This is the wisdom I've learned: Folly rules the world. The world only makes sense when I realize that folly, not reason, reigns as the governing principle.

Berkeley philospher/professor John Searle explains why folly rules the world. Human being don't live in the world, and cannot see the natural phenomena in a direct, real manner. We have lost the physiological sensors we were born with. Instead, human beings see the world through language and socially-constructed symbols. Layer-upon-layer of semiotic systems collide (advertising, religous rhetoric, politicians hot air, conflicting ideologies, internalized beliefs). History and the future push against each other, erupting in the continual earthquake we call the present. The rifts stand out more than the solid ground.

Here are just a sampling of the follies this lead to.

PUBLIC TRANSIT

From the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) attendant making $60,000 for sitting in a protected booth doing nothing.

To BART riders paying $120 each month to ride a system with elevators and water fountains that don't work, with scarely any restrooms, and those that do exist reeking of excrement and marijuana.

To public transit officials who

• expand a system to get federal money when there already is public transit in San Jose
• won't link CalTrains to BART, which means that people have to walk at night in a dangerous part of San Francisco
• fight each other over tiny fiefdoms
• refuse to create a single, integrated, useful transit system, and thereby doom the Bay Area and Silicon Valley to its current ecological decline and imminent economic decline

Car junkies who refuse to share public transit, and who scarcely share the road, who weave between lanes dangerously, who crave and purchase ever larger gas hog sport utility vehicles. The automobile becomes a gas tank, and a quasi-military tank. Who drive oblivious to the world because they are so busy dialing their cell phones.

GAMBLING

To New York funding education by encouraging citizens to stupidly lose money by playing the state lottery. A government that teaches idiocy to adults to fund teaching reason to children.

HEALTH

To a modern nation, the United States, making itself sick by overusing antibiotics and antibaterial cleansers that have the effect of creating stronger and stronger microbiological diseases.

To a tax system so corrupt it has to tolerate tobacco to get income, even though tabacco kills more people each year than the Vietnam War did in a decade.