Drivers, driving in warm and comfortable cars after a bad night”s sleep or feeling a bit replete after a meal, dose off, cross the painted lines and collide head-on with an oncoming car.
“Well,” we think, “it was entirely the fault of the deceased. He knew he was not supposed to cross the double lines.” And there we let the matter rest. And the people in the oncoming car? “Just bad luck,” we say. “It happens all the time.”
It does indeed happen all the time. Every newspaper in the United States reports a serious automobile accident nearly every day. But it”s not just bad luck. It”s our failure to realize the modes of functioning are two: infallible and fallible. Inanimate things, lacking brains, function infallibly. They never make a mistake when they are functioning as they were made to function.
All creatures with brains, on the other hand, function in the fallible mode. They make lots of mistakes because they have lots of choices and often choose wrongly. However, precisely because they are fallible, they are creative; for they need many choices in order to be creative.
It will always be so. The infallible mode will always be faultless; the fallible mode will always be fraught with mistakes. If man has not learned how to make no mistakes in the millions of years since his evolution, depend upon it, it cannot be learned.
People will always make mistakes, not for lack of intelligence, nor, necessarily, for any culpable behavior, but because mistakes are a natural parameter of the animal condition. The human animal presses into the future at the very vanguard of the present; and the future is unknown, but for which there would be no irremediable fallibility of function. But no quantity or quality of intelligence can inform man of the event the future conceals until that event occurs.
We need desperately to study changing our infallible constructions in the interest of safety, for fallible creatures will always make mistakes.
Dean Sparks
Lucerne
