There’s always something to howl about.

The world is larger than you think it is . . .

I had mail yesterday morning from “keith”, who is Lord of the Flies at HousingPanic. This is the first chance I’ve had to deal with it, and I might just as well ignore it. But there are issues that I think are worth addressing in a metablogical kind of way, in order to dispense with them.

Here is the entire text of the letter:

dude, you’re gonna be seen as the town fool in a few more weeks, if you aren’t already

I’d recommend toning it down a bit. Admit you were wrong, and give your clients (if you have any) good advice, not wrong-headed advice that doesn’t learn

Okay, fine.

First, I’m not going to be seen as the town anything. I get press coverage that other Realtors would kill for, and it’s basically worthless. I was cited first and most in an article in Phoenix Magazine entitled, “Where do the Valley’s best Realtors live?” I heard from one client, who was delighted to have seen the article but got the name of the magazine wrong. I have been published every Friday for almost a year in three regional sections of the Arizona Republic. I get phone calls when I’m controversial, but that’s the sole measurable consequence. We are very highly regarded by our clients, and we are fairly well known in the neighborhoods we farm, but, beyond that, we are not on anyone’s radar.

Not that I’d hate it if we were. We do very well with people who like to read — half of whom are colorful and struggling and half of whom are colorful and very, very prosperous.

Second, there is nothing for me to tone down. I believe the long-term prospects for the residential real estate market in the Phoenix are are very good, but I don’t make any short-term predictions at all. Alike unto “keith” and all those who buzz at his behest, I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future — with the only difference being that I know I don’t know it and I don’t affect to pretend to believe that I do. (Incidentally, I have no opinion whatever about other real estate markets, not even those that are proximate to Phoenix. It would never occur to me to hazard a guess about Tucson or Prescott or Flagstaff — or even Wickenburg. I don’t work in those places, so I don’t know the issues.)

There is a larger point to this, and that’s why I’m addressing this letter at all. This is it:

The world is large.

The world is larger than you think it is, and, even when you’ve just told yourself that the world is larger than you think it is — even then it’s larger than you think it is.

We conceptualize, abstracting from the relentless chaos of the senses to herd and shuffle things into manageable categories, so that we might reduce the world down to a size our minds can encapsulate. This is a good thing, in the main, but the map is not the territory, and the territory is not constrained by the map.

But that’s not a very comfortable notion, so instead we tell ourselves that we know what will happen — not because we know what will happen, but because we can’t stand not knowing what will happen. We strive to regulate everything we can, imposing upon reality the order and structure of a game, not because we actually can impose order and structure on reality, but because we want to believe that we can, even though we know we cannot. We are terrified of our ignorance and the perils it portends, but rather than amend that ignorance in the ways that we can, we prefer to deny it by affecting to have knowledge without a prior process of discovery.

This is not a recent development.

But it leads us to make rash and stupid statements that do not, cannot, bear up to rational scrutiny — which we then rebel against because we insist that we must “know” without having discovered, this in turn because we cannot allow ourselves quietly to acknowledge that we do not know what we do not know.

This is not new, either. The names change, but the game is ever the same, alas.

What will change “in a few more weeks”?

Almost nothing.

What will change in a few more years?

Almost everything.

What are the particulars?

Hide and watch. If you’re willing to admit that you don’t already know everything, you just might learn something…

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