Is Anyone Surprised?

So you might have heard, but Australia has a new prime minister.
Hey.
OI.
GET BACK HERE.

No, this is not a political blog. I'm actually about as non-political as a person could possibly be. Somewhere, sometime during the election weekend, a very confused government worker unfurled a ballot slip to find my carefully worded explanation on why a monarchy would be so much simpler.
So no. No politics. I do not care for them.

But the significant thing about the election was the landslide victory that firmly ousted the Labor Party and saw the rise of innumerable Facebook groups whining about Tony Abbott that will inevitably become entirely redundant within days (he won the election. He is Prime Minister now. Your vigorous clicking of the 'like' button won't change a thing. Kindly get over yourselves). It was almost a given that things would turn out the way they did. All the polls pointed to the same result. And so things happened as they were predicted. The Liberal Party won. Kevin gave a speech conceding defeat despite wearing an expression that suggested he'd just received definitive proof that both Santa Claus and unicorns were real (there is such thing as laying it on too thick, Mr Rudd).

In this and many other similar situations, it's often our hope that we'll be taken by surprise. Despite insurmountable odds, the underdog will pull through and score a shocking victory, cementing the event in the pages of history. We're certainly fed this image enough in fiction; our entire understanding of conflict is that the hero must be at a severe disadvantage, lest their story not be worth telling.

Remember that one film with the sports team? The one where they were the underdog, but they managed to set aside their differences and come from behind to score a tear-jerking, fist-pumping victory against a group of arrogant rivals?
Oh, right...that's every sport movie ever. People raved about Remember The Titans, otherwise known as 'that one film that you totally have to see' and 'omigosh you haven't seen Remember the Titans yet you TOTALLY have to see it because it will change your life', or sometimes 'you've seen it seven times well you need to watch it again because you REALLY get the message on the eighth watch'. I got a lot of recommendations for that one, is what I'm saying. But despite being based on real events, the stakes were wildly exaggerated. The real-life Titans breezed through their entire season and utterly destroyed the team they were facing in the finals. Which is nice for them, but not so much for Hollywood.
In real life, they were simply the better team, so they won. Barely scraping a dramatic victory outside of a movie means that you may not have been the best, but simply played better on the day.
NO, Hollywood barks, slamming its metaphorical fist against its metaphorical desk. DRAMA. EMOTION. INTERRACIAL COOPERATION. And that's what made them all the money. Well, that and Denzel Washington.

But real life is devoid of such surprises. It always is. Even fiction is predictable, in that we know that the good guys must triumph. Call me a cynical old man, but I believe that the world is a very, very predictable place. Elections, sporting matches and anything of the same ilk almost always have a transparent result. We even predict the weather with rapidly growing accuracy.
And sure, we'd love to see a blazing, glorious underdog triumph over adversity, but it never happens. The world's events play out as they should, because that is the way of things. If just once we were allowed to be surprised - genuinely surprised, in the sense that even the informed/educated were unable to predict- the world would cease to follow its own principles.

This realisation doesn't mean that my life has been deprived of all joy. After all, while every conclusion is a foregone conclusion, I can't see the future. I don't have all the answers, nor does anyone else, so surprises are still par for course in life.
It does mean that I don't hang out for the impossible, or waste time wishing for an unlikely resolution. So when everyone is reeling from an utterly expected development, I can simply shrug. Because despite being inhabited by unpredictable people, the world is still a predictable place, and that's something that physically cannot change.

Although I should mention that anyone who says they can predict Melbourne weather is lying. That is something no man shall ever accomplish.