Category: Personal Reflections and Diary

THE COST OF TEACHING TRUTH

THE OBVERSE

The day before yesterday, I met a very interesting fellow, who though a decade older, and part of the 60/70s generation (Hippies) instead of the 70’s/80’s generation (Yuppies); also of English extraction (of the taller kind), obviously someone in the same iq range; he, like many musicians was a bohemian, author of some successful pop songs (many years ago) and who (uncomfortably for me) was happy switching between lyrics, music and language as means of communication. We spoke for hours. We are different but still kin. Same genes, different gene expression. I had to couch no idea, fear no rejection of it. Weigh no words. I felt safe, understood. I could chain together a long sequence of reasoning and he could effortlessly see the pattern, and pose questions.

But unlike my operationalism he, better than any woman I have met, could read people, sense them, intuit them on a scale that I feel for what we call ‘the economy’ or ‘pure abstractions’. I was envious – jealous – that like two beings we were divided: specialists in the conceptual division of knowledge and labor.

That is what the future of many looks like if we do not once again descend into dysgenia. He, and me, in one, without defect, as the population in a mean. What could we achieve with just 10,000 of us?

There are too few of us. We are spread out. But our utility to one another, and the relief we feel from the ease of one another’s company is what normal people experience every day – and we rarely do.

It is not true that genius competes. We love one another. Models of analogy that we construct differ within the same field can come into conflict. My work creates a universal language that renders models commensurable and without dependence upon analogy. And a universal language elminates competiion on frames of analogies, such that we compete on explanatory power and parsimony.

THE REVERSE

But what if artist’s laments are lies, rather than truths? Thefts rather than creations? If we deprive the religious of the illusion of the deity and mystery, can we also deprive the communist, the feminist, the postmodernist, the propagandist, the snake oil salesman, and the wishful thinkers of the release and relief that their fantasies provide? Do we personalize fantasies the way we have personalized religion – eradicating both from the public commons?

I can find no reason not to. I see no reason why we should or even can, limit private mysticism, self deception, obscurantism, and fantasy, while I see every reason to prohibit mysticism, obscurantism, deception and fantasy from the public forum.

We prohibit discourse on many topics which are taboo and justifiably so (child pornography). We have all but prohibited religion (christianity) from the public form (because it competes with the religion-of-state).

It is one thing to enforce for conformity (a positive constraint) and another to enforce the prohibition on error, bias, wishful thinking and deception from the informational commons.

Although it is somewhat unfortunate that we must teach everyone the logic of truth telling the same that we teach them reading, writing, mathematics, and the scientific method.

But just as the cost of teaching people the Three-R’s was expensive, the fruits were phenomenally beneficial for all. And teaching people the reading, writing, ‘rithmatic, rhetoric (truthful speech), and history as the evolution of cooperation and production, is an additional expense.

But like reading, speaking truth will have similar beneficial consequences.

(And it will destroy the lies, pseudosciences, and false religions forever.)

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine (L’viv, Ukraine)