Showing posts with label edu. Show all posts
Showing posts with label edu. Show all posts
The Power of Stupidity
It is entirely possible to perceive the stupidity of another person as a special form of intelligence, for a while. While intelligence expresses itself in understandable, logical behavior, which makes it measurable, calculable, and controllable, the conduct of the stupid is senseless and therefore cannot be predicted or evaluated.
Stupidity can be amazingly effective: a stupid person may, for example, appear poised and in command of the situation in the midst of danger, simply because he does not have the imagination to realize the threat. A stupid person can appear to be decisive, merely because his inability to think abstractly leaves him with only one choice in a given situation - an instinctive one, and therefore quite possibly the right one. Being
ignorant and therefore incapable of making comparisons, the stupid person is likely to be amazingly consistent in judging intellectual problems.
It may take months before one finally discovers the pattern behind the apparent lack of pattern, or system, in a stupid [...](individual)'s thinking, and is able to see behind the mask of self-assurance its true basis: an incapacity for abstract thought and a lack of sensitivity, founded on a lack of experience.
[Esther Vilar]
How scientists cheat
Models, Hypotheses and Logic in Science
[...]"the logic of science," said John Stuart Mill, "is also that of business and life," and science, said T. H. Huxley, is "organised common sense." Indeed, scientific philosophy does produce much the same conclusions as common sense.
Faced with unexplained observations, a scientist is advised to devise a model. In some fields this model can be a physical object but, on many other occasions, the word model is interchangeable with hypothesis. In the philosophy of science the two words have somewhat different meanings but here the distinction is unimportant. If a hypothesis successfully predicts the outcome of many critical experiments, then it is proved beyond reasonable doubt and has become a theory.
The term beyond reasonable doubt, again brings out the analogies between scientific and legal investigations. Scientific logic is the logic of investigation and decision making everywhere. No theory is ever actually proved, it is only not disproved while lawyers use the phrase "beyond reasonable doubt" to recognise that the guilt of a defendant is never proved with absolute certainty. Guilt is proved only beyond reasonable doubt.
Models
A model is a set of axioms or postulates which, it is thought, might fairly describe the nature of the phenomenon being studied. Model building is like using an intellectual version of a child's construction kit; scientists gather a set of axioms and concepts (the component parts of a hypothesis), assemble them into a model and compare its behaviour with that of nature. Models are valuable because they can be used to predict the outcome of experiments and scientists compare these predictions with observation. They may discard a new model immediately if it fails to predict existing results. More usefully, the predictions of a model will guide the experimenter's hand, enabling him to design investigations to differentiate two or more opposing ideas. The model(s) failing to predict the outcome of the test being discarded in favour of those that do.
Philosophers of science point out overarching or general models, called paradigms, ideas that are very wide-ranging and provide the framework for the formation of many more specific models. An example might be Newton's mechanics, a paradigm whose ideas are contained in lots of narrower models from fields as diverse as atomic theory and cosmology.
Classic Scientific Logic
There is no more to science than its method, and there is no more to its method than Popper has said. Hermann Bondi (Quoted by Magee (1973))
Model building is the classic description of scientific method expounded at length by Karl Popper in his famous books The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1968) and Conjectures and Refutations (1972). His approach, often called the hypothetico-deductive method, is accepted as a major feature of scientific logic. Popper is often thought to have regarded falsification as the centre of scientific logic but this is an error. To him falsification was extremely important and the elaboration of this principle was his own major contribution. However, he also held that all ideas, even his own, could and should be subject to reasoned, rational criticism. This principle of critical rationalism originated in ancient Greece, not with Popper, but to him it, not falsification, was the central scientific principle. Thus, it is necessary to be clear about the meaning of these two words, rationality and criticism.
The philosophy of rationality is the philosophy of the enlightenment. It originated much earlier but was elaborated in the 17th and 18th century by Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz and others in response to the growing success of science. Rationalism incorporates the principles of logic and certain ideas about the universe. It holds, for example, that there is only one single reality, hence that a person cannot simultaneously hold two contradictory beliefs about the world. It follows that to assert one theory is to simultaneously reject all competing theories. To assert otherwise is, in the strict meaning of the word, irrational. Further, a rational belief must be based on sufficient reason and that a rational believer should proffer reasons that are sufficient to justify holding his view. Rationality asserts that, to hold any belief, one must equally accept all the logical deductions that flow from it. The process of testing ideas by experiment depends on this principle, it leads to the conclusion that inconsistent experimental results undermine a theory.
Rationalism does contain different streams of thought, one split being into subjective and objective rationality. The latter is exemplified by Popper and asserts that the external world is real and that science seeks that reality. Objective rationalisty is the traditional system and remains the foundation of science, it reject all authorities other than observation and reason but does accept that no certain conclusions can ever be drawn. Subjective rationalists include pragmatists and naturalists, who note that lack of certainty and conclude that ultimate reality must reside in humans themselves - their motives, objectives and beliefs. The subjective/objective distinction was made by Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason (1947), who attacked subjective philosophies noting how they can rationalise any act, for example, "I have to consider my own best interests," or "I was just following orders". Thus subjective rationality can maintain bizarre social practices, such as witchcraft, or become the tool of authoritarian social attitudes. Such social impacts led Horkheimer to reject all subjective rationality, adding that the, "denunciation of what is currently called reason is the greatest service reason can render." Both in science and elsewhere, people who use the word rationality normally mean objective rationality.
