Francisco Miraval
Years ago, when I was still a young college student, one of my professors used to say that, “‘Order’ is just the chaos we get used to see every day and ‘truth’ is just the lie we hear more frequently than any other lie”.
Being young and immature, and with a yet uneducated and undisciplined mind, I didn’t fully realize, much less accepted, what my professor said. It is neither a relativistic nor a pessimistic approach, but a thoughtful invitation to never assume what we have achieved or learned is “the final word”.
However, our daily life acts as a constant “sleeping aid,” preventing us from remembering that this moment we are living now, this precise moment (even if it is an eternal returning of the same, as the ancients and Nietzsche said) is just that, one moment in an infinite sea of many other moment.
In more concrete terms, what is “normal” for me is normal because I am used to it. In other contexts, in other times, and for other people my “normal” may not be so.
For example, the first time I visited the United States I was suddenly surrounded by huge signs showing the temperature in Fahrenheit degrees, and the distances in miles. I didn’t understand either measure, so, for me, it was “wrong” to use them.
I also remember when I began to watch soccer on American television and suddenly I discovered that the time of the game was kept backwards, from the 90th to zero, not from zero to 90, as I was used to see. So, for me, once again, that was the “wrong” way to keep the time of the game.
Since I wasn’t used to count the time backwards in soccer games, my “solution” was to keep doing complicated mathematical calculations to see how much time has elapsed and how much time was still to be played. (Eventually, that time-keeping approach changed.)
And, of course, we should mention that in different parts of the world the dates are written in different ways, sometimes with the month first and sometimes with the day first. That’s not a problem is the date is November 11, but what about “07/12”? Is that July 12th or December 7th? It depends.
In this age of globalization, I receive messages from different people in different continents and frequently I have to “translate” the date I see into the date they meant to say if I want to avoid misunderstanding the day of an event. However, that “translation” doesn’t happen spontaneously.
And just a few days ago, I installed a new app in my phone to check my use of Internet. The app said “25%”. I assumed that was how much Internet I had left, so I added a new “package”. Later I discovered that “25%” was how much I have already used.
In summary, it is very probably that sooner or later my “order” will be revealed as chaos and my “truth” just as often repeated self-delusion.