a little bit of insanity: the burden of consistency

I'm not too sure how it all began, but quite sometime ago, predictability became entrenched as the cornerstone of existence and so being; the ability to read patterns equipped one with the necessary skills to survive.

Looking around it should not really surprise, it is a fool who denies that there are seasons and this darkness and light we call night and day. The intelligent among those who were there in those early days took heed of these patterns and hunted and stored in response. Those who didn't, simply froze or starved whichever came first...

And maybe so it was that little by little, identifying and adapting to these patterns became easier and easier as part of our very natures, driven by our innate ability to learn and this consciousness of the past that we call memory.

I don't know exactly when and it might have been quite a long while ago, when the tribe of human realised that finding no more patterns to follow, it was quite possible and comforting to create our own. And then not inconceivably so, from each person to each tribe the message and the expectation grew and from then on, each person bore this burden of consistency; our wage to the rest of humanity for survival.

The "mean" is a formidable master and futile to resist. There is a tremendous duty to be one with the mean, to be identifiable and comparable, and adherence or any petty resistance only serve to reinforce this. Indeed we as a species have even come to love it, in a manner not unlike how hostages develop stockholm syndrome. We have fallen in love with our captor and have enshrined it in our deepest notions of of beauty. In symmetry, the beauty of sameness comes to full expression.

Speech and writing is no different, for all our protestations of craft and art, whatever can be said, must have been said and understood before. In this way does vocabulary gain in strength and force as recognition and resonance increase, passed through the mouths of babes and fools.