Compensating with Superstition and Second-Hand Experience
Series on Arnold Gehlen
In a world where we are increasingly narrowing down into highly specialized fields and first-hand experiences become sparse, it isn’t easy to keep a sense of reality. We cannot create it due to missing the direct consequences of our actions. How do we try to make sense of such incomprehensible situations?
Maximization of Order
In the constant flow of events that surround us, we continue to look for some kind of organisation principle. To somehow make sense of what happens around we are however overestimating its degree of order. This phenomenon results in superstition as a form of overestimation similar to magical thinking in earlier times.
But we have to deal also with a lot of information that is unusual, irregular, patchy, incomplete, and blurred. Superstition is a suitable method here to squeeze it into a closed and well-rounded form. In some sense, superstition is then also a sign of the tendency towards conciseness.
As a result, overestimation of the degree of order always works hand in hand with the simplification of reality and its stream of events. It, therefore, creates a value of relief, since grounded assessments of those events are impossible.
Second-Hand Experience
Regarding all this, the only reason why we don’t seem to be even more prone to unworldliness is the experiences we make “second-hand”. Since we are not able to experience everything ourselves to create a sense of reality, we must rely on the experiences of other people.
In other words, coherent meaning for the whole is missing. The patchy facts of the situation require gaps to be filled. Therefore, we start to pack opinions on matters to create the illusion of a coherent whole. It compensates for the lack of direct knowledge and its resulting uncertainty.
Action without motive
A seemingly absurd phenomenon during WWII describes these compensatory superstitions pretty well. Even though the Germans were just about to lose the war, they continued to fight. They believed in a secret super weapon on their side. This was used as a justification for the individuals to continue according to their set of facts that stood in contrast to the overarching event.
Here again, we seem to operate on overestimation: certain opinions or convictions are packed into our set of facts and expect that the world behaves accordingly. Even more so, from such convictions, one has to expect that actions follow directly from the situation at hand.
