IS THE UTILITY OF TRUTHFULNESS WORTH THE COST? I was too optimistic. Enthralled by my discovery. Desperate to provide my people with a language of self defense.
People had used the supernatural frame for more than 1500 years, and the supernormal frame before that. Look at what it took to overthrow the church’s lies. It took the restoration of commercial civilization, so that we could sufficiently practice law that once again our contractualism dominated the thought of the classes that possessed any semblance of literacy and agency; and then it took the restoration of greek knowledge, the restoration of greek heroic literature, the restoration of mathematics, and its use on the heavens (scale) to falsify supernaturalism, and a tidal wave of discoveries from descartes’ rediscovery that the universe was open to our comprehension via instruments both physical and logical through darwin, watson, and crick.
And there are still those who deny Darwin, advance or follow conspiracy theory, informational pseudoscience, social pseudoscience, physical pseudoscience, pseudo-rationalism, supernaturalism, and the (nihilistic) occult and (optimistic) new age. And our academy, our public intellectuals, and our politicians are as guilty of pseudo-everything as the most vociferous proletarian adamant about the virtues of communism.
People can’t imagine a world where people speak truthfully because that is the norm, and the grammar of truthful speech is the norm, any more than they could imagine a world free of supernaturalism, any more than they could imagine a world free of shamanism. But we converted from a world of supernaturalism to a world of reason. Even if we were subsequently converted to pseudoscience.
We still make use of supernatural context, ratio-moral contexts, pseudoscientific contexts, and rarely, scientific contexts.
It’s not that a people need to be particularly intelligent in order to prosper, to defeat the dark forces of time, ignorance, and scarcity, and to transform the earth if not the universe into an eden. It’s that the formal, informal, informational, and normative institutions that supply the majority of *calculative* power (positive knowledge and negative reduction of ignorance) through the presence of *context*, and the removal of those who cannot use and therefore competitively survive (calculate) under that context that is the problem.
Truth is disruptive. Because lies create opportunities for discounts and rents. And man excels and identifying and exploiting opportunities for rents.
So, is it possible to require truthful speech via formal institutional means and from that requirement evolve contexts both informal, informational, and normative?
Of course it is. It may not seem so to those who don’t practice the discipline every day but it’s rather obvious to me and those others that do use it. I mean, just as we improve tools to improve precision, and improve logical tools (math, programming, simulations, general theories and laws) we improve various institutional and normative contexts – admittedly at a long lag, and sometimes generations. (Meanwhile others improve upon statements of ignorance, error, bias, and deceit which we must also defeat).
Is it desirable, preferable, utilitarian to demand truth?
If it will defeat Semiticism (judaism, islam)
If it will save your civilization?
if it will save mankind?
I think so.