Consequences

Do you ever stop to think about consequences and that sometimes even good deeds can have negative ones? I would like to believe every good thing we do will have a good result but truth is-- not so much. So why is it that we can do what looks like it should be good and has been good in other situations but this time, it's not? Can we build anything into our lives that reduces the number of times that happens?

This blog started out with just that question and went into politics and many other examples of how consequences play out. It was a fine blog as far as it went; but then I had the dream about entropy.

After the dream, how entropy plays into consequences grew on me to the point that I divided this blog and you can read the global and political end of it in [Rainy Day Things]. The subject had grown until it became too much to put it all here, and it changed pretty much everything I had intended to write because I began to see not just a problem but an opportunity.

Considering consequences will begin with two scientific theories which although they are about science, they also can be used to help understand consequences.

First, although not necessarily any more important to this discussion, comes Newton's laws of motion (I like how wikipedia not only explains things but for the layman). This applies here because it is true in human life as well as science when we apply an action one place, it will often lead to something somewhere else as a reaction. Those reactions are not that predictable in humans. Which takes me to the word in my dream and the thing that changed how I decided to write about consequences-- entropy.

Once again I liked how Wikipedia scientifically explained it Entropy and energy. For anyone who wants to go deeper into what entropy is than what I intend to pull out, I recommend reading that. It has some interesting conclusions at the end, but it's not where I am going with my thinking. I am interested in how entropy impacts consequences.

Most of us pretty well know that we cannot totally depend on something that worked with one person working with another or even with the same person at a different time. Humans are not tidily predictable (actually animals aren't either). We can be trained but sometimes that training has unexpected counter results so that the consequences aren't always clearly obvious in the beginning. Anybody who has raised children knows all of this.

This is where entropy comes in. It's the energy that is lost or more accurately that went somewhere we didn't expect. It explains why a home, if anyone lives in it, will naturally head toward chaos without discipline being applied to what is happening within it.

If you turn your back on your house for a month, become totally involved in say a creative job, you clearly see the results of entropy when you turn back. The natural result of doing nothing tends to be chaos and accidents-- which might even explain how life on earth came to be, but as much as it can lead to life becoming, it can lead to it ending. Consequences

Some examples: say we help out a family that is destitute. We feel good. Then when they are stronger, we find them brutalizing someone else.... or we don’t help them and same result. We gave them money and they used it to buy drugs. We gave them food and they sold it to buy drugs. We do something good, like buy a car for someone who then has a tragic accident with it. Consequences.

We develop a friendship with someone we think will be good for our life. Then we learn they are not good and are even more so energy suckers. We start out with the best intentions but everything goes askew. Consequences.

If we could always weigh this fact and that to come up with the right choice, kind of like a chemistry experiment, life would be much simpler or maybe not. Maybe some of what entropy does with its unintended chaos is actually a positive thing for our life on many different levels.

The issue of consequences is one of the life issues with which I have wrestled. It's especially tough during the child rearing years, but the questions arise many different times. If I do this, what will be the result? For me, the conundrum of doing what seems to be good but seeing it turn out to be bad arose as soon as I could see the complexity of human action and how results are often unintended. We control actions. We don't control reactions. Something sounds good and ends up causing something else that is not so good. I got it drilled home when I had children where I had the responsibility for directing their lives but in what ways?

In life there are times we must make choices and act. We have to vote. We have to support certain actions. We have to help or not help a friend. Whenever we do that, we apply that first law above-- one action tilts things in a direction they were not going. Then comes the second law that unpredictability is part of life. Will that be good or bad? Consequences

The concern for consequences could literally cripple a person on so many levels that they would become hermits and do nothing involving anybody else. So how do we deal with consequences in a healthy way?

An obvious solution is not think of anything once we have done it. We could do the things we think are good but avoid considering what happened afterward. Was it good and worthy of praise? We don’t notice. Was it bad and deserves blame? We don’t notice.

Up to a point, that sounds good. I mean guilt does us no good and praising ourselves for possibly something turning out well, where we may have only had part of the impact on it, that isn’t very effective either for the next time.

AND I think the next time is the reason why it’s good to think about consequences and try to learn from them—especially when it’s supporting something our nation does which might end up with an unintended consequence but where we have seen something very similar play out historically time after time.

The thing is we cannot really ever know the full consequences possible to any action we take nor that we support in others. We opt to take a walk on the very same road a drunk driver is turning down. No way to evaluate that ahead of time.

There are things though where we can look at what has come before, the usual result of such actions and evaluate what we should do to improve our chances of it being the right choice.

With an awareness of entropy, whether we call it that word or not, we recognize that chaos is a part of life. We can though do what is possible in our own lives to reduce its impact by discipline, developing skills, keeping things reined in because if we don't, more and more or our energy will be lost.

Although I will be writing much more about Libya in the other blog that is linked above, one thought seems to belong here. There is a zeitgeist blowing through the Middle East. It is the desire for people to improve their lives. This is all very positive. Except...

I think in too many people there is a lack of understanding that you build one thing on another. An educated populace yields a disciplined people (or has a shot at it). When we try to jump over the skills, it might work one time out of a hundred thousand but won't keep working because one thing builds on another; and in this case there is nothing to build on.

An example is our own personal lives when we look at someone else who has this energetic personality, full of seeming energy, constantly creating, always working toward what seem good things to us. We look at that, want it but have seen the superficial part of what got that person there.

In the Middle East, the people are demonstrating, rioting and finally rebelling as a way to get what they see other nations having. They have every right to want that but they are trying to skip steps to get there. We have to watch out that we aren't also thinking we can skip steps through things like bomb, bomb, bomb Iran, missing the point that when the bad guy leader is gone, the people won't be ready for an improvement. If we worked through negotiating, building, it'd take longer but in the end, it's more likely to last-- out there or in here.

(One of my digital paintings at the top.)