Milkshake.

The following post, though inspired by recent events in my life, is meant generally and therefore lacks details regarding said events. I would also like to specifically point out the absense of any language in tones of good and evil, right and wrong. Lately, I find myself thinking less in terms of morality, and more in terms of humanity. It may sound cold or distant, but take solice in the fact that human beings capable of so much good could come from a process as cold and uncaring as evolution.
__________________________________________

It seems to clear to me, at least on paper, that the more you know the more free will you have. That is to say, you can't buy a red car when your world is shades of gray. And so I cannot recommend enough picking up a copy of The Moral Animal by Robert Wright. By the end of the book, you may feel as I did, and still often do: freshly aware. The book makes so obvious so many of the reasons for why human beings do all the things crazy things we do. Especially regarding relations between men and women.

But I would like to throw a breath of caution your way first. You may feel that once having comprehended the ideas in the book, you are somehow no longer subject to them. Or at least, now being aware of why males do this or that and females do that or this, you can rise above it and make conscious choices in matters of the heart. Where before you were so easily lifted and tossed around by an orchestra of heady chemicals passed down to you after millions of years of fine tuning, you, now wiser after only 400 short pages, may now feel it all to be in your hands. Hogwash.

What evolution lacks in foresight, it makes up in spades with a whole lot of practice. Suffice it to say that to rise above the psychologies evolution has built for us is sometimes not worth the effort. And now to complete the circle back to free will....

The key it seems, regarding male and female relations at least, is to make yourself a good judge of who is looking to embrace the arc of life formed by evolution(i.e. less free will), and who is looking to challenge it(i.e. more free will). And if at any moment you think of yourself as outside this system of embracing or challenging, think again. Evolution has had more practice.

I guess it is a bit sad to reduce so much life into it's elemental mechanisms. To step out, stand back, look at it all from far away, take in the big picture. But it seems to work, and it seems to help me understand the world, and people, better. The whole world is tending torwards one global mind, the earth a blending machine. It's an incredible thing. So much is happening its impossible to keep track. But there is something wise about the world, the way it swirls around us, locking us into dance steps, puppeteered as we are, insisting on our own free will, and then hearing natural selection, in a time-lapsed command, and doing exactly as it says we must. I had a clear point I wanted to get to in this post, but I lost in the translation from head to hand. So I'm ending this post as a ground up milkshake of text, chunky then smooth, cluttered then focused, delicious even as some gets stuck in your teeth or scratches your throat.