September 18, 2009 | 
Author Throughout human history, human beings have been preoccupied within various schools of thought, which tend to govern most of their actions. It has been written that obsession is a fixed idea.? Resultantly, compulsion is the inability to change direction, once an action is set in motion, which results from that idea. Humans are, therefore by nature, both obsessive and compulsive; although, some exhibit greater evidence than others. Once driven to action by habitual thought, the inability to stop is akin to the nature of a physical body in Newton’s First Law of Motion. This law can be summarized as,
“A body remains in a state of rest or of uniform motion unless acted upon by an external unbalanced force.”
It seems that, like this accepted law of physics, the behavior of the human species is to lock on to certain patterns of contemplation, which catalyze both repetitive and relative action. It is strange that our various religions and anti-religions likewise follow this pattern.
According to Aristotle, thoughts are both inductively and deductively realized through the five physical senses. These common, sensory inputs are available to most people, who are fortunate enough to possess them all. Even those with a subset of the basic five seem to have heightened awareness to partially compensate for those they lack.
Subsequently, the resultant, and often unyielding patterns of human behavior naturally extend from these causal obsessions. People do not all think alike. All do not act alike. Yet all think and act in similar patterns. And there does not seem to be any real reason to expect that something so natural ought to change. Unless, of course, an unbalancing force is introduced. Perhaps, nothing less than a paradigm grenade will facilitate a more hopeful evolution.
Although certain senses are more intense than others in different people, humans will disagree in their descriptions of the very same observations despite their obvious similarities. Through this combined nature of both similarity and diversity, groups of humans gravitate toward those of like minds only to find themselves still grasping for distinction.
Historically, this is the truest origin of common sense. In the American south, for instance, common sense is referred to as, “Ordinary, every day horse-sense.” Yet, try asking any number of southerners what that phrase really means. No doubt, a plethora of explanations will unfold. Therein resides the nature of one of humanity’s greatest ironies.
Strange is the allusion, when one employs the allegory of Newton’s First Law in relation to the human condition. Obsession and compulsion inertially hold themselves in the natural order of the common sense of mankind, which is continually evolving into something less and less common. In addition to Newton’s Law of Motion, this extraordinary dichotomy is also analogous to the definition of insanity as defined by Einstein:
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results
Humans march onward in a quest for knowledge, wisdom, understanding, and enlightenment. At times and in time, they retain their momentum. When confronted by the same isolation and despair that they would so readily impose upon others in their journey toward righteousness, people wax religious. Either with or without God, over and again, humans instinctively recognize differences, and still they vacuum the unaware with their common sense. Human beings simultaneously group together based upon orders of both similarity and distinction.
The moment of human inertia in this remarkably ordained and revolutionary cosmos is paradoxically predicated upon a physical universe with apparently insane tendencies at the foundation of its natural laws. Even Newton’s Second Law of Thermodynamics joins the fractally emergent allegory. Amazingly, there is around and within us a space-time, where change in motion is resisted, while theoretically evolving toward a chaotic state of entropy. And the same is true of the human compulsion.
E-Sword