Omar Claflin

I distrust wonder implicitly. It is not meant to survive or have permanence.

It is held up as a virtue in modern society. It shouldn’t be.

Wonder has a purpose in your brain but it isn’t to be sought for its own sake. To do so speaks to intellectually low-level addictive behavior. Like the mind of a drug addict who has been commandeered by an overriding quest. It isn’t necessarily an ethical statement (although I could make it one) but it speaks to a reduction of intelligence complexity. A loss. In my world view, that becomes an ethical statement. It may vary for you.

Mystics and charlatans accrue a false credibility by deliberately creating bewonderment. Discipline experts obscure the clarity of their field with lame attempts at forced poetic wonder. Theology uses it to subdue reason and establish a sense of authority. Bewonderment is declarifying, obscuring and mystifying. It’s a pacifying tool imbuing a psychological-informational sense on its bewondered listeners that the speaker has access to knowledge they don’t.

It’s an attempt at intellectual stagnation. That there exists a permanent mystery that shall be given infinite reverence.

Perhaps the speaker does know something I don’t but the attempt only makes me suspicious. Subtle attempts or dramatic, are still attempts at manipulation.

Take the new-age mystics for example. Clarity-seeking isn’t necessarily the opposite of what they do but it is different. The difference is made obvious when the two are put side by side and the clarity-prioritizer, after a while, after using clear definitions and simplifying narratives, make things less mysterious. Boring in fact. That’s fine. After interesting comes boring. This happens quite quickly. You’ve figured it out. You will find new things to be interested in. Or new levels. Obfuscation does something different. It injects mystery, drama, a sense of wonder. Our explanation systems should not purposely create this.

Mystification isn’t that hard or that useful. There is plenty to be in wonder about, mystified about, interested in. There’s no point in artificially creating it or to deliberately seek it.

I have no issue with brain teasers or metaphorical language. I’m a fan of these in fact. But no concept is so complex as to defy linguistic encapsulation. Skip past the wonder part quickly and figure it out. Restate it for your own personal clarity.

Wonder is a mental state. A subconscious system communicating a mismatch between new information and expectation. Expectation informed from all your previous experiences and information. Which is frankly embarrassingly limited. Frequent cycles of interest and boredom, relative to your exposure, are bound to happen but wonder isn’t a perpetual mystery to be treated with wonder itself.

Wonder is a state of confusion. Slack-jawed, drooling, stupefying awe that has been somehow been culturally revered as a worthwhile human condition in our modern intellectual times. It’s been erected as an obelisk of our humanness serving as a pedestal holding up our stupidest ideas.

The majesty of a rock formation or a frozen waterfall. The state of being inspired. The idea we’re beings made from exploded suns. Can you believe it? How wondrous wonder is? Yes, you’re easily impressed. Go away.

Mental confusion is bound to happen like some Neolithic tribe seeing a helicopter for the first time. But eventually even they get over it. There’s a reason befuddlement is socially embarrassing. I’m not chiding being momentarily impressed or momentarily confused. I’m saying bewonderment is a self-conscious stagnation of curiosity. A stagnation that is toxic to comprehension.

Just as the universe may have come from soul-chilling void so defined by nothing that it can’t even be described as empty; the intelligent biological algorithms of the nervous system came from an exhaustively unintelligent process of planet-wide genocidal culling for eons; our attempts at absolutism comes from an information organ grounded in relativism. Feel free not to be continually impressed by any of this.

We can infuse our own interpretations on the world outside, to our own benefit even. Purpose, intent, autonomy, consciousness are encapsulating summaries, rough approximations we use. But do not tread outside the boundaries of your own goals with that fiat currency because it isn’t redeemable out there. When you run into problems of answering a question, a paradox of meaning, it may be that you are asking a meaningless question. Using words not meant to be used in that way. Everything is limited, even our abstract concepts.

Failures of our interpretations or systems of understanding should stand as an obvious limitation of those words or meanings. Not as a paradox to dwell in for wonder’s sake.

We need to distill them in the most arguing language possible, understand them cerebrally and integrate a wariness of them in our intuition.

Ask poorly defined rhetorical questions if you want. Splash around in your astonishment at self-created paradoxes. Be puzzled. Get sucked into the mystery. But then you’re not genuinely asking a question. So keep it to yourself. You will get an answer about how your question is a disaster or, more likely than not, no response at all. What you will not get from me is shared wonderment. Not even wonderment about why you seek wonderment. Or how the universe, as it appears to us is full of mystery. It’s all understandable. Hardly interesting. It’s just a lack of comprehension.

There are genuinely interesting things, even if they are scarce and short-lived. But the sake of wonder isn’t for itself, so I don’t need to create my own confusion to find it. As is intentional mystery through definitional sloppiness – it’s a bad word game on the level of puns. So, lose yourself in your lame cloud of confused word mist and go be mystified on your own time.

Deliberate wonder is to deliberately dull the comprehension of your mind. To be enchanted with wonder itself is to stagnate and undo clarification. It makes you vulnerable to shoddy explanations, robs you of your curiosity, capitulates your mind to the unimaginative and stands in the way of personal clarity.

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