What is It?

            Hi reader, I hope you’re doing better than you’ve ever done in your life this evening. Tonight I’ve got a bit of psychology on the brain, so I’ll be jawing about the way that naiveté feeds into creativity. Now, the interesting thing about being naïve is that it doesn’t necessarily involve anything like a lack of knowledge or understanding, or even a lack of experience… after all, the only thing that it takes for us to call someone naïve is that we get the distinct feeling that they don’t know any better than to act in the silly ways they act. Often enough, when we meet someone who immediately strikes us as naïve, we get the feeling that they must know better. After all, surely there’s no way that a tolerably intelligent human being could ever wear their heart on their sleeve to such an extent! There’s no way that anyone could ever possibly be so trusting without being cheated at every turn. Guilelessness is a weakness that can’t fail but invite others to betray us… isn’t it?

            But then again, what if? What if…

            What if being naïve, far from being the route of a silly little simpleton, were the token of a wide and deep experience? What if it were possible for someone to become utterly naïve… out of an excess of cynicism? What if there were some nasty little sticking point way out there in the depths of our minds, some point where we discover that of all things honesty is the most disarming of all ways of dealing with our fellow human beings?

            After all, what do we mean when we call someone naïve? Do we only mean that they are honest when it doesn’t necessarily serve them well to be honest? Or is it possible that we mean that they are so honest that they are willing to sacrifice what they want the most… for the sake of hiding nothing? In the last analysis, is there really any reliable way to tell the difference?

            Or to put it another way: of all the vices that tempt our humanity, is it possible that the worst vice, the most typically human vice, is the one that leads us to overuse that which makes us most human? The most human thing to do when faced with adversity, I think, is to think about it… but what if the very act of thinking could be so destructive, so needlessly complicating, that thinking itself creates more problems than it solves?

            In that case, wouldn’t naiveté, rather than seeming to be a foolish lack of consideration, appear to be an almost superhumanly wise way of being? The refusal to look too deeply into things may undoubtedly lead us into a number of grave mistakes in the short term… but what if it was the only way to find the most preferable ways of acting in the long term? As usual, this leads us to some rather profound ways of considering just what we consider this world to be… do we think that it’s a rational system that takes kindly to optimization problems… or do we think that reality is essentially unmathematical? In a sense, it’s a question of conviction… but it’s a question of just how much we think our convictions mean!

            The most rational thing for us to do, of course, is to trust the mathematicians and the scientists… after all, they’ve got the mathematics and the scientific rigor on their side. That’s certainly nothing that we should cast aside without reason… isn’t it?

            Mathematics is the best way of figuring out what’s going on in the universe… what the universe is in the end… isn’t it?

            But what if? What if rationality were only a diversion? What if being a reasonable being were only a temptation dreamed up for beings who would like to think of themselves as primarily rational? Is there any irrational, obviously unrealistic reason we shouldn’t think that this is the way things are? What if there were some very good, very profound reason that we ought to think of ourselves irrationally?

            Now, let’s look at this rationally, as men are of course supposed to be. If men are primarily, pretty much axiomatically supposed to be thought of as rational beings… then why shouldn’t we think of that as being a systemic predisposition, an almost inevitable mistake? Why shouldn’t we, indeed? But if that’s the case… well, we certainly know ourselves well enough to know that we’re not entirely rational… we know ourselves well enough to know that we find this or that attractive and that unattractive for no reason at all… we know that we’ve turned the tables in some sense. Or is that really what’s happened?  In the end, does being naïve mean anything more or less than knowing that it’s impossible to turn the tables? I hope you know, reader. All I know is that I don’t.