Coming now to the meaning of criticise - to find fault with. This is word that does have quite negative overtones but finding fault is exactly what scientists are asked to do with theories - hypothesis testing is a negative logic. However, they are not asked to give just any criticism, it should be rational, reasoned criticism. The three practical characteristics, of such criticism were summed up by Bertrand Russell (1935, p66) in his description of reason, "in the first place it relies upon persuasion rather than force; in the second place it seeks to persuade by arguments which the man using them believes to be completely valid; and in the third place it uses observation .... as much as possible and intuition as little as possible." The first of these rules out the use of inquisitorial methods, the second rules out the use of propaganda and the third rules out appeals to the emotions or self-interest of the audience.
The implication of this is that critically rationalist debate requires certain behaviours from participants, generally that they be seriously seeking the truth. Thus, they must present all arguments they believe to be valid and may only present arguments they believe to be valid; both facts and opinions must be reported honestly. To enable criticism, such presentations must be open and available to all. A further facet of critical rationalism is, "the principle of sufficient reason", decisions are not made arbitrarily but must be founded on reasons that are stated and adequate to justify the verdict.
Critically rational debate in science, involves relevant experiment and the last idea surviving after a period of such debate becomes knowledge. We can never be sure that a piece of knowledge is true, because a better idea or contrary observation may come along later. Nevertheless such knowledge is the closest we can come to knowing external reality. Because doubt can always be expressed, it is often useful to think of knowledge as a contrast concept to a guess (Harré (1972)). Knowledge is the product of a rationally considered choice between alternative hypotheses, rather than choosing between them by guesswork. Thus, one may not randomly choose two alternatives from three, then conduct a rational debate to decide which of these two is correct. Such a mixing of rationality with irrationality is simply irrational.
These principles of critical rationalism generate the ethical imperatives of science. Popper suggested that they separate random ideas from knowledge, pseudoscience from science; modern scientists agree. It is evident that many human dialogues are not critically rationalist. In many situations the aim of participants in dialogue is to "win," whatever that may mean in their circumstances. Accordingly, in Popper's hands, critical rationalism became more than a scientific principle, he saw it as the alternative to all authoritarianism and it guided his political thinking. To him these principles underlay the freedom of speech and democracy upon which western society prides itself. Science is often held up as a bastion against authoritarianism because of this.
Today Popper's ideas are widely accepted. So much so that they are offered as advice to prospective research students. For example, Phillips & Pugh (1987), begin their advice to students by demolishing an older scientific philosophy, the idea that science starts with the gathering of disparate facts by entirely objective and dispassionate researchers:-
The myth of scientific method is that it is inductive: that the formulation of scientific theory starts with the basic raw evidence of the senses - simple unbiased unprejudiced observation. Out of these sensory data, commonly referred to as "facts" - generalizations will form. The myth is that from a disorderly array of factual information an orderly, relevant theory will somehow emerge. However the starting point of induction is an impossible one.
They point out that even scientists are human and begin with their own prejudices:-
There is no such thing as an unbiased observation. Every act of observation is a function of what we have seen or otherwise experienced in the past. All scientific work of an experimental or exploratory nature starts with some expectation about the outcome. This expectation is an hypothesis. They provide the initiative and incentive for the enquiry and influence the method. It is in the light of an expectation that some observations are held to be relevant and some irrelevant, that one methodology is chosen and others discarded, that some experiments are conducted and others are not. Where is your naive pure and objective researcher now?
Then, crucially, they go on - all scientists start with a hypothesis, a model, but they must never think they have proved it - they must try to disprove it :-
Hypotheses arise by guesswork, or by inspiration, but having been formulated they can and must be tested rigorously, using the appropriate methodology. If the predictions you make as a result of deducing certain consequences from your hypothesis are not shown to be correct then you must discard or modify your hypothesis. If the predictions turn out to be correct then your hypothesis has been supported and may be retained until such time as some further test shows it not to be correct. Once you have arrived at your hypothesis, which is a product of your imagination, you then proceed to a strictly logical and rigorous process, based upon deductive argument - hence the term "hypothetico-deductive".
Prejudices may govern how a hypothesis is created but it is illegitimate to display the same prejudice when comparing its predictions with data. A scientist should permit criticism of his ideas and accept disproofs, even of his own models, when they are there.
Probable and Improbable Hypotheses
Not all models are equal. Apart from well thought out concepts, a whole range of improbable or downright silly notions could be created to account for a set of observed results - Heath Robinson could have worked on scientific theories had he so chosen. How one model is chosen for test, and another deemed silly, is for the judgement of scientists but the verdict should not be random. Intuition, guesswork, prejudice, analogy or any other thought process may help conceive a model but, once devised, there is little reason for the judgement of its reasonableness to be personal and absolutely none for the interpretation to be inexplicable or secret. Scientists can articulate the reasons to consider one model, while dismissing another. There are analogous situations.
[...]Great scientists may be distinguished by their insight into how to eliminate unworkable models. This is scientific strategy but it is a phase of reasoning almost never recorded. During their training, scientists do not read books explaining the principles used to reduce the number of hypotheses to be considered. Even so, practising scientists must surely use such principles, possibly subconsciously. Analysis of this thinking is quite disparate. Most thought has been due to philosophers of science, with their demarcation criteria, and to sociologists of science, who simply ask the workers concerned. In both cases their studies are little read by practising scientists, some will be reviewed later. It is strange that this stage of reasoning is so little recorded. Not only is it perfectly possible to make a record but, at times, scientists have an evident duty to do so.
