God's Plan
So, You handle the important things?
The last time I checked, the world is a pretty screwed-up place.
"It's still Here.
If we had left things in your hands, it wouldn't Be."
"We actually tried Free Will before.
After taking you from hunting and gathering to the height of the Roman Empire we stepped back to see how you'd do on your own.
You gave us the Dark Ages for five centuries... until finally we decided we should come back in.
The Chairman thought maybe we just needed to do a better job of teaching you how to ride a bike before taking the training wheels off again.
So we gave you the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution.
For six hundred years we taught you to control your impulses with reason, then in 1910 we stepped back. Within fifty years, you'd brought us World War I, the Depression, Fascism, the Holocaust and capped it off by bringing the entire planet to the brink of destruction in the Cuban Missile Crisis.
At that point a decision was taken to step back in again before you did something that even we couldn't fix.
You don't have Free Will, David.
You have the appearance of Free Will.
What did they tell you about the Mentaculus?
The Mentaculus is actually taken from a friend of theirs who wrote this thing called the Mentaculus. It was the same thing— someone who was trying to create a probability map of the universe, and probably went a little mad in the process. So they just stole from the truth that was their lives, and threw it in the movie.
Do you know who did the artwork for Uncle Arthur’s Mentaculus notebook?
Yeah, fantastic artists. Mike Sell and Eric Karpeles. They’re these wonderful artists. Mike specializes in a kind of photographic realism in his painting, and Eric does more sort of abstract art. They created it together. Really, really fun stuff, and they just went to town. [laughs]
It’s interesting that there is all this questioning of why things are happening, without finding any answers, but here’s Uncle Arthur, who believes he is going to completely figure out why everything is happening — and he’s a mess. He’s going mad.
Maybe that’s where the quote comes in: “Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you,” as opposed to fighting against it or trying to understand it thoroughly. There’s a kind of wisdom in acceptance in some cases, and in other cases there is not.
The Mentaculus is actually taken from a friend of theirs who wrote this thing called the Mentaculus. It was the same thing— someone who was trying to create a probability map of the universe, and probably went a little mad in the process. So they just stole from the truth that was their lives, and threw it in the movie.
Do you know who did the artwork for Uncle Arthur’s Mentaculus notebook?
Yeah, fantastic artists. Mike Sell and Eric Karpeles. They’re these wonderful artists. Mike specializes in a kind of photographic realism in his painting, and Eric does more sort of abstract art. They created it together. Really, really fun stuff, and they just went to town. [laughs]
It’s interesting that there is all this questioning of why things are happening, without finding any answers, but here’s Uncle Arthur, who believes he is going to completely figure out why everything is happening — and he’s a mess. He’s going mad.
Maybe that’s where the quote comes in: “Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you,” as opposed to fighting against it or trying to understand it thoroughly. There’s a kind of wisdom in acceptance in some cases, and in other cases there is not.
These are the Members of the Airplane.
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