"There's no Logic to it?" Well, maybe there is...

One of my biggest pet peeves is that so many people don't know the difference between something being counter-intuitive and something being illogical. It's a common misunderstanding, found in everything from ditzy rhetoric to Supertramp hits.

Just because something is counter-intuitive, doesn't mean it's illogical.

Everything that happens happens because of cause and effect, and just because one might find events or developments surprising, doesn't mean there's no logic to them. There always is. Even the wildest, most unexpected events and outcomes happen because of the combined logical outcomes of chains of cause and effect; chains of cause and effect which aren't always readily apparent.

Here's an example: people often point to couples who don't seem like an obvious match and say "Well, there's no logic to love". However, there are obviously logical reasons why that couple got together. They must have been attracted to one another in various ways when they started seeing one another. They must have seen some value in being with one another and staying together. Just because they don't seem like an obvious pair to observers, that doesn't mean their relationship is illogical.

There's no denying our world is often baffling and full of events which can seem illogical. From senseless killing to the popularity of raver pants; from the Trump/ Clinton election cycle to the popularity of spray cheese, our world is a strange and often stupefying place. But it gets that way because of how its inhabitants behave, not through blind, inexplicable chance.

If something absurd happened, something(s) absurd or someone absurd probably caused it. And chances are those absurd people were educated in an absurd (and absurdly over-priced) academic institution, and/ or filled with absurdity by peddlers of an absurd religious cult or ideology. A cult or ideology taught by institutions whose doctrine or curriculum was developed by addled products of similar institutions, and so on and so on.

We tend to find the truly illogical in human folly, not in the consequence of human action. Consequence is always the result of action, and action has its reasons, however strange, silly or stupid those reasons may be, and however keen of an eye it may take to find them.

One can take a very illogical approach to a problem or task. I could try to dry my shirt by sticking it in a bucket of water. I could try to get a job as a forklift operator by pouring molasses in my ear. Approaches like that would be pretty illogical, though I might be able to get a performance art grant for them.

One can babble out illogical statements all day. Postmodern academics make good livings at that.

People babble and take illogical approaches to things because they're fools. And they're fools because of the folly of nature and the limits of the mind, and because they've been indoctrinated with dogma, lured into laziness, and probably filled with absurd post-modernist tripe.

And so the absurd world rolls on; absurd, but absurd for definite reasons, absurd because absurd ideas sew absurd plans and reap absurd outcomes.

In short, there's a logic to all events, even those which make us shake our heads the hardest. And though the increasingly outrageous and often volatile world around us may seem illogical, those troubling and bewildering things which make us question our sanity are the logical outcomes of bad thinking and ill-advised action. People speak folly because they absorb folly. People speak the illogical because they've never learned to use language in the service of truth. And in a world where the leading shapers of minds abuse and contort language and use it to spread lies, actions and outcomes become increasingly illogical. If we want to live in a world whose outcomes seem more logical, we must stand up for truth and common sense. If enough of us do, the world around us will start to make more sense.