[...]Three Stages of Scientific Method
The hypothetico-deductive method can be seen as requiring three phases in a scientific thought. These phases are -
1. Laying down, or brainstorming, of all possible explanations of an observation. As many hypotheses as possible can be created here as this gives the best chance of the "correct" model being among those considered. The inclusion of incorrect models should be unimportant.
2. A judgement or strategy based screening of the various models to decide between those worthy of being tested and those that can be discarded on some general principle - some demarcation criterion. For this stage to work, it should be regarded as permissible to criticise the ideas put forward in stage 1. The models surviving this stage are likely to be those for which a reasonable … priori (or prima facie) case can be made.
3. Test of surviving models against empirical observation, either by reference to available data, or by designing new and critical experiments.
The three stages need not be executed consecutively. A new hypothesis may be advanced at any time, even after attempts have been made to test other hypotheses. No theory is ever proved. All theories are open to challenge and criticism may be advanced at any time.
Moreover, there is no reason why a new hypothesis should not be proposed by anybody, including people not deemed to be "expert". Non-experts, people without considerable training, would find it difficult to produce a theoretical novelty that could not be dismissed by reference to established experimental data or a demarcation criterion. Even so, there is no logical barrier to them doing so. The task of criticising theories seems easier than that of devising them and may well be within the capabilities of non-experts but, in practice, the difficulty of the task is not the only fence an amateur would have to jump. Even if his new theory, or his criticisms, met all scientific criteria, the non-scientist may not be listened to by professionals. Even well-established scientists find it difficult to get new theories heard against earlier alternatives.
Of the three stages, generally only the third is found in the scientific literature. The processes going on during the first two stages are rarely recorded. This is unfortunate as the agenda of science, its operational timetable, is laid down during those earlier periods. The exclusion of a concept from that agenda is just as important as the inclusion of another, and more capable of invalidating scientific conclusions. Exclusion, at any stage, is equivalent to saying a theory is wrong. No experiment can ever be done without some form of screening process having been performed but the scientific literature explains these stages only after the event or, more probably, does not explain them at all. When it does, the presentation is a sanitised representation of what may have been a messy process.
To put it another way, and more baldly, it is during those first two stages of a scientific programme that decisions are made as to how research funds will be allocated. In the real world, those decisions largely prejudge the outcome of scientific inquiry, yet there is little study of their formation and only the most opaque of records.
Gatekeepers and the Management of Science
Whatever system of philosophy is adopted, science poses certain unavoidable management problems. Its fields are highly specialised and proper, effective decisions depend upon access to technical knowhow. Such expertise is normally available only from the scientists themselves. To ensure such knowledge is available during administrative decisions, certain scientists, are appointed to decision making positions involving, for example, deciding what projects should receive research funds, which individuals will be appointed or promoted, or what papers will be published. The scientists chosen for these roles have often distinguished themselves in some way and are the elite of science. These gatekeepers play a key role in scientific management.
Scientific gatekeepers decide what is, or is not, science. Their corporate decisions define science in an administrative and practical way, marking out the area of human endeavour called science. Something in the nature of gatekeeping exists for all subcultures and the role is a key and often very powerful one. Most professional subcultures try to select gatekeepers so as to avoid their having any personal vested interest in the decisions they will take. However, science is different in this regard. Because of its highly technical nature, science selects its gatekeepers solely from the field being gatekept. As a result, virtually every gatekeeping decision in science is taken by an individual with a very definite self-interest in its outcome. Also, there is almost no definition of gatekeeping responsibilities and virtually no public accountability for the way gatekeepers discharge their roles. Scientific gatekeeping decisions are taken anonymously, even those affected are kept ignorant of the identity of the person who made it and the rationale he used.[...]
It is most disturbing. The gatekeepers of a field are its existing experts. They can exclude views, not merely because those views lack sense, but simply because they "disagree" with them, and in this context "disagree" can have a range of meaning running from "disagree," through "can't reply," to "I'm jealous." In "disagreeing", gatekeepers can and do turn their back on reasoned explanations. This administrative state of affairs flies in the face of Popperian logic, the principles of critical rationalism, openness and freedom of speech. In effect, science is subject to authoritarian government by gatekeepers.
Chronological Order Dictates Merit
It seems that what matters about a theory is not whether it is right or wrong but whether it was proposed first, second or third etc. (Who proposed it also matters, if the innovator is himself already a gatekeeper things are different.) The first theory in a field is advocated by its first workers. Those workers are taken to be experts. New hypotheses are assessed, anonymously and without unaccountability, by the same men who, now acting in the role of gatekeeper, have a vested interest - an interest in thwarting any ideas that threaten to replace those from which their own influence flows. Those "experts" have complete freedom to reply to the alternative in a rationalist way, simply ignore or patronise the upstart idea or perhaps even steal it. If a good argument is available to rebut an alternative theory, they will no doubt present it in their reply. But even if the newly developed theory is plainly superior, the "expert" gatekeeper is in no way obliged to accept or even consider it. New theories can simply be stifled by gatekeeper disinterest.[...]
