Do We Have to Understand?

My wife is a lot more empathetic than I am. She has a desire to understand and sympathize more than I do. Lately she’s taken to monitoring the Facebook feeds of someone she’s connected with who is knee deep in the Q conspiracy theories. And nearly every night, she will randomly yell, which means she read something new.

Our argument is always this: I thinks she should stop reading, and she thinks it’s necessary to “understand” the other side.

Is it?

There has always been a non rational other side. There’s always been people who are looking for reason and motive in places that defy rationality. It’s the root of some good, and some bad in the world. But the world is chaotic, irrational and seemingly consistently about to drive off the proverbial cliff. You can find a reason for something, but upon deeper examination, reason doesn’t equal motive, and the contradictions run deep.

Nothing is ever good or bad, right or wrong, fantasy or reality. It’s always this weird thing in the middle. Out of this chaotic soup, some look at it and try to extract a pattern that will anchor their own rationality. Still others will look at it and realize it belies any sense of rationality, and the chaos is the reality, with each piece running into others.

Some use that to their advantage. Some tune it out. Some like me just write it to get it out of their head.

I am incapable of absolutism, which makes my life entirely exist in the gray area where everything I note or have an opinion on is rooted in other things you can note and opinions. It makes for a destabilized existence, but ultimately the complexity of the world is a beautiful thing.

Do we have to understand? Only back on the causal chain as far as we want to go in that moment. I’ll go deep on many things, but trying to understand crazy is not one of them.