Pre-Dawn Contemplations of Ineffable Subjects

It’s early morning here in my office in Humptulips County, and while the building is operational after a massive overnight internal power outage, the office systems are down and useless. I suspect that they will be up and running before too much longer, but in the meantime I have discovered that an office desktop computer without any access to the Internet or much of anything else is closer to that end of a sliding scale labeled “boat anchor” than it is to another end labeled “computer.” As proof that my desktop computer isn’t completely ready for residence in Davy Jones Locker, I am writing this piece on it for subsequent publication.

I faced an interesting dilemma this morning as I prepared to come in for work. I and my fellow workers had been well warned about the possibility of no power in the building this morning after the failure of a master switch that controls the flow of electricity to our floors. Between my cell phone and my home phone, I must have received eight different calls last night warning me of the impending outage and the possibility that an outage might last until the commencement of normal business hours, and these were in addition to the three or four emails literally shouting the same warning. So upon arising this morning, I had to decide whether to hit the road or wait until I received a follow-up message that the office was up and running. Insofar as I could tell from the vantage point of the house, the outage was still in full swing.

I opted for leaving home at my usual time of departure, feeling compelled not to deviate from my usual routine but questioning what I might find upon arrival. I derived a back-up plan about what to do if I was unable to get through the electrically powered mesh screen that allows entry into the building garage after hours – I would park at the club where I play racquetball and go read newspapers until it was time for my morning game. Both the decision to go forward and the back-up plan were made during the course of my morning preparations and seemed to me then to have been carefully and thoughtfully determined.

Upon further reflection after finding myself in the office but without access to the firm’s network, I have decided that the compulsion I felt to make a trip into uncertainty combined with my alternative plan for my morning if the trip’s uncertainties were resolved unfavorably argue that my decision to come into work was more the result of my being of the human persuasion than of rational, intellectual thought. For I believe we are all creatures of habit and that habit is perfectly capable of over-riding an otherwise free will when the stakes aren’t too high. At moment of leaving my home there were good and valid arguments for me to stay there, but the urgent and strong pull of my routine simply overcame any real notion that I might have a cup of tea and read my book until I received email assurance that the office was open and functional.

I suppose that if there had been an earthquake in the city and the extent of the damage was unknown and unknowable, I might have stayed at home until conditions were made clearer, but my use of the verbs “suppose” and “might” in the various clauses of this sentence suggests to me that I would have had to argue myself into remaining safely at home even in the face of such a hypothetical catastrophe. When the nature and extent of potential obstacles to achievement of one’s routine aren’t at the level of a true emergency, it is my belief that on any given day the compulsion to follow a personal routine will normally triumph over uncertainty as to whether the routine can be successfully achieved. In cases of true emergency, I also believe that routine’s pull is sufficiently strong as to create significant reluctance to its abandonment and sometimes lead one to poor decisions – such as has been the case on several snowy Winter days when I have departed from home into the teeth of a blizzard to face unknown and potentially unsafe road conditions.

The fact that I had a back-up plan this morning is merely further evidence of the strength of routine’s compulsive powers, for it was nothing more than an internal mental argument for why my routine should be followed in the face of knowledge that failure to achieve its usual goal might well be likely. Put another way, I rationalized my intent to follow my normal routine in the face of significant uncertainty by giving myself another means of achieving the bulk of its usual goal (the commute from my home into the city) by imagining the prospect an alternative venue in the city from which I could eventually achieve the ultimate goal (access to my office). You might well argue that I might have been better off playing hooky for the day and thereby proving myself a true free spirit, but I believe most of us suffering from the human condition would have been compelled to make a similar decision.

