Rationality has been a prime value of our society since the Enlightenment, since the start of modern times. But no matter how much we try—or perhaps because we try so hard—the world dances to the tune only of madness. 

The more we have tried to artificially structure our experience of reality—which truly proceeds in an anarchic flux—into something that follows a strict logic, the more has the irrationality of the universe expressed itself in the gnarliest ways possible—like repressed desires manifesting themselves in the most perverted forms possible. The more we have tried to organize our endeavors to follow an instrumental notion of rationality, the more this rationality has turned into a bewildering parody of itself—just look at the hyper-controlled, over-orderly bureaucracies that our world is composed of. 

Truth is, today, if you think about it … the world is crazy. To take a stand-out example, somehow we’ve developed to the stage at which, according to United Nations numbers, one week of United States military spending would be enough to end global food shortages. And as of recent times, it seems that the irrationality of the times may condense into the exemplar mother event of a reality in which things simply aren’t supposed to make sense: A war on Syria. 

What’s the point of this potential war, again? 

No one really wants it. According to an ABC News/ Washington Post poll, about 60 percent of Americans don’t want it. The British Parliament voted against helping the U.S. with it. No major European ally of the U.S. thinks it’s a good idea except for France. For heaven’s sake, David Koch, the oil baron who, along with his brother, is considered the most significant financier of the American right wing, said that a military attack on Syria would be “dead wrong.” No one who matters, except for a bunch of Washington D.C. warhawks (led by President Barack Obama) and probably executives from the military-industrial complex, wants it. So why? 

Is it because Obama and company are really concerned about the alleged horrid acts of the Assad regime? Various sources have said that fatalities range from 355 to 1,729, but both those figures are tiny compared to the 100,000 civilians that have already been killed in the two-and-a-half-year-long civil war in Syria. So what’s compelling Obama to enter the conflict right now? What’s the sense behind, “Oh, he killed his people? Let’s teach him a lesson … by killing his people!” 

And c’mon, it’s not as if folks on Capitol Hill really think that killing people with chemical weapons is such a bad thing. After all, wasn’t it the U.S. that killed an estimated 400,000 Vietnamese people with Agent Orange and also caused an estimated 500,000 Vietnam-born babies to have birth defects? OK, if that’s that too far in the past, then weren’t some of the same folks around when the U.S. used depleted uranium during the 1991 and 2003 invasions of Iraq? And massacred civilians with white phosphorus during the Fallujah Offensive of November 2004? 

Let’s be honest: Neither does the U.S. care about the suffering souls of Syria, nor do most important people think the military operations would be a nice idea, as they did in 2003, either for U.S. interests or just for the chance that they would succeed. So why? 

We are not supposed to know. Not in the sense of Obama not giving us whatever evidence he has that Assad was behind the chemical attacks, but in the sense that American military actions―—blatantly now—just aren’t supposed to make sense. There’s no point in being surprised when they don’t. 

But more broadly, the world in general is not supposed to make sense. Chaos is the way nature works. And if we don’t accept that, if we insist on an arbitrary and artificial edifice of rationality to understand the world and guide what we do in it, this is how things will end up—bloody on one end, befuddled on the other. So, maybe, the key to the project of human liberation lies in the acceptance of there not having to be a fundamental order to things, on realizing that the logic of the machine is arbitrary, and hence, its facade of necessity a lie … and then seeing the multitude of possibilities that emerge. 

That being said, let’s go back to grilling Obama about why the heck he wants to drop bombs on Syria.