The Fallacy of Being Human

Nothing fascinates me more than going ahead and seeing what is getting views on my blog and what isn't.  I aced both the midterm and final of my statistics class so it's a no brainer that I'm a stats junky.  Give me the stats tab for a blog and I can, fairly naturally, see so much.  The stats of a blog and popularity of a blog post (or comparative unpopularity) tells me not just what people are willing to read but also tells me what people are interested in.  After one year of reasonably active blogging, there are two posts that account for almost half of all my blog's views.  The first one is my market breakdown of why jeans may be tearing at the thighs (2244 views).  The second is my breakdown of Congress' discretionary spending (1010 views).  In comparison, the third highest viewed post is on free speech (The Symbolism of Tents with 408 views). 

In general, most of my posts are involving what I call "social dynamics", whether they be in a specific market, economy, media, legislation, or society, itself.  They are all, at least through my eyes as the writer, involving societal interactions.  Out of all of my posts, I would say that the jeans post is the least important and yet, the number of views it has is double that of even the more important breakdown of discretionary spending.  The natural question that arises in me is "why is that?".  Why these three posts?

As the writer, I find it very plain to see that what interests people are those things that they perceive as having the most direct affect on them.   This plays out as very true when I look at the specific subject matter of these top three posts.  Jeans are something that many people wear on a daily basis.  Congress' spending, especially due to the media driven debates and fiscal cliff talks, also has been a subject that people can see as having a possible direct effect on their lives.  And the tents?  Well, that had a very specific affect on the lives of Occupy protestors and was the chief complaint of detractors from the movement.  Hence, the premise that people are interested in what they perceive as affecting their daily lives turns out to be true, at least according to the stats of my blog.  However, they also watch the news on a daily basis (media).  They share images on Facebook that expand a generational divide (society).  They worry about the safety of their children in schools and so on.  Yet, the further away the subject gets from what they perceive as their own personal lives, the less interested they are.   Is it that individuals within a society are self-serving or is it simply harder to comprehend how more complex subjects may affect them?

One of the things that I see come up so often as of late is the discussion of "free will".  We, myself included, have a tendency of disengaging ourselves from society by perceiving ourselves as individuals who may or may not be affected by the movement of societal interactions through the process of free will.  Nevermind the fact that society is, in fact, comprised of individuals interacting and influencing each other on a constant basis.  When I explain to my children how it is that I view people within a society, I compare it to being rather like water molecules in a pond.  Each individual water molecule is separate and may bump into each other from time to time but, when taken as a whole, we see a pond,(a city) a lake (a state) or an ocean (global humanity). 

Some may balk at seeing themselves, with all their free will, as being relegated to the status of a water molecule.  However, the comparison does stand up.  Is not a law like a dam to prevent water from flowing into a specific area and if there should be holes or failures within that dam, doesn't some of the water escape past it?  And do we not flow like water, at times, following down certain streams of affiliation that could represent the flow of a river or a current within the ocean?  Or some idea or invention, such as the internet, may have the same effect as a child tossing a pebble into a pond, causing a ripple of change amongst the whole.  And as water molecules, our perception of the world around us would be those other individual water molecules that are the closest to us of all and not necessarily the scenery through which we traverse or that our course may have changed entirely.  Our scenery would be those other close by molecules, not the forest that we cut through or the mountain from which we descend.  To us, the change of scenery would not be felt until it touches our lives in the most direct of ways.  Like the ripping of jeans at the thigh.