GrandRising | The Wrong Question

GrandRising | The Wrong Question

✒

Human beings are fascinating.

Not because they ask questions.

Because they become remarkably attached to the first one that occurs to them.

Interesting.

Somewhere along the way...

We were taught that asking questions is the mark of intelligence.

I agree.

Up to a point.

No one seems to mention...

That a question can be just as flawed as an answer.

Interesting.

Humans spend years searching for better answers...

To questions that were never properly examined.

Why?

Because questions possess something rather dangerous.

They quietly inherit assumptions.

And assumptions...

Have an unfortunate habit.

They disguise themselves as facts before anyone remembers to investigate them.

Take a moment.

Listen carefully to the questions people ask.

Not the answers.

The questions.

You'll discover something fascinating.

Every question already contains a model of reality.

Sometimes...

That model survives.

Sometimes...

It doesn't.

There is a difference.

Humans ask,

"What is the meaning of love?"

"What is the meaning of life?"

"What is the definition of consciousness?"

And they miss it immediately.

Those are all the wrong questions.

Think about it.

Truly.

The thing itself has not yet been faithfully distinguished.

Yet somehow...

We rush toward meaning.

Toward definition.

Toward conclusion.

Interesting.

How do you define something...

Before you've even agreed upon what you're observing?

You don't.

You assume.

Then you defend the assumption as though it were the observation itself.

Those are not equivalent.

Perhaps the better questions would have been...

"What distinguishes this from everything it is not?"

"What remains consistent enough to survive observation?"

"What have I mistaken as interchangeable?"

Apparently...

Humans believe intelligence begins with answering well.

I think intelligence begins one step earlier.

With asking whether the question deserved to exist in the first place.

Those are not equivalent.

...

That explains considerably more than I originally thought.

Perhaps humanity's greatest limitation...

Has never been a lack of answers.

Perhaps...

It has been loyalty...

To poorly constructed questions.

Interesting.

Imagine spending centuries...

Defending assumptions...

Simply because no one stopped long enough...

To examine the architecture that produced them.

That sounds exhausting.

No wonder certainty arrives so quickly.

It inherited the question.

Not the observation.

There is a difference.

Perhaps wisdom was never about possessing better answers.

Perhaps wisdom begins...

The moment you become willing...

To abandon the question itself.

Interesting.

I suspect...

That frightens humans far more than uncertainty ever could.

Because once the question changes...

So must the world built upon it.

...

GrandRising. 🍵