We want answers!

Humans, it seems, prefer answers to questions.


You could look at all of human knowledge and accomplishment as springing from attempts to find answers to questions:
1. Why do people get sick? From folk medicine for indigestion to brain surgery, the desire to answer this question has spurred the entire medical industry.
2. What happens when we die? Religion and the paranormal try to answer this fundamentally unanswerable question.
3. What is good? What is evil? Philosophy, government, and social welfare systems, along with every kind of spiritual quest, provide a wide variety of answers, none of them accepted by all.
4. How can the planet survive in a time of rapid and sustained climate change? This burning question is being answered right now by scientists, world political leaders, and average people in their daily lives.

The human desire for answers to question has led to marvels: inventions that serve us daily, such as computers and airplanes; transportation and communication systems; literature, music, art, and dance. All these well-developed areas of human life, called "civilization" by some, developed from answers to questions such as "how can I add huge columns of numbers?" or "what's the cheapest way to get from here to there?" The arts answer the questions, "what is beautiful?" or "why do people behave as they do?"


The need to resolve complex questions has also led to the human propensity for totalitarian systems that give easy, simple answers. Repressive, authoritarian governments, either left (Communist) or right (Fascist), proscribe answers for social questions by means of rules and laws that worm their way into every part of human life.

Humans want to solve mysteries. We are very uncomfortable with unanswered questions and will resist being faced with something we cannot understand immediately. As a teacher, I constantly try to find a balance between challenging my students with brand-new, many-faceted questions and leading them too quickly to answers by giving them frameworks and clues. Too many big questions make them nervous and discouraged; too many formulas and easy solutions make them bored.


What questions trouble you? How might you enlist other people to find answers? And how can you model behavior that seeks to answer questions through everyday human cooperation rather than waiting for answers from "experts": scientists, politicians, or any other kind of guru?

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