The "just because" as a surrogate of thinking

Just because as an explanation

No, you don't think when you towel dry yourself when you get out of the shower.

Try it: one morning, before you start drying yourself, or in the process of drying yourself, stop for a moment and think about how you dry yourself: where on your body do you start, how many times do you towel that part before moving on to another part, and so on. You will almost certainly not be able to describe the process. And with a high probability when you start or resume it, after that thoughtful pause, you will be unable to finish it as usual.

As usual.

The intangible act of thinking is automatically displaced by a tangible somatic act. And just as you come to towel-dry yourself without thinking that you are towelling yourself, so it is that you come to do whatever without thinking that "whatever" and its circumstances.

You choose a T-shirt and trousers from your wardrobe without thinking beyond your wardrobe (ergo, without thinking), or you have coffee and buttered toast for breakfast without thinking beyond what you have in the pantry (ergo, without thinking).

And, note, this is not exactly a reflex action —although it is on the way to that—, nor is it a yellow, subliminal or unconscious thought according to which your mind decides before you are aware of what has been decided —by that, your mind, turned into a homunculus. No. It is something insurmountably worse. It is about the mind being displaced by the body, about the act of thinking succumbing to the act of the flesh. A rupture this, of the Cartesian curse, that doesn't even have the good of the fact of the rupture itself —and I can't explain this to you now.

Habit kills custom.

The act repeated just becase —let's call it "habit"— displaces the act repeated because I want to —let's call it "custom"—. Yes, habit kills custom, also the (custom of) thinking. Unconscious repetition violates your will to turn it first into mere passive feeling and then into an act of vileness. That is how you come not to think; and, where you cannot think even once, you can no longer repeat that to think —to repeat the non-existent is something that is beyond you, a human being.

No, you don't think because you are used to doing things the way they were done, including thinking or not, disregarding thinking. Where the "why things have been done this way" is "because this is the way things have been done". An authentic "just because" that does not matter where it comes from, whether from what in illo tempore a social group did, does and will do, or from what your parents taught you because they were taught that way by their parents: in both cases there is an utter disregard for whether what was taught is the best, the most, or whatever, beyond just because. It is an absolute disregard for thinking —has anyone ever thought about this way of doing things— a pathological disregard.

It is curious how the "just because", the "equis (just) because equis", that tautological answer that explains itself so much and so well to itself as so little and so badly to others, can be (though not simultaneously) both an explanatory aberration and the paradigm of the best explanation, if not the only explanation...