—Should we be tolerant? Should we tolerate intolerance? If we don’t, does that make us intolerant?—
We can always justify truthful speech. Why and how can we justify tolerance of anything other than truthful speech? Why should we justify falsehood, libel, slander, and risk (yelling fire in a theater for example).
So, why did the founders of the constitution, attempting to transform anglo empirical law into a formal logic of social science, state that freedom of speech was permissible instead of that freedom of truthful speech was permissible, and that punishment for use of false speech was permissible? (Jefferson’s ambition was brilliant but incomplete.)
The problem we have faced through history, is that because our justificationary language was based upon the false application of internal axiomatic moral language, we confused moral and legal justification with theoretic and survivable truth. And only with contemporary science did we discover that we cannot justify theoretic argument no matter what we do – we can only perform due thorough due diligence against falsehood in theoretic systems, including all of ethics, economics, and politics.
We have just endured a century of pseudoscience, propaganda, and deceit, on a scale not seen since the use of writing and roads to spread the conflation of law and religion we call monotheism.
And it has cost us as much damage as that last deceit caused the roman empire, and western civilization, and the dark ages that followed, and all the painful reformations that we have born: anglo, french, german, and Jewish, Russian, Chinese, and now Muslim.
But why have we been so susceptible to the lies, deceits, pseudosciences, and falsehoods of the 19th and 20th centuries?
(media scale vs pulpit and book, and town crier and parchment scale)
And how can we perform due diligence and warranty against error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, and deceit?
WARRANTIES OF DUE DILIGENCE
Now, we can’t possibly cover this subject in detail as an interjection, but these are the six tests, the first three which are familiar to scientists, and the last possibly so.
1 – categorical consistency (identity)(non-conflation)
2 – logical consistency (internal consistency)(non-contradictory)
3 – empirical consistency (external correspondence)(repeatable)
4 – operational consistency (existential possibility)(possible)
5 – moral consistency (reciprocal voluntary transfers)(moral)
6 – scope consistency (full accounting, limits, and parsimony)
The first novel test is 4-Operational consistency, meaning that we write in the objective language of action, as do the physical scientists, so that each step we discuss is subjectively testable, and existentially possible, and does not conflate actor intent, observer interpretation, and subjective experience, but simply a record of the actions taken. (This technique can be found by researching e-prime.)
The second novel test objective morality under which we require that all transfers consist of productive, fully informed, voluntary exchange limited to externalities of the same criteria. This is definition of natural law: the law of non-imposition of costs that would cause resentment or retaliation which would disincentivize the process of cooperation, and limit the disproportionate returns of cooperation.
So now that we know how to demand the same warranty of truthfulness in speech that we do in advertising, marketing, production, distribution, and trade, why do we not demand implicitly warranty against harm, by the demand for due diligence in the qualification of political speech, just as we over the centuries have incrementally demanded due diligence and warranty of the fitness for service of goods, services, and all other products?
The only reason to do so is to continue to allow deceit. Or to fail to pay the cost of suppressing falsehood out of convenience.
Or worse, —“Why is it that people should be lied to and not taught Truth, or spoken to, but not spoken to truthfully, or speak, and not speak truthfully? To engage in human husbandry.”—David Mondrus
We can all tolerate uncomfortable truths. That the universe doesn’t care about us has been one discomfort after another. But why must we tolerate falsehoods, frauds, and deceits, pseudorationalism (obscurantism), and pseudoscience (deception) when we know how to demand due diligence against error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, overloading ( including pseudoscience), and deceit?
Why must we give voice to error bias, wishful thinking suggestion, obscurantism, and deceit? If so, why do products and services require regulation? Do we not live in an information economy now, where it is information that is our primary product and primary good of consumption?
THE BEAUTY OF IT ALL
Here is what I am certain of: that the same delta in human achievement that resulted from the greek development of reason, and the suppression of mysticism in the commons; and that same delta in human achievement that resulted from the English invention of empiricism, and the suppression of mysticism and rationalism in the commons, would be brought to mankind by the development of truthfulness as a suppression for error, propaganda, and deception in the commons.
And likewise I am quite certain that just as the mystics fought reason tooth and nail, and just as the religious and theological fought empiricism tooth and nail, and just as the spiritual fought darwin tooth and nail, and those who practice theology, rationalism, and pseudoscience, and justificationary deception will fight tooth and nail.
Because, each of these groups profits from their lies.
The next great leap in human civilization is not technology. it’s morality and law: truth telling. It will be as great a leap as science has been.
Now, imagine all the books written today, how many are false? Sure, it is true, that we need a different book to discuss the same idea, for every ten points of intelligence, from about 140 on down. But how many fundamental truths are there? (we have estimates in the range of a few hundred to less than two thousand). Why is it that people should be lied to and not taught truth, or spoken to, but not spoken to truthfully, or speak, and not speak truthfully?
Why do we have any more right to pollute the informational commons than we do the other commons of air, water, and land? Why can we cause informational harm out of ignorance, yet we are prohibited from economic and criminal harm out of ignorance or not?
What was the cost of literacy? What was the cost of creating rule of law? What was the cost of western high trust?
We must tolerate the truth, productive competition, the vagaries of the voluntary organization of reproduction we call the family, the vagaries of the voluntary organization of production distribution and trade we call the market economy, and the vagaries of competition for the production of commons that we call government. But there is no reason we must tolerate preventable harm by error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, and deception, any more than we have tolerated murder, violence, theft, fraud, conspiracy, conquest by conversion, conquest by immigration, and conquest by war.
So no. Tolerance is an excuse to conflate convenience (cost) with conviction, in exchange for false status signals, fraudulently obtained, by the pretense of charity versus the evasion of the tax necessary for the preservation of a high-trust society and its benefits.
The tolerant so to speak are just engaged in fraud and nothing more.
Curt Doolittle
The Philosophy of the West: Aristocracy
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine