As human beings, our immense cognitive faculty (or that which most of us have, at least) can be a serious drawback. Wild animals don't get discouraged in their grueling crawl to survival, trying to meet those few needs that they have. Why? They're driven by biological imperatives: eat, sleep, procreate, and maybe a handful more. People, especially in the New and Old Worlds, have muddied their ideas about what drives them in life. A wolf cannot imagine the incredible odds stacked against it in that world of nature famously called red in tooth and claw. Animals, in a word, cannot be discouraged. They keep on keeping on, because it's all they know. A wild animal does not make a cost/benefit analysis before it decides whether or not to hunt for some food today. It hunts. That's that.

 

Like I said, people differ radically from that model. People don't know what they're doing, and in the rare instances when they do, our overblown brains can switch that off in the blink of an eye. Truly a double-edged sword, the human mind.

 

So, in the face of all this, what do we have? We understand the imminence of our potential failure, exactly how hot the breath of dismal defeat on our collective necks. We have, in short, the race. While the outcome is hazy, the competition, our very own rat race, is here and now.

 

This puts me in mind of the recent movie The Pursuit of Happyness. There's a snippet of narration in there about America's Founding Fathers, and why they would put the titular phrase, sans spelling error, in the Constitution. They guarantee a right, in that document. They do not guarantee happiness, but instead the pursuit. Can't guarantee the win, but they can guarantee a shot at it. (In my mind, this contrasts starkly with what I understand of the Communist philosophy, which spells out the nature of a happy society--democracy as the American founders envisioned it makes no such absolute promises)

 

This is where things like "ethics" come in. In a way, the outcome is immaterial, in opposition to Machiavellian mechanics. You can certainly have a goal, but on a large scale, there is little certainty as to its achievability. Only time will tell, as they say. So, in light of this, ethics is about running the race in a way one could admire. If we haven't got the goal in the bag, the journey really is it. Make it count--because if you blow it, then the way you've gone about your business is the only account you have.

 

The short of it is to simply keep trying. The long is that there is nothing simple about trying.