The Stochastic Man

1

We are born by accident into a purely random universe. Our lives are determined by entirely fortuitous combinations of genes. Whatever happens happens by chance. The concepts of cause and effect are fallacies. There are only seeming causes leading to apparent effects. Since nothing truly follows from anything else, we swim each day through seas of chaos, and nothing is predictable, not even the events of the very next instant.

Do you believe that?

If you do, I pity you, because yours must be a bleak and terrifying and comfortless life.

I think I once believed something very much like that, when I was about seventeen and the world seemed hostile and incomprehensible. I think I once believed that the universe is a gigantic dice game, without purpose or pattern, into which we foolish mortals interpose the comforting notion of causality for the sake of supporting our precarious, fragile sanity. I think I once felt that in this random, capricious cosmos we’re lucky to survive from hour to hour, let alone from year to year, because at any moment, without warning or reason, the sun might go nova or the world turn into a great blob of petroleum jelly. Faith and good works are insufficient, indeed irrelevant; anything might befall anyone at any time; therefore live for the moment and take no heed of tomorrow, for it takes no heed of you.

A mighty cynical-sounding philosophy, and mighty adolescent-sounding, too. Adolescent cynicism is mainly a defense against fear. As I grew older I suppose I found the world less frightening, and I became less cynical. I regained some of the innocence of childhood and accepted, as any child accepts, the concept of causality. Push the baby and the baby falls down. Cause and effect. Let the begonia go a week without water and the begonia starts to shrivel. Cause and effect. Kick the football hard and it sails through the air. Cause and effect, cause and effect. The universe, I conceded, may be without purpose, but certainly not without pattern. Thus I took my first steps on the road that led me to my career and thence into politics and from there to the teachings of the all-seeing Martin Carvajal, that dark and tortured man who now rests in the peace he dreaded. It was Carvajal who brought me to the place in space and time I occupy on this day.