Author: Curt Doolittle

CURSING, WE NEVER KNOW THE TRUTH, I CERTAINLY DON’T

F__K. Spinoza worked his whole – albeit short – life on two hundred parsimonious pages that still failed to drag western man from mysticism. Kant spent ten years on just his Critique, and created a rationalist version of christianity, rather than science. Marx worked like a dog his whole life only to figure out in the last year or two of his life that his entire project was a failure. Yet he lives on despite his own abandonment of his work. Popper worked his whole life and was, like most of his tribe, only half right, and tragically half wrong with the remainder. Hayek worked his whole life and while he managed to correctly identify that information was the model with which to study mankind – just like it is in physics.; and he managed to correctly identify the common law as the origin and preservation of liberty, he never did solve the problem of the social sciences.

I’m almost, but not yet done. And I don’t claim to be right. I claim only that I can find no substantive criticism that the arguments won’t survive; and I can find vast explanatory power informing us why enlightenment modernity failed; and that I can find vast explanatory power in creating institutional solutions to correct the failures of modernity; and I can find vast explanatory power in explaining the rapid rise of the west in both the ancient and modern worlds. I can only do this because the men in the prior generations only made it half way. I can see the same ideas forming around the world in others in my generation. Consilience does its job slowly.

We never know the truth. We just now we have greater power over the universe than we had with the previous version of it. But whittling away, generation by generation, century by century, we incrementally suppress parasitism, we incrementally pacify mankind, we incrementally pacify the planet, we incrementally eradicate ignorance, and we narrow the distance between our ignorance and truth.

it’s beautiful really.

If it weren’t for the numbskulls along way…