Imaginary Problems
Several days ago, a local group celebrated an event by releasing several dozen balloons. Within two days, the local newspaper had printed a letter written by a local do-gooder.
In essence, the letter said that we should not have balloon releases because they “endangered animals”. She did not mention a single animal that had been injured because it was so dumb as to swallow a balloon, or portion of one. But, the mere “feeling” that some animal might have done, or might do so, prompted a long, long letter of complaint.
If one assumes that such a complainer believed in evolution rather than Creation, it’s logical to wonder if animals should be provided with more balloon releases so that the dumber ones would remove themselves from the gene pool in the process of natural selection. But, a deeper question must be asked. In the absence of actual evidence of animals dumb enough to eat ballon fragments, why would anyone care?
Lots of people like to worry about Imaginary Problems. Some make a living by doing so. Few problems are as imaginary as the that of animals hurting themselves by eating bits of deflated balloons. We may conclude that such complaints manifest a degree of self-righteous that’s welded to the shallow, pseudo-intellectualism endemic in those of less than average intelligence. Giving in to the immense amount of vanity necessary for the truly unintelligent to fool themselves into thinking “I’m really very bright.” renders any human mind even less incapable than it is of being able to do serious thinking about any real problems.
In the End…
In the end, Imaginary Problems are a way to allow the intellectually handicapped to believe themselves to be far smarter than they actually are. Worrying about things as ephemeral as animals being destroyed by balloon fragments is an exercise in vanity that leads inexorably to delusion and destruction.
Those who fall into the trap of believing they should devote effort to solving Imaginary Problems believe they are studying “cause and effect”. The real object of all such efforts is to find a way to let them believe themselves to be superior to others. The real result of their efforts is to make them look like fools when the particular Imaginary Problem fad has passed.
