—“You always go in hard and soften up. It is fascinating to watch.”— Andy Curzon
Andy has been a partner in my investigations for years now. And while I wasn’t going to call this out, I think its important for newbies to understand why I am such a relentless critic of some of our most cherished ideas.
He means that the way I investigate the truth and value of an idea is by attempting to exhaustively falsify it.
And the veracity of my attacks on any given subject are continued evidence of my commitment to falsification. Meaning, that I do not treat anything as a truth candidate unless *I have no other alternative*.
There is a grain of truth in almost anything. But finding that potential needle in any given haystack generally requires burning the haystack to the ground so that only the metal remains.
Truth is unforgiving.
But once I have discovered that grain of truth – for example, the secret of western adaptive velocity, or the secret of christianity – or in the failure of the 20th century philosophers to discover operational epistemology – then I no longer need to attack the subject and can then be forgiving of our many mortal failures.
This is important since it takes a great deal of intellectual honesty to perform this kind of work – few of us are emotionally able to – and it takes a great deal of character and intellectual honest to follow such investigations. Investigations that dismantle your cherished values.
So if you are going to come along on this journey, it might help to understand, that there is an extremely important method to my antagonisms. But that once an investigation is done, we move on.