Weakness of the Hypothetico-deductive Method
Popper's basic idea, of model (or hypothesis) falsification based on critical rationalism and its concomitant antiauthoritarianism, is the accepted base of scientific logic. It is a testing protocol linking scientific ideas to experimental reality. This link, connecting theory, through experiment, to reality, is the reason for the great success of science as a philosophy but it is not a perfect link - it has weaknesses. The main problem is in the early phases of the process. Firstly, science makes almost no record of how it decides which models or theories it should test. Secondly, and compounding the first problem, in the real world scientific judgement is clouded by the personal subjectivities and deviations of scientists themselves. Thus it is that the initial development and selection of models to be tested, a process not necessarily linked to experiment at all, that remains the major logical difficulty inherent in the paradigm of falsification.
Robert K. Merton enunciated principles of scientific ethics which included Universalism, the belief that ideas must be considered without regard for their origins or who proposed them and this is implicit in Popper's logic. However, that cannot mean all theories must be translated into experiment, that would be impractical. To put it baldly, again, the problem is how to decide which research projects to fund. Especially, how this is decided when sociological observation indicates that the advice given by scientists themselves is hampered by personal subjectivities and deviations from logic. It is necessary to have some ground, some demarcation criterion, to decide before experiment, which theories are most likely to be correct.
In law, similar problems can arise. On the basis of the law and the evidence before him, a judge must often try a case but be unsure of the right decision. If the case is a criminal case, the benefit of this doubt will go to the defendant. In a civil action a judge may be forced to take some kind of practical line. He does not have the luxury of scratching his head for ever, he must decide on the balance of probability. He will need to find a rationale, even if it is not perfectly logical. This may lead the judge to error but it is unlikely it will lead him to fraud - he must give an open account of his judgement and explain the case and how it relates to the law. If he gets these things wrong his judgement is subject to appeal. What is more, a judge should never try a case in which there was any hint of a personal interest.
In one role, a scientist can scratch his head and vacillate between two theories for ever, or stick to a wrong theory purely to save face. There will always be some argument to put. Set against a great mass of often conflicting experimental data, no opposing scientific theory will ever be completely perfect. But gatekeepers are the judges of science and for scientists in this things are different, at the end of the day they must decide. When they go home at night, they must have made funding decisions, or job appointment decisions, or publication decisions. They must decide - whether or not they are sure. A rationale must be found even if it is not perfectly logical. However, although he is forming a judgement, the gatekeeper is not in nearly the same position as a judge. He is not subject to the discipline of explaining his decisions or recounting any scientific law or principle. What is more, he would not be deciding the issue at all unless he had a vested interest in its outcome. For the gatekeeper the temptation to follow the easy route of his interests or relativism must be very real.
In these circumstances problems arise, more for everyone else than for the gatekeeper. There are logical approaches, demarcation criteria, for selecting without experiment those theories most likely to be valid and therefore to reward funding. But how can anyone be sure the gatekeeper follows them? The observer is in a predicament. Strictly, the problem should be addressed by the administrators of science but, [...] they are content. That is not surprising - they are the gatekeepers.
Reducing the number of models - Demarcation Criteria
We will now turn to the question of which hypotheses are scientific. How to choose from a range of possibilities those hypotheses that are worthy of attention and deserve to be pursued. Philosophers of science address this problem by laying down demarcation criteria. A new theory should then be tested against the chosen criterion. Those ideas which satisfy the demarcation criteria would be most likely to be productive and most attention would be payed to them. The following sections present a series of demarcation criteria, though it may not be complete.
Popper
The main demarcation criterion associated with Popper is falsifiability - in order to be scientific, a hypothesis should be falsifiable - it should make predictions that can be tested by observation or experiment. By tested, Popper meant some of its predictions must be such that, at least in principle, the contrary could be observed. This was his primary demarcation criterion and was seen by him as very important. On this basis, for example, he criticised the various schools of psychiatric thought because each could accommodate all observations. As a result the ideas did not compete with one another and attempts to distinguish them could not be informative. This test separates the hypotheses inherent in an act of faith - religion for example - from a scientific hypothesis. The statement, "God created the heavens and the earth," cannot be contradicted by observation. Therefore, Popper would not see it as a scientific hypothesis, whether or not it is believed true.
The idea is that only models which can, in principle, be falsified are scientific - others need not be considered. It is useful to view this assertion from a different perspective. Popper is saying that, to be meaningful, a scientific theory must deny something. The idea must prohibit some observations from being made; this is extremely important, because Popper's logic is purely negative, it asserts that the actual meaning of a theory lies not in what it asserts about the universe but what it denies. Some philosophers go further, arguing that any statement has meaning only in what it denies. Thus, even a sentence as simple as, "this paper is white," actually means, "this paper is not, not white." I.e. it is not green, not blue etc.
Falsifiability is the first example of a strategy, or general principle, for reducing the number of models. It is probably the most widely discussed demarcation criterion and shows at once that asserting a scientific theory is equivalent to denying alternatives.
Popper listed two other criteria besides falsifiability. Firstly, a good, new theory should, "proceed from some simple, new, and powerful unifying idea," (Conjectures and Refutations). It should, in principle, be able to unify a body of knowledge that would otherwise be a set of disparate facts. Secondly, Popper held that it should pass some tests. A good new theory should make at least one successful prediction not apparent from existing theory. This seems rather restrictive but is not as bad as sounds. Popper would not have demanded that a theoretical astronomer build a radio telescope before publishing a new theory. Predictions explaining data within existing knowledge do meet this criterion.[...]
