I have written a few times on the subject of humor, specifically political humor, and one of my theses is that humor is funny mainly because it is unexpected. However, having thought about that a bit more, I realized that there is something more profound there. You see, I think humor, more than we realize, falls into that "laugh so we don't cry" category. I am not saying that all humor is tinged with sadness, but that we react with a laugh to humor because we are relieved to find uncertainty resolved with something harmless¹. Because, if you think about it, there are only two areas of human experience which deal with total uncertainty and unpredictable outcomes. Those are humor and nightmare. In fact, just as humor is based entirely on the unpredictable and unexpected, so too nightmare is possible only when we face the unexpected².

And that is my topic for today, why we recognize that the unexpected is the stuff of either fear or absurdity, and why we so rarely take that realization to heart when we set out to plan our lives or our society.

Of course, this is hardly a novel topic, I have written extensively on the subjects of predictability³, consistency⁴, and related topics. But I have never really looked at them from the ground up. I have argued that predictability is essential to human society, and even to our everyday life, but outside of a few brief examples, I have never laid the groundwork upon which my beliefs are based.

So let us look at the very basic level of predictability. Assume you are an infant once again. You know nothing, you are a complete blank slate. How do you learn what to do? You try doing something and see what happens. You do it again and see what happens. If the same thing happens every time, you develop a rule. If something different happens, then you look for what was different between the two and try to come up with another rule.

For example, you kiss daddy and he smiles. You learn daddy likes to be kissed. But then you kiss daddy and he gets annoyed. You look around and realize daddy was sleeping. You try a few times and learn that daddy likes kisses, but doesn't like to be woken up.

In other words, form regularities, you learn how things work. You need a predictable world to develop rules. If the results differed every time you did something, you would never be able to develop such rules, and would never preoceed beyond the "try and see" stage, In short, you would remain infantile your entire life. (We see this to some degree in children whose parent's treated them in erratic, unpredictable ways. They tend to have trouble developing consistent ways to deal with other people. The anticipation of unpredictable results makes it impossible for them to develop interpersonal behaviors.)

And that is the rule throughout life. You learn by observing regularities, and develop rules based on them. All our sciences as well as the ways with which we deal with everyday life is based entirely on that discovery. Granted, sometimes we develop incorrect rules by imagining patterns are there which are not, or we fail to notice patterns or maybe distinctions we need, but by and large we base all our planning, and even our momentary actions upon the assumption that the world has regularities.

We can see this in our problems dealing with unknowns. For example, when encountering totally unfamiliar situations, we find ourselves unable not only to plan ahead, but unable to figure out how to act. We are reduced tot he infant's approach of test and see, to develop new patterns. Or else we look for things that remind us of other patterns and hope the old rules apply. This is also the problem dealing with erratic or insane individual. Unable to rely upon cultural norms or general rules of human behavior, we find ourselves uncomfortable, uncertain fo how to act around them. We try various approached, look for patterns specific to them, but, if they truly are erratic and display no patterns, we are at a loss how to handle them.

Which brings me to government.

Government is a human construct, but being so large and mostly remote for most individuals, in some ways it acts as a force of nature, something to which we must react, not something we control. And so we hope that it behaves in regular ways, that by following the law we will achieve the expected result.

The problem is modern government has departed form the rule of law and moved instead to the rule of men. By enshrining such nebulous concepts as "equity" and "fairness", it has substituted the judgments of individual regulators and judges for the impersonal rule of law⁵. That means that instead of facing an impersonal, regular force, we find ourselves facing arbitrary human responses.

And that is why I have argued again and again for the government to be, as much as possible, restricted by law. And, even more importantly, limited to areas where government is absolutely necessary. Even when bound by law, government still introduces, inevitably, a small degree of human inconsistency, if from nothing else than the quirks of judges and juries. So, the fewer areas in which government intrudes, the fewer areas governed to any degree by whim.

And that, in the end, is the easiest way to ensure predictability, and allow us to best plan for our own futures. The less government there is, the fewer arbitrary rules there will be. And when we must have government, it must be bound by clear, tightly written laws, rather than loosely worded regulations giving freedom of action to bureaucrats. Anything else introduces increasing degrees of uncertainty and makes planning ever harder.

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1. Perhaps the best example of this dichotomy with regard to surprise is found int he surprise party, and the start with which it is often greeted. We are used to reacting to surprise with fear, and it is only once we establish that the surprise is benign that we let out a relieved chuckle.

2. Some nightmares are centered more on the inexorable certainty of some dread outcome, but even then the fear usually comes from unexpectedly finding ourselves in such a situation. Nightmares rarely come form knowingly placing ourselves in the way of harm, but from unexpectedly finding ourselves placed in the way of an unavoidable doom. So, even if part of the nightmare is entirely predictable, it is the unexpected way in which we find ourselves there that make it nightmarish.

3. See the following: "In Praise of Slow Changes", "Predictability", "The Problem With Cultural Relativism", "The Shortcomings of Pragmatism", "The High Cost Of Protection", "The Problem With Evolving Standards", "England Becoming a Third World Nation", "Why Judicial Activism Hurts", "Interpretation and Activism", "Pragmatism Revisited", "Shaky Reasoning", "Expectations", "Conservatism, Incremental Change and Federalism","Inflation and Uncertainty", "Empathy" Threatens not "Justice" but Predictability" and "Sotomayor and Empathy"

4. On the subject of predictability, my essays fall into two categories, those on pragmatism ("Pragmatism Revistied, Again", "The Shortcomings of Pragmatism", "Pragmatism Revisited") and those about the inexorable logic of our beliefs ("Inescapable Logic", "Smaller Government , Fair Weather Friends and Special Cases", "Inescapable Logic II", "Greed Versus Evil").

5. Any law has some uncertainty, as i will mention later. Judges and juries can always have unpredictably. But laws written with very specific terms are less prone to arbitrary interpretation than the vague regulatory guidelines which tend to cover government intervention into economics. For instance, it is much easier to tell if you violated a murder statute than whether the FCC will or will not find your broadcast "offensive". Laws need to be written with the specificity of the traditional criminal law statute, not the open ended nature of statutes creating most regulatory agencies.

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POSTSCRIPT

I realized after I wrote this that I did not explain the harm from lack of planning, as I thought it would be self-evident. But as some may ask, let me offer a quick explanation. Long range planning is the prerequisite for most wealth building. The farther into the future you can plan, the more opportunities for wealth there are. If you can only plan for a few days in the future, you cannot engage in the sort of planning which results in great fortunes, while if you can plan decades ahead, you can create great industrial infrastructure. Our modern governments, with their arbitrary regulation and tendency to remove economic rights individuals previously enjoyed (eg. cap and trade), as well as their open ended liability law (which I did not discuss here), tend to discourage long term planning. And the evidence is all around us. The 99 year leases once popular are no longer in evidence, as inflation and other types of uncertainty make such agreements impossibly risky.

In short, planning is required for wealth, longer term planning meaning greater wealth. So the more uncertain an environment, the poorer will be the people who live under those laws.

I hope that clears up any questions readers might have had.