Leaf and Litter

When I hear my neighbor’s leaf-blower, I wonder: What manner of beast is this? I don’t mean the beast that is roaring, but the beast that is using the blower. What kind of mind can motivate spending money to buy a gas-guzzling, noise- and other-polluting, obesity- and laziness-inducing machine, when simple raking is superior in all respects? 

The same goes for littering. What kind of mind would motivate tossing the wrapper of a cheeseburger into the street or road when out walking or driving? 

But then, what kind of mind would motivate buying a cheeseburger to begin with, when equally tasty and healthier plant-based alternatives that involve much less animal cruelty and killing are known to be available? 

And how can people smoke? How can so many people not vote? Etc. ad inf. 

These phenomena seem unfathomable to me. That is my feeling when I encounter them, anyway. Of course a little effort does enable me to fathom them to some degree. There are several main options for making sense of them: 

1)      Maybe these folks do not realize what they are doing. They might not even be aware of doing them, so habitual are they.

2)      Maybe they know what they are doing, but they have a good reason for doing it anyway, which I simply happen not to know.

3)      Maybe they don’t have a good reason, but the error is one of logic not facts. 

My current thinking, however, is that in general the explanation is that the litterers and I have different worldviews … we live in different worlds, if not literally then virtually, that is, for all practical purposes. I now think it is easy enough to imagine how this could be; indeed, it is pretty much unavoidable that all of us live in different worlds. Why? Simply because each of us is the product of countless contingencies, so it would be an utter fluke if any two of us had developed the same web of interconnected beliefs about the world, and hence, had the identical set of desires and were motivated to do all the same things.

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