2.16 Metaphysical Logic and Scientific Logic
It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true. (Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays)
The distinction between science and metaphysics is significant because there seems to be a significant difference between the logics of metaphysics and science. Science seeks to disprove a hypothesis and a persistent failure to do so leads to its acceptance. This is the negative logic of falsification. Metaphysics is not quite like this; before the existence of a postulated entity should be accepted, there needs to be positive reason to require the existence in question. For example, the postulate of life on Mars is a postulate of existence. It may be believed or not but well-justified belief would require positive supportive evidence, such as Martian roses.
In laying down theories, scientists do not normally distinguish science from metaphysics. That may be unfortunate, much of the philosophical disputation between confirmation and elimination of theories might be removed if this were done. Metaphysical logic seems to be largely the positive logic of confirmation, while scientific logic seems largely the negative logic of falsification.
Popper's hypothetico-deductive model applies to the scientific parts of theories but not so obviously to their metaphysical elements. It is generally a very difficult, or even universally impossible, task to disprove a metaphysical postulate. Even though it seems very unlikely, it would be difficult to actually prove that there is no life on the moon.
However, it is only when a metaphysical idea has supportive evidence that it becomes important. As an example, consider the atomic theory of matter. As every schoolboy knows, the idea of atoms was originally advanced by the Greeks but in this form the idea was metaphysical speculation unsupported by evidence. The idea of atoms was merely a conjecture, unproven, unlinked to any body of experimental evidence, and irrelevant to any possible course of action. Agnosticism was a rational view of the debate about atoms until Dalton's chemical laws, based as they were on observation, began to require them for chemical interpretations. The observations that positively required atoms also made them relevant, and they began to influence men's actions. In the twentieth century, photographs of atoms have been obtained, and disbelief has become irrational.
In logic, then, you just cannot win. Theories need positive evidence for the entities whose existence they postulate. Then they need negative disproof of competing theories.[...]
Occam's Razor - the Coherence Criterion
A principle stated in correspondence by Dr. John Maddox, as Editor-in-Chief of Nature is that a hypothesis should be "grounded on previous understanding or observation." To take his example, in the nineteenth century there might have been competing hypotheses about the make up of the moon. One school of thought arguing the moon was made of rock, another school advancing the view that it was green cheese. As he says, even without experiment intelligent scientists would not have considered the green cheese hypothesis, because it was founded upon no present knowledge or observation. There are other, rather trite, reasons to reject the green cheese model. Cheese is a dairy product made by men from milk, in turn produced by lactating mammals. The green cheese hypothesis implies that men and other mammals are at large within the solar system, giving the green cheese hypothesis some very complex, improbable and unsupported implications.
The existence of such complex ramifications is a general reason for rejecting, or at least downgrading, a hypothesis without experiment. All this boils down to Occam's razor - hypotheses involving the least possible departure from the existing body of knowledge are most likely to be correct. Hypotheses that pick up well-established ideas from related areas inherit much of their supportive evidence, much as an organism inherits many characteristics from its evolutionary forebears.
Occam's razor is related to the idea of coherence with existing knowledge. To understand coherence one may think of all knowledge as being cut into a large number of small pieces much like a jigsaw puzzle. To reassemble the picture we must examine a piece to see if the pattern on it fits in with, or coheres with, the pattern on those pieces we have already assembled in that area. For a new piece of knowledge fits comfortably in place, the shape of knowledge painted onto it should form a continuous pattern with, or cohere with, surrounding pieces.
A new claim to knowledge or a hypothesis which fails to cohere with surrounding knowledge is an extraordinary claim. Its acceptance would demand the revision of knowledge within those surrounding areas and, consequently, its acceptance demands extraordinary evidence.
Coherence, or Occam's razor, is a well known and important principle but two important caveats should be stated. Firstly, the coherence criterion must be used with care and moderation, applied rigidly it produces closed systems of thought. The pieces of the jigsaw already assembled may actually be in the wrong places. Secondly, the existing body of knowledge means exactly what it says and knowledge is well-founded belief (Popper). The existing body of knowledge does not mean the existing body of hypotheses. To be of any real value, a new idea must compete with existing suppositions used to explain the same data set. It is diametrically wrong to demand of a new hypothesis that it be consistent with the ideas it sets out to replace.
Hypothesis Testing and Probability
Many years before Popper, Bayes investigated the branch of mathematics applied to formal hypothesis evaluation and now known as Bayesian statistics. A scientific investigation links experimental results with the probability assignments attached to particular hypotheses. Before any experimental test is performed initial probabilities (known as antecedent probabilities) must be assigned to the various hypotheses. As experimental data become available these antecedent probabilities are adjusted up or down depending on whether the observations support or do not support the corresponding hypothesis. The theorem used to adjust the probabilities is known as Bayes' theorem. Some fields can use the procedure quite formally. For example, in medical diagnostics, antecedent probabilities reflect the incidence of a disease in the population. In practical science Bayes' theorem has little formal use because of the general difficulty giving objective numerical values to the antecedent probabilities. Accordingly, the theorem is neither stated nor used here. Even so, scientists must intuitively use Bayes' theorem, assigning antecedent probabilities by judgement.
