“WHY did this happen?” is a question that seeks reasons and meaning for an event. Some answers to this question include:
“It happened because God/Allah/etc. willed it”
“It happened because that’s the way the stars aligned”
“There is no reason, it just happened”
WHY did Oswald kill Kennedy? WHY did the shooter in Las Vegas kill 60 people? WHY do people support someone like Trump? WHY do we allow Israel to have nuclear weapons but not other nations in the Mideast? WHY did a nice person like that ever marry a real jerk? WHY did the chicken cross the road? From the sublime, to the peculiar to the mundane to the trivial, we are obsessed with knowing WHY? We must have a reason WHY.
The police call it motive. If a crime happens today, someone will scourer Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TicTok, and other social media to find out “WHY?” WHY did they do it? What was their motive? WHY would a 47 year old married woman with three children who was a teacher have sex with a seventeen year old in the back seat of her husbands car?
When we don’t know WHY, we either begin a useless search for the reason or we brush it aside. Your young child asks you WHY and you reply, “Because I told you to.” Your employee asks you WHY and you respond, “Because I am the boss.” You want to know WHY they laid you off or WHY you were fired, and you get a reply like “We had a reduction in force.” You want to know “WHY” you were defriended on Facebook or WHY you did not get the job you applied for or WHY your good friend died so young or a million other WHYs. No one stops to think, there is no sense in asking WHY? In all probability, any WHYs you come up with will be suppositions, hypotheses, conjectures or out and out myths.
We are diseased with asking WHY. We do not want to accept an arbitrary and capricious universe. Even the great Einstein rejected Quantum Theory because it was built on the concept of indeterminacy. Ironic, that so many people initially rejected Einstein’s theory of Relativity because it lacked absoluteness and determinacy. Today, we still have a rebellion going on in morality in terms of whether or not there is any absolute morality or is all morality relative. It is easy to posit a WHY if you have a solid concept of morality that you can refer to. The favorite one among religious people is the concept of sinner. A sinner is anyone who ruptures the boundaries of your own avowed religion.
So I run to the Lord
Please hide me, Lord
Don’t you see me prayin’?
Don’t you see me down here prayin’?
But the Lord said
Go to the Devil, the Lord said
Go to the Devil
He said go to the Devil — Sinner Man by Nina Simone
I told a friend of mine the other day that I did not want to go to heaven. “WHY,” he asked? “Because.” I replied, “What if Adolph Hitler and Donald Trump are both there?” I think the WHYs around such a situation would drive me to hell.
Another friend of mine is always good for theories on WHY people do things. We discuss lots of problems in the world and he loves to seek out facts and evidence that might help to explain WHY. He is driven to make sense of a nonsensical random capricious world that is frustrating. Perhaps most frustrating is that just when we are beginning to realize that there are no answers to the WHYs of the world, suddenly an answer emerges or at least appears to.
The answer all depends on numbers. A WHY can be found if enough people are willing to accept the explanation. WHYs have a democratic aspect that has nothing to do with logic. For instance, the question I raised above about WHY anyone would support Donald Trump has spawned a cottage industry of books purporting to provide WHYs to the Trump sycophancy. From racism, to sexism, to caste, to identities, to religion, to abortion, to greed, to fear, to being rural, to the electoral college, there have been over fifty books dedicated to theories to describe WHY any rational human being would vote for Trump.
I asked ChatGPT “WHY would anyone vote for Donald Trump.” Here is what she/he said:
ChatGPT:
“People vote for political candidates for a variety of reasons, and the decision to vote for Donald Trump in particular can be influenced by a range of factors. Some voters are drawn to his positions on certain issues, such as immigration, trade, or foreign policy. Others appreciate his outsider status and his perceived willingness to challenge the political establishment. Additionally, some voters may feel a strong connection to his personality, viewing him as a strong leader who speaks his mind.”
“It’s also important to consider the broader political and cultural context in which elections take place. Factors like party loyalty, economic conditions, perceptions of the opposing candidate, and regional or demographic influences can all play a role in why someone might choose to vote for a candidate like Donald Trump.”
I think this is a very good answer, but somehow it lacks a definitive characteristic. I don’t want a hodgepodge of reasons WHY. I want to know “THE WHY.” All of the mitigating factors above are mere hypotheses. If your neighbor has a Trump Flag flying outside his/her house or your cousin says that “I am going to vote for Trump no matter what he does”, the above reasons given by ChatGPT are not going to do much for you. The problem with finding an answer to WHY is that it is like the Russian dolls. One WHY is embedded in another WHY. We want the bottom WHY but then the dolls become more like an onion. You can peel the onion all day long and eventually there is nothing there. If you are looking for a core seed or a core reason to explain all the other WHYs, you will soon be grasping nothing but air. For instance:
“WHY did you vote for Donald Trump?”
“Because he is a Republican.”
“So, you voted for Trump because he is a Republican and you support the Republican party?”
“YES.”
“WHY do you support the Republican party?”
“I have always supported it.”
“WHY”?
“Well, my mother and father were both Republicans.”
“WHY”?
“I don’t know, they always were so I am too.”
“What if Trump decided to become a Democrat again, would you still vote for him?”
“Yes, I would.”
“So, it really has nothing to do with his party affiliation?”
“I guess not.”
“Thank you for your cogent explanation.”
Where oh where can I find the real reason WHY the world is so screwed up? And what if it is not? What does that mean for the universe?
“Excerpt from ‘Suzie Bitner Was Afraid of the Drain’ by Barbara Vance.”
PS:
WHY are poems so confusing?
Aging Capriciously 