more complex, more nuanced, more resistant to gross characterization than any simple experiment in a Petri dish can demonstrate. Life is not as simple as a thought experiment or a moral conundrum such as: You are a switchman at a train yard. Various numbers of people, zero to many, are vaguely standing on tracks in front of you and a box car breaks loose at the top of a nearby hill and comes trundling down towards them. You can use your exalted position as switch man to send it one way or the other, killing few, many, or none in the process.

What do you do? Do you choose one life over many? Can you live with the consequences and suffer the inevitable criticisms from all-knowing but uninvolved observers after the fact? Those, “You should have’s” that follow in the wake of every panicked decision? I doubt it.

Ah, and in the favorite conundrum of our day: What if one of those many was Hitler? Does killing him and a handful of innocents outweigh destroying all of them at the redemption of just one random other? The one you spared verses the many you killed to eliminate one monstrosity? Even though it was a promise of those many in the future you would thusly save? Several die including one who is a horror. One lives, you know not his character. Is that good mathematics? Or, do you say, as it is also in vogue to say at times like this, ‘It’s complicated.’

We say, ‘It’s complicated,’ when we don’t know how to answer a simple, straightforward question.

“Is this right or wrong?” we are asked of some moral dilemma. “How much is a life worth?” more pointedly. We cannot decide. The very thought that we have the right to choose between good and evil, which was the first sin in paradise, is proof that we have failed the dilemma.

“What,” you say? Forget the apple. That succulent fruit was just the first bite of, “I am right and you are wrong!” that we ever savored. And we’ve been savoring it ever since.

Who can choose? Who is right and who is wrong? What action is allowable despite its many consequences? What Enigma machine allows us to weigh lives against lives and say, “I will let these souls die today that I may save these many more lives tomorrow?”

So human it is to believe that we even have a say in the matter. We do not. Once we go down that path, the path of thinking that we have some moral compass of right and wrong, we become wrong. For behold! You, too, stand on a track. The car approaches. Your life, too, is on the pan of the scale. It swings from the balance beam and you are not detached. Not indifferent. Not apart from the dilemma.

Or to quote The Doctor: “Let me ask you a question about this brave new world of yours… When you’ve killed all the bad guys… And when it’s all perfect and just and fair… When you’ve finally got it exactly the way you want it, what are you going to do with the people like you? The troublemakers? How are you going to protect your glorious revolution from the next one?“

And thus; as is taught by most of the world’s religions, traditions, and philosophies; can it be summed up in two simple words: Harm none.

“Well, it’s complicated,” we respond, as if that somehow excuses us from further discussion. The moral debate is over, without question. Unequivocal. Also unanswered.

I am right, whatever it is I am saying and just about to do.

You are wrong, whatever it is you are saying and your point of view.

What if both our spins cancel out? What if the answer to the dilemma is… silence?

We quickly retreat into the crumbling world of, ‘Everything I know is right.’ We insist upon scooping up bits of sand and bracken on the beaches of our chosen and selected experiences and molding them into sandcastles of good and evil. No, ‘It’s complicated,’ here! Just pure, acidic truth. I am right. You are wrong. All who disagree will be dissolved by it.

But it remains... Everything you know is… complicated.