Mathematicians have investigated the fallacies arising in Bayesian statistics, some of which help to clarify points made earlier. A hypothesis is meaningful only if it partitions the possibility space; for example, the hypotheses that a dice will fall as a five or as an odd number are both meaningful in that they can both be wrong - it may fall as a four. On the other hand, the hypothesis that the dice will fall with a number uppermost is not meaningful because all possible outcomes are numbers - the hypothesis cannot be falsified because it fails to partition the possibility space. This failure is what philosophers of science mean when a hypothesis is described as vacuous.
A hypothesis may be "academic" (in a pejorative sense); whether it be true or not will make no difference to actions or beliefs flowing from the statistical analysis. The distinction is important for doctors making a diagnosis - only if two diseases require different treatment, is the physician concerned to know which his patient suffers from. Returning to the example of the dice, whether it falls as a five or not will affect my actions only if I am playing snakes and ladders or have some other link to this test. For most people, the outcome of throwing dice is academic and uninteresting. In science, this pejorative form of the word academic means that whether a hypothesis is true will have no effect on perceptions of the world or how people act.
Finally, note again that a hypothesis set should be well chosen and, without overlap, cover all possible explanations. It is hard, in science, to prove that a hypothesis set does entirely cover the possibility space. The proper response to this problem is to contemplate the possibility that all the considered hypotheses are wrong. It remains very wrong to use a hypothesis set that is known not cover the possibility space.
Assessment of Antecedent Probabilities
Much of the intuitive Bayesian statistics used by practising scientists consists of the assignment of antecedent probabilities to any suggested hypotheses. This is the statistical equivalent of initial hypothesis screening [...]. If a hypothesis fails to cohere with existing knowledge, it is right to assign it a low antecedent probability. Only very clear evidence supporting it, and contradicting more cohering hypotheses, will bring its probability assignment up to a point where it would be accepted.
Invalid criteria such as relativism and self-interest will intrude on the intuitive assignment of antecedent probabilities. They will lead to the assignment of a low antecedent probability to a correct hypothesis and vice versa. However, unless the correct theory is actually assigned an antecedent probability of zero, this should only slow things down. The objective application of Bayes' theorem would steadily improve the probability assigned to the correct hypothesis as experimental data became available. (In Bayesian statistics, antecedent probabilities can, in principle, be assigned randomly but still ultimately produce good knowledge. This may be how some sciences arose from areas we would today classify as mythology. Alchemy for example led to chemistry and astrology to astronomy.) Only if the correct hypothesis is dismissed entirely will Bayesian statistics fail. If the antecedent probability assigned to a correct hypothesis is zero, Bayes' theorem will keep the probability at zero no matter what the outcome of experiment and the remaining ideas will become a closed system of thought. This seems to be true of the intuitive Bayesian scientist, just as it is of the formal statistical process.
Intuitive Bayesian statistics are applied both by individuals and by the community of scientists. Both levels will assign intuitive antecedent probabilities to hypotheses and both, being human, will err. [...] In general, the scientific community is too willing both to assign a probability of zero to dissenting ideas and to assign a probability of one its own beliefs.
The Origins of Uncertainty
It is universally accepted, and implied by use of probability theory in hypothesis testing, that no scientific theory can be known, with total certainty, to be true. Scientific certainty is lost in two general ways - uncertainty in the outcome of experiments and uncertainty in their interpretation. Our certainty in the outcome of experiments is greatly increased by care in its execution and repetition by other groups or on analogous systems. Unfortunately, these hardly improve our confidence in the interpretation of the results.
Clearly repeat experiments and studies on related systems has a role in ensuring validity of results but there are also structural and social reasons for such studies. If an experiment is cheap, quick and already within the laboratory's range, it is quite easy to perform a series of studies around a theme. Moreover, results that accord with earlier data are theoretically uncontroversial and, if the field already understands a technique, other workers are less likely to obstruct publication by raising queries about the validity of the observations. Thus, a large body of publication can quickly accumulate that hinges round one basic experiment.
For purposes of interpretation it is important to realise that, for all its size, that body of papers only amounts to one experiment. Failing to recognise this is to act like the man Wittgenstein mentions in Philosophical Investigations, who purchases several copies of the morning paper to reassure himself that what he reads there is true. Committing this fallacy is both a common individual fault and also structurally embedded in modern scientific administration. Of course, scientists do not buy many copies of their morning paper, but they do publish many copies of the same, or very similar, experiment; then they point to the "mountain of evidence" supporting their ideas.
Experiments report reality much as newspapers report news. The hypothesis used to explain their outcome is the impression of reality they give. Like a newspaper article, the scientific observations may be clear and accurate, or misleading and inaccurate. Because observations may be inaccurate, they need to be reported in a way that enables other workers to replicate them. Because the observation may be misleading, even though accurate, the generated hypothesis should be confirmed by data which is as unrelated to the original observations as possible. Reverting to Wittgenstein's analogy, his man would have been well advised to read another newspaper, one which employed a different reporter who, himself, employed different sources for the news he reported.
This point has been made by many philosophers of science; for example, in the nineteenth century, Whewell, adopted it as a criterion of induction, referring to it as the consilience of hypotheses. Although we no longer think there is a logic of induction, his point remains valid as a means of increasing our confidence in a theory. On the same lines, Popper asserted that a hypothesis supported by data of two or more distinctly different types should be preferred to an alternative able to explain only a narrow domain of data.
