Entertainment & Arts

The Cube - "Nobody is in charge"

This 'MyTake' is actually about conspiracies; or, I should say, the lack of them. People in this day and age like to believe that everything happens for a reason (it doesn't), that chaos doesn't rule the world (it does), that coincidences and bad luck don't happen (they do, all the time), and that it's possible for a single, hidden clique of men to be "pulling the strings" behind the scenes (it's not).

Well, to begin with, grand and over-arching conspiracy theories like 'The Illuminati', 'Flat-Earth' and 'Area 51 aliens' don't factor in that very crucial component - human nature. It's in our very blood to disagree, to dissent, to be incapable of keeping anything at all a secret. If there had been at some remote time in the past an agreement among men to subvert society, it wouldn't have been very long before this group would have split up into innumerable factions, each with its own agenda, and with the express purpose of undermining the group from which they split. Christianity is a good example of this occurring, there being at no point in time since the end of the first century a single, united Christian church (Catholicism was not the very first 'brand' of Christianity, Marcionism predating it for example).

The second point that needs to be emphasised is the fact that our universe, our reality, is inherently chaotic, unpredictable and lawless at base level. People like to point to the "Laws of Nature" that apparently demonstrate we live in a perfectly deterministic and harmonious world, but those laws reflect more the inherent workings of the human mind more than anything that may actually be "out there" in some sort of objective reality. Our understanding of reality is filtered and distorted to a very large degree by our five senses, and whilst our senses are good enough for what they do, they are very far from being perfect. The old Newtonian paradigm imagined a "billiard-ball" scenario for our universe, a reality in which with enough computing power one could precisely fix each and every entity within our cosmos, and from this extrapolate with perfect precision the subsequent states of that system. It doesn't work that way though. Our reality is best seen from the vantage point of a statistician, not a physicist, and because of this we are often surprised by what can, and does, happen, and this leads me on to the point I'm trying to make here - "luck" is real.

Yes, chance. It rules the world, which means that bad things just happen, all the time. There is no reason for it, no sense to it, and it will always be thus. When John F. Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Oswald (yes, he did it), millions of people couldn't believe that some lone loser like Oswald could have been responsible for the death of a president who was as popular and well-liked as Kennedy was. There just had to be others behind it, because it didn't seem possible that something so seemingly pointless and random could ever happen.

In the clip the character of Worth tells the others that there is "no one in charge", that the whole thing is just an accident, a "public-works programme" that got lost, misplaced and forgotten. This monologue could (and has been) interpreted to mean there is no God (no one in charge) and surprisingly enough, it actually sounds convincing. Maybe it's in the delivery, but I find myself agreeing with him, even though I don't consider myself to be an atheist, but I think a better interpretation of the scene is to see it more literally, to come to the conclusion that, as someone whose name I cannot now recall put it, to "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".

The Cube - "Nobody is in charge"
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