So many people have suffered or died due to an overdose of human seriousness (theirs or somebody else’s). The planet may be currently dying from it. There’s nothing more dangerous than a human who wants to be taken seriously.
Wars are decided by men who are afraid not to be taken seriously. For a “manly man” (i.e. a man who thinks testoterone defines him), and most military people certainly see themselves as such,1 nothing is more scary than being perceived as a clown, an inoffensive dreamer, or worse: a defenseless child! All these tough men pretend to protect their country but secretly protect their fragile ego at least as much.
The same goes for business, government, and likely any other instance where significant power is held: an elite club of so-called experts recognize themselves as the “adults in the room”, disregarding anybody else as an ignorant and their opinion as irrelevant. This elite of serious people sincerely believes that they understand the “real world”, whereas the remaining population does not.
One may note that their understanding is based almost exclusively on applying the knowledge and reasoning of those who taught them, those who belonged to the same club earlier. In other words, their apparent intelligence is often no more than that of a well-trained monkey. It is not by chance that the look and attitude, i.e. the physical appearances, are an important key to any club of serious people: it’s usually more a matter of accepting the predefined codes and usages than of actual undestanding of whatever the serious topic is. Even more interestingly, most of us subconsciously accept this ridiculous rule: if somebody does not dress the part, we assume that they are not serious.
There is no such thing as an adult, let alone a serious adult. We are just grown-up children, i.e. children who lived longer. We like to believe that some of us know what they are talking about, because we would feel scared and powerless if we admitted that the serious people are as clueless as us.
This is why we should not take seriousness too seriously.
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including most women in the military. Incidentally, this could be a clue that the concept of manliness is ill-defined. But logic is not a particularly strong value in the culture of manliness. ↩︎