In summary, repetition offers confidence that the published data are accurate but those scientists who believe that repetition of data can support ideas are buying too many copies of the morning paper. No matter how many times an experiment, or its close siblings, are repeated - one hundred times or one thousand papers - repetition adds no assurance that any particular interpretation of that result into a hypothesis is valid. If another idea will explain the data from one such experiment, then it will equally apply to any number of repetitions. Assurance of interpretation can come only by comparing the success of competing hypotheses in interpreting data from disparate areas. The more dissimilar are the sources of data used the better, providing only that they do fall within the range of application of the hypotheses in question. Modern scientific administrations fail to recognise this fallacy, a failure linked closely to the procedures they use for quality assessment.
Quality Assessment - Peer Review and Citation Analysis
Science managers and gatekeepers base many policies and decisions on quality assessments. Consequently, how quality is defined, maintained and assessed, is a pivotal issue for modern science - it is also one of the few areas in which scientific practice overlaps with scientific philosophy. In principle assessment of quality in research programmes should include a rational assignment of the antecedent probability of the underlying ideas. In practice, however, the methods adopted simply abandon rationality and one of them jumps head first into Wittgenstein's fallacy, buying as many copies of the morning paper as leaders in a field might find convenient. Assessments are made at several levels, for example of :-
* Research projects before they are funded.
* The value of work before it is published in the scientific literature.
* The worth of researchers before they are appointed to posts.
These prospective evaluations are usually made by peer review. Referees, anonymous experts in the field, are selected by scientific authorities. The expert will then write a report, which is taken to be an objective evaluation of the work in question, but that report is unlikely to make any attempt at explanation and it may not be seen by the scientist concerned, who will have little or no opportunity to reply if he does see it. Besides these initial screening steps, post hoc assessments are also made of :-
* The "success" of published articles in terms of their scientific impact when set against competing articles.
* The "success" of published scientists in terms of their scientific impact when set against competing workers.
* The "status" of institutions and journals.
Sometimes such assessments are made by committees of experts but one of the most important tools used for the appraisal is citation analysis, a tool developed over the past twenty to thirty years.
A scientific paper does not stand alone, it builds on what has gone before, using other workers ideas, techniques and results. To place the work in context, the scientific article ends with a list of relevant publications showing where the ideas it used came from[...]. These are citations and they interested an American named Eugene Garfield. His Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) notes every scientific paper published and, from their citation lists, constructs a computer database, called the Science Citations Index (SCI). Scientists can use the SCI to find all papers citing any earlier article. It has proved to be a very valuable research tool, enabling workers to research a topic forward through the literature, whereas traditional abstracting media permitted only a backwards search.
The SCI is also used in quality assessments. Using it, one can easily determine how often, or whether, a paper is cited by subsequent publications, a process called citation analysis. The argument is that rarely-cited studies cannot have been very important. In making this count, the ISI itself carefully avoids the term "quality", preferring to call the resulting measure the "impact" of a paper, but scientific institutions do take this impact as a measure of quality. Journals and institutions can also be ranked according to the impact of articles published during a given period. Journals even tout their impact rating when advertising to libraries for sales or soliciting the scientific community for new papers.
This way of assessing quality means that the citation practices of authors influence the assessment of the work done by their contemporaries and colleagues. If a scientific theory is not mentioned by establishment figures, and the articles which propose it are not cited by them, the theory is automatically assessed as of low quality, even if no reason for disregarding it has been given. By contrast, if scientists go to great lengths to rebut an incorrect theory, that theory will be assessed as being of high quality, even if most observers regarded the theory as absurd from the outset.
Whatever its value as a management tool, quality assessment by citation analysis is clearly prone to Wittgenstein's fallacy. Moreover, its practical implications for the assessment of theories are clear. Under that process, ignoring, or not citing, a theory is the same as rejecting it. For their part, scientists are well aware of the quality assessment procedures used and the implications of their actions. When a scientist disregards a theory, he knows the result this will have for its assessment and presumably intends that outcome. In short, a scientist who chooses to ignore a theory, is broadcasting a message about that theory - namely that he rejects the theory as of low quality. The message thus broadcast may be implicit but the scientist knows it is sent, he knows who receives it and he knows how they will interpret and act upon it.
Both citation analysis and peer review are highly questionable as methods of quality assessment and amount to little more than statements of establishment opinion[...].
© Copyright John A Hewitt.
[Source: John A Hewitt - A Habit of Lies - How Scientists Cheat : http://freespace.virgin.net/john.hewitt1/pg_ch02.htm]
[...]"the logic of science," said John Stuart Mill, "is also that of business and life," and science, said T. H. Huxley, is "organised common sense." Indeed, scientific philosophy does produce much the same conclusions as common sense.
Faced with unexplained observations, a scientist is advised to devise a model. In some fields this model can be a physical object but, on many other occasions, the word model is interchangeable with hypothesis. In the philosophy of science the two words have somewhat different meanings but here the distinction is unimportant. If a hypothesis successfully predicts the outcome of many critical experiments, then it is proved beyond reasonable doubt and has become a theory.
The term beyond reasonable doubt, again brings out the analogies between scientific and legal investigations. Scientific logic is the logic of investigation and decision making everywhere. No theory is ever actually proved, it is only not disproved while lawyers use the phrase "beyond reasonable doubt" to recognise that the guilt of a defendant is never proved with absolute certainty. Guilt is proved only beyond reasonable doubt.