Given the strength of its compulsion, I must assume that personal routine plays some significant role in what it means to be “human.” Perhaps personal routines are evidence that humans are basically herd animals and that we follow our routines in order to not disappoint the expectations other members of our herd have of us. If this is the case, being a true free-thinker becomes all the more difficult. Breaking free of conventional wisdom and expressing yourself in a manner contrary to your particular herd’s conventional wisdom is difficult, but it is only when I consider that any person who has actually achieved free thought may yet feel strongly compelled to re-join daily the very herd which he or she has intellectually repudiated – thereby exponentially increasing his or her sense of cognitive dissonance and dissociation – that I am fully able to comprehend the strength of the force we denominate “a personal routine” and to realize the strength of will it takes to become a truly free spirit unencumbered by conventional wisdom or herd affiliation.

Can one become herd-free? I am uncertain that this is possible, for whenever we dream the unconventional we seek to find others who will validate our new beliefs – and those others are invariably the members of our new herd. I suspect is was far easier to be a truly free soul in the days when communication was harder and people were more isolated, than it is today when a Facebook posting frequently finds a significant number of adherents to what a large majority of us would believe to be non-conventional, or even asinine, conclusions. Even those at the extreme edges of sanity, such as Anders Behring Brevik of Norway or James Holmes of Aurora, Colorado, are likely to find someone of kindred spirit on the Internet if they are willing to look hard enough. And, at least in Brevik’s case, if he cannot find them in real-time, he is perfectly willing to imagine them. Who knows what Holmes’ thinking may be at this stage of events, but I am willing to bet that when we find out it will involve adherence to outlandish, perhaps evil, views he will attempt to justify by arguing that they will be good for the achievement of whatever warped vision he has come to believe is essential for the sake of his idealized herd.

If one cannot become truly herd-free, there may well be those who will argue that once free thought has been achieved one ought to simply change herds, as it were. But I don’t think that second decision comes very easily and in most cases I don’t believe it comes at all. I suspect that lethargy, the uncertainty of alternatives, and the compulsiveness of routine serves to prevent most people from ever-changing the original herd to which they were assigned by Fate. Take the case of my tenure at my first law firm. I realized quite early in my tenure that the normal means of operation within the group were, from my viewpoint, faulty, counter-productive and, frankly, stupid, but I stayed for over sixteen years despite this realization. Why? Because I felt compelled to fight hard to change the herd’s direction and thought and convinced myself I was being successful in my efforts despite the strain of trying to maintain change, until I returned from a hard-earned, three-month sabbatical to find that, in my absence, the herd’s traditional habits had snapped back to their former true as if they were a rubber band.

I have concluded that those of strong disposition will work long and hard to achieve change rather than quickly determining to abandon their resident herd. If this conclusion is correct, it is yet another piece of evidence that humans are, first and foremost, herd animals, for once we arrive at new beliefs inconsistent with the conventional wisdom of the herd, our desire to better our resident herd when viewed against the measuring stick of our new beliefs is far stronger than our desire to strike out on our own. It was at the end of my tenure with my initial law firm when I finally arrived at the realization that I – and not “they” – was the square peg trying to fit into the proverbial round hole. It was only then that I was able to find the strength to abandon my original herd for a more congenial one resident in the so-greener pastures fertilized by the formerly antithetical, but newly conventional, beliefs which had compelled my departure in the first place. (Ah, the joys of the mixed metaphor!) My decision to do so was quite emotionally difficult and taken only after extensive internal debate, yet it quickly proved to be so blazingly correct that I have subsequently come to marvel over my inability, while original herd-bound, to recognize its remorseless clarity. It took Helen’s urging that I simply quit even though I had no other job prospects to motivate me to leave and begin what proved to be the not-so-very-difficult task of finding an intellectually congenial replacement herd.

So here I am at work in the early pre-dawn darkness of a day on which I could well have stayed home without blame, wondering whether or not man is a herd animal, contemplating the consequences of such a conclusion, and realizing that my characterization of my second law firm as any sort of “herd” will undoubtedly profoundly annoy my mentor (and former second-herd partner) Bob Weiss. Do I need more proof? Or do I just need a cup of coffee so I can quit my half-baked philosophizing about things ineffable? It’s up to you to decide.

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