Sometimes I wonder…

I’ve had a thought today, that may or may not be continued and expanded upon in a later entry, but which I thought I’d put down briefly while it was still in my mind. In fact, the point is that the thought won’t leave my mind, and I’m hoping that putting it down in writing will be, in some small mmater, cathartic.

Anyway, sometimes, I get really fed up with the condition of the house I’m currently living in. I’m here at IU with two other guys, you see, and my tendencies towards cleanliness and organization, while not comparable whatsoever to either of my parents (whose hospital-influenced cleanliness borders on OCD), are still in the top 5% of all Y-chromosome-carrying graduate students. That said, I do let a lot go, and my room is not always a model of sanctity and germ-free living. Still, the entropic mess that is the community kitchen and bathroom drives me nuts.

I spend a good hour or two every day to keep things from falling apart, washing dishes, scrubbing counters, tossing out trash, making sure rags are clean, etc., and probably once or week or so, I have to buckle down and do a really good job of it. Otherwise, produce and trash would be left out, there would be no pots/pans for cooking dinner, etc. The house would reek.

And nobody else does anything.

One of them, who I’ve known for a while, is generally pretty good natured and will preemptively do some cleaning from time to time. In his case, I can understand that his schedule for cleanliness is just a bit more sparse than mine, and that difference is unavoidable when living with other people. I’m not unreasonable. As long as most of the time, he’s helping out with something, I don’t really mind that he’s too absent-minded to remember everything.

The other one is where things start getting bad. As far as I can tell, the majority of his concerns are self-serving, and while he does do some cleaning around the house, it’s always after I look surly or after I’ve been at it for a while and home-slice feels guilty, so he dries a few dishes, only to go back to finishing the third season of House or playing his video games. When he cooks, there’s always a grittiness in the food that I can tell is from vegetables not being well-washed. He always leaves the wok out with some rank shit that won’t come out, and so I have to wash before AND after I cook. AND he always picks at newly prepared food without washing his hands.

When I raise issues like, “if we don’t keep the counters clean, the kitchen will smell like shit,” his response is something like, “but our kitchen doesn’t smell like shit.” What? Do you want to wait for that to happen? When our landlord came over, he said, “we should make him some Pad Thai” (when I’m the one who knows how to make it) instead of “Hey man, you think you could make some?”

Then, after I spent 2 hours working on the house budget, he had to come to me to explain it to him to make sure he wasn’t shorted on the money he had spent on house groceries. I didn’t spend 2 hours on the budget so I could steal 5 bucks from your sorry ass.

I’ve seen the pattern before. It comes from a philosophy of trying to get away with as much as possible while doing as little as possible. It’s probably the mode of living for many people I’ve met.

Which takes me to the thing that’s been bothering me. Let’s say selfishness is an evolutionary mechanism, at least on a micro/individual level. It allows the individual to preserve its energy and gain as much from its actions as possible. Plausible, right?

However, in group dynamics, that can’t be true. There has to be a few people willing to do as much for others as they would do for themselves. These individuals keep the group together, and allow the group to act as something more than the sum of their parts. Selflessness in this case could be seen as a deviation from the norm, selfishness, creating those people that become the “glue” of society.

But in this dynamic homeostasis of many selfish people/few selfless people that I’ve modeled, it never gets better. The world will generally be more self-centered than compassionate, and those few selfless people of any generation exist just long enough to give hope to the next generation and allow a few more selfless people to arise in their place, perpetuating the cycle.

I’m reminded of the movie trilogy The Matrix, in which Neo, the Jesus figure, is told by the machines that 1% of every generation rejects the Matrix due to their personalities and thus they are let go. The humans are given a fake prophecy that a savior will arise in their midsts to destroy the machines, bring peace, etc. Once that “chosen one” enters the Matrix and talks to the machines, they tell him that they are on their way to destroy the colony of freed humans, and he’s allowed to choose about a dozen of them to take with him and rebuild the colony. This group is again given the fake prophecy and so it goes, and endless cycle of hope, destruction, hope, destruction…

Yes, I just compared cleaning the kitchen to The Matrix. That means I’ve overstayed my welcome and I need to go do work.

Wednesday, September 19th, 2007 : Personal, Philosophy : 1 Comment

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