Kaspar Hauser's Box

Why we are stuck in an overturned cardboard box without enough food to sleep comfortably:

Facts stare us in the face; we stare back and tell ourselves that they are an abyss. What is outside our box may be worse than the hunger and desperate boredom we’re experiencing inside it. To do anything at all would be to decrease stability, so we do nothing. We have a schematic for the box, but not enough light to see. There was food. We speculate on where it came from. There’s a stick which we knocked down as we came in. Some of that stick is outside the box. It’s not a big stick, and on its side as it is now, let’s in but little light. Sometimes none.
A long lifetime ago someone demonstrated the disconnect between mathematics and the real world, but we’ve been able to ignore that. There’s magic in numbers and number systems and we like that. Like Kaspar Hauser, we glory in the omnipresence of that which encloses us, protecting us from terrifying new thought and experience. Outside the box be dragons! Better to be hungry than to be food! Besides, inside the box is infinite; whichever way you turn it is there. Outside, simply turn around and all you had seen is replaced. Far, far too confusing!
That there is and can be no nullity, unity nor ordered of infinity we place with imponderables like irrational numbers ( ! ), imaginary numbers, hypercomplex numbers, triple and quadruple negatives and things that neither are nor are not, like wavicles, “spacetime” and the dividing-line between this and that.
But that’s okay, and we go on telling ourselves that an impossible equation one side of which involves the squaring of a rate, is the greatest equation ever. That equation than which no greater can be conceived. Well, inside our box, 100 kilometers per hour or 70 miles every 60 minutes are as easy to imagine as squaring them (you know, like counting, none, one two three and lots).
We have obvious limits and physical constraints (even outside the box), but do all we can to deny and overcome them, or at least pretend to). We are now born before we are born (at conception, apparently – to be conceived being to be), and harvested for parts that live on after we die; we examine the miniscule and the immense while ignoring practical imperatives.
We even honor, praise and propitiate geographically limited Gods (which helps ameliorate the obvious irrationality of contending that “My infinite being is bigger and more powerful than your infinite being”).
We lie to ourselves even more than we lie to others.
Some have claimed that, logically, for every proposition, either this proposition or its negation is true. Everything is either black or white, good or bad. Everything is pure.
We also have a greatest writer ever, from over 500 years ago. 37 or so plays, 2 narrative poems, many love poems, and a mind-bogglingly illiterate and poorly expressed last will and testament. While it’s admitted that his “Henry VI Cycle” was likely a collaboration, advocates of his status as a superior genius loathe to admit that the stage players he worked with always contributed to the best of their ability (despite how contrary that working alone would have been to reality as known, experienced and usually found conceivable). A “debate” rages, with, somehow, no listening involved.
That humans can simultaneously hold diametrically opposed viewpoints was once used to demonstrate the inferiority of the half of our world we obdurately refused to recognize the importance of, even while taking advantage of it. Now that ability is the mainstay of our ability to stay within out box, however uncomfortably.
Life without super-heroes is apparently not worth living.
Do we know what a virus is? Really know? No.
Do we understand what a germ is? No.
Do we understand genetics as much as we pretend? Again, NO!

“I always lie” and “I never tell the truth” are problematical statements. A speech-writer for Richard Nixon once told me, “I can’t say that I don’t think what you’re doing is not wrong.” Meaning, I guess, “I guess you’re doing the right thing” but instead saying “I can’t tell you anything” – which, of course, told me a LOT…
There are no absolutes. That’s just life.
As we’d rather rule in hell than serve in Heaven, we get to serve in hell.