Everything You Know Is Wrong pt1

Weird Al Yankovic wrote a song called "Everything You know is wrong".

Yankovic's lyrics read thus,
"Everything you know is wrong
Black is white, up is down and short is long
And everything you thought was just so
Important doesn't matter"

I remember hearing it years ago and it just clicked with me. From the time I was about 10 years old I had felt that there was something very wrong about the world. I don't mean the corrupt politics, or the secret business deals, or any number of evils that abound in the world. Everyone is aware of those things really, apart from naive simpletons and small children (who should rightly be protected from such harsh realities).

No, what I am talking about runs far deeper than any conspiracy theorist could imagine. I felt that there was a fundamental "wrongness" about everything that existed. I couldn't explain it, but I was convinced that nothing in this world was as it should be. It was like there was a way that things were meant to be, and ought to be, but it wasn't that way.

I felt as if perhaps at some point in history, there had been a branching, and the universe had taken a turn for the worse. Perhaps in another dimension an alternate universe existed that I belonged to. A universe in which I was destined to exist in, but somehow I ended up in this one.

It is no strange thing then that the song by Petra titled "Not of this world" struck such a chord with me. The lyrics read,
"We are pilgrims in a strange land
We are so far from our homeland
With each passing day it seems so clear
This world will never want us here
We're not welcome in this world of wrong
We are foreigners who don't belong
We are strangers, we are aliens
We are not of this world"

On hearing these lyrics, I felt like screaming "Yes! That is exactly how I feel". However, nobody could tell me why this was the case. Perhaps I was mad, perhaps I was deluded in some way into thinking I didn't belong in this world. Maybe some higher power was playing an enormous hoax on my mind. Whatever it was, I felt this great displacement from my observed reality, and what I couldn't understand was how so many people seemed completely oblivious to the mismatched reality of their lives in this world.

I suppose this sort of feeling is the basis of so many people heartily embracing non-conformity, and leading many others to some kind of nihilistic despair. However for me, it began to lead me into the search for the reason behind this pervading sense of wrongness.

Before I even knew of people like St Anselm, or Descartes, or knew what ontological meant, I was beginning to formulate my own ontological argument for something deeper and larger than what I understood the world to know. If I had this fundamental sense of not belonging in this world, then perhaps, even if only in part, it was true. If I had such a strong sense of wrongness about the world, and there was no other reason to believe that I was mad or deluded, then it was almost certain in my mind that even if everything was not wrong, then at least some of it had to be. If I have such a deep and unfulfilled desire for something that I knew not what, then that something had to exist. C. S. Lewis put it like this:
"A man's physical hunger does not prove that man will get any bread; he may die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic. But surely a man's hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist. In the same way, though I do not believe (I wish I did) that my desire for Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will. A man may love a woman and not win her; but it would be very odd if the phenomenon called "falling in love" occurred in a sexless world."

This seemed to me a most satisfactory argument, though I did not find this passage of writing until years after I had discovered the concept. The reading of it was the first time I had seen it explained so succinctly.

So now I had discovered that perhaps I wasn't completely out of my mind, and there was maybe some truth to these concepts that permeated my being. Not satisfied with merely an ontological argument I was convinced that there was more to know. The line of reasoning that had brought me thus far was really only useful to point out and support the sense that I had in my inner being. How to find out more would have to come with a more systematic approach, and perhaps a great deal of reading and thinking. I was convinced that if I was right, then there would be evidence everywhere to support it.