People are confused.
A world of confused people is confusing.
People saw they want certain things. But they do not always act consistently. That is, their actions are often not appropriate, to satisfy their wants. Thus, I consider them confused.
Some people are not as confused as they seem. They are, instead, dishonest.
Perhaps most of us are at least somewhat dishonest. Or more likely, we are performative. We claim to want things. We believe that such claims will help us get what we really want. We may even want those things. But we may want other things more.
A core problem with being human is wanting more than we can have. Even wanting incompatible things. It seems to be how we are wired.
Is it possible for people to transcend their own contradictions?
Many people claim to want justice. They say they want better treatment and better outcomes for minorities, the marginalized, and the vulnerable. I do not doubt them.
But they also want things for themselves. They want happiness. They want comfort, pleasure, joy, satisfaction. To get those things, they need some degree of power, status, influence, and recognition.
Most people need to work, to earn a living. They want to be attractive, to find a mate (or several), perhaps even to have children. If they are good parents, they want their children to have success, too. This is the baseline of self-interest. Everyone is minimally self-interested. Even saints want something, if only to be worthy of God's love.
Most of us are not saints. Many of us do not even believe in God (at least, not a God who responds to prayer and intercedes with personal miracles). Most of us are mostly resigned to the mechanical nature of the world: the tyranny of causality. Even though we mostly don't understand the mechanics of the world, or the nature of causality, very well.
Then again, supernaturalism often slips in the back door. People might believe in some form of luck. Not just the mathematical reality, of chance and statistical probability, but literal Fate. Even that they can negotiate with Fate, by their thoughts, words, or actions, securing for themselves a better outcome than they could attain by random chance. (Effort and basic strategy seem to be regularly forgotten or dismissed.)
This, perhaps, is the heart of my confusion with people, and the core of the confusion with which they seem, to me, to be stricken. Most people believe, to some degree, in some kind of underlying conscious order to the universe and human existence. They don't necessarily know what it is. They may not have a name for it. But it is there. It watches us. It cares. It has plans. It listens. It intervenes.
Me, I don't believe any of this. The universe is governed by rules, set down at the moment of creation—the Big Bang—or, simply universal, in space and time and whatever exists beyond them. The same rules which can be found in mathematics govern all things, both conceptual and material. Nothing contradicts those rules. Anything which appears to is described or understood in error.
But you cannot get people to let go of their superstition. It is innate, intuitive, perhaps necessary. Most people cannot accept existential nihilism. Not merely don't want to, but find it impossible to do so.
People believe that the universe cares. That something requires that life is, ultimately, fair. That we get what we deserve.
I do not believe there is any such thing as "deserving". Things simply play out, according to the rules, and the current and past state of things, and different people experience different outcomes. Justice does not exist.
Now, we could create justice, if we chose. But that would require agreement on what justice means, what it is, and what it looks like.
Unfortunately, there is no agreement on justice. The exact opposite is the case. We strongly disagree. And if we wait for God or Fate to instill justice in the hearts of all people, we will be waiting forever, and be forever dissatisfied.
We could, if we wanted, create a compromise in our shared definition of justice. And, in fact, we do! That is the nature of politics: to debate, compromise, cooperate, and struggle to promote and produce our own individual expectations of justice in the public realm. Sometimes, it degenerates into unrestrained conflict and violence. But mostly, the consequential suffering is indirect. It appears mostly as neglect, abandonment, and deprivation. Or manipulation, dishonesty, cheating, and exploitation.
Many people claim to want justice for all. But mostly, they want justice for themselves. That might include a world where they don't experience or witness injustice. But usually that simply means that the injustice is hidden, or framed as a different kind of justice. As long as people are willing to accept the appearance, a story, a fiction of justice, that is what we will get.