Models
A model is a set of axioms or postulates which, it is thought, might fairly describe the nature of the phenomenon being studied. Model building is like using an intellectual version of a child's construction kit; scientists gather a set of axioms and concepts (the component parts of a hypothesis), assemble them into a model and compare its behaviour with that of nature. Models are valuable because they can be used to predict the outcome of experiments and scientists compare these predictions with observation. They may discard a new model immediately if it fails to predict existing results. More usefully, the predictions of a model will guide the experimenter's hand, enabling him to design investigations to differentiate two or more opposing ideas. The model(s) failing to predict the outcome of the test being discarded in favour of those that do.
Philosophers of science point out overarching or general models, called paradigms, ideas that are very wide-ranging and provide the framework for the formation of many more specific models. An example might be Newton's mechanics, a paradigm whose ideas are contained in lots of narrower models from fields as diverse as atomic theory and cosmology.
Classic Scientific Logic
There is no more to science than its method, and there is no more to its method than Popper has said. Hermann Bondi (Quoted by Magee (1973))
Model building is the classic description of scientific method expounded at length by Karl Popper in his famous books The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1968) and Conjectures and Refutations (1972). His approach, often called the hypothetico-deductive method, is accepted as a major feature of scientific logic. Popper is often thought to have regarded falsification as the centre of scientific logic but this is an error. To him falsification was extremely important and the elaboration of this principle was his own major contribution. However, he also held that all ideas, even his own, could and should be subject to reasoned, rational criticism. This principle of critical rationalism originated in ancient Greece, not with Popper, but to him it, not falsification, was the central scientific principle. Thus, it is necessary to be clear about the meaning of these two words, rationality and criticism.
The philosophy of rationality is the philosophy of the enlightenment. It originated much earlier but was elaborated in the 17th and 18th century by Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz and others in response to the growing success of science. Rationalism incorporates the principles of logic and certain ideas about the universe. It holds, for example, that there is only one single reality, hence that a person cannot simultaneously hold two contradictory beliefs about the world. It follows that to assert one theory is to simultaneously reject all competing theories. To assert otherwise is, in the strict meaning of the word, irrational. Further, a rational belief must be based on sufficient reason and that a rational believer should proffer reasons that are sufficient to justify holding his view. Rationality asserts that, to hold any belief, one must equally accept all the logical deductions that flow from it. The process of testing ideas by experiment depends on this principle, it leads to the conclusion that inconsistent experimental results undermine a theory.
Rationalism does contain different streams of thought, one split being into subjective and objective rationality. The latter is exemplified by Popper and asserts that the external world is real and that science seeks that reality. Objective rationalisty is the traditional system and remains the foundation of science, it reject all authorities other than observation and reason but does accept that no certain conclusions can ever be drawn. Subjective rationalists include pragmatists and naturalists, who note that lack of certainty and conclude that ultimate reality must reside in humans themselves - their motives, objectives and beliefs. The subjective/objective distinction was made by Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason (1947), who attacked subjective philosophies noting how they can rationalise any act, for example, "I have to consider my own best interests," or "I was just following orders". Thus subjective rationality can maintain bizarre social practices, such as witchcraft, or become the tool of authoritarian social attitudes. Such social impacts led Horkheimer to reject all subjective rationality, adding that the, "denunciation of what is currently called reason is the greatest service reason can render." Both in science and elsewhere, people who use the word rationality normally mean objective rationality.
Coming now to the meaning of criticise - to find fault with. This is word that does have quite negative overtones but finding fault is exactly what scientists are asked to do with theories - hypothesis testing is a negative logic. However, they are not asked to give just any criticism, it should be rational, reasoned criticism. The three practical characteristics, of such criticism were summed up by Bertrand Russell (1935, p66) in his description of reason, "in the first place it relies upon persuasion rather than force; in the second place it seeks to persuade by arguments which the man using them believes to be completely valid; and in the third place it uses observation .... as much as possible and intuition as little as possible." The first of these rules out the use of inquisitorial methods, the second rules out the use of propaganda and the third rules out appeals to the emotions or self-interest of the audience.
The implication of this is that critically rationalist debate requires certain behaviours from participants, generally that they be seriously seeking the truth. Thus, they must present all arguments they believe to be valid and may only present arguments they believe to be valid; both facts and opinions must be reported honestly. To enable criticism, such presentations must be open and available to all. A further facet of critical rationalism is, "the principle of sufficient reason", decisions are not made arbitrarily but must be founded on reasons that are stated and adequate to justify the verdict.
Critically rational debate in science, involves relevant experiment and the last idea surviving after a period of such debate becomes knowledge. We can never be sure that a piece of knowledge is true, because a better idea or contrary observation may come along later. Nevertheless such knowledge is the closest we can come to knowing external reality. Because doubt can always be expressed, it is often useful to think of knowledge as a contrast concept to a guess (Harré (1972)). Knowledge is the product of a rationally considered choice between alternative hypotheses, rather than choosing between them by guesswork. Thus, one may not randomly choose two alternatives from three, then conduct a rational debate to decide which of these two is correct. Such a mixing of rationality with irrationality is simply irrational.
These principles of critical rationalism generate the ethical imperatives of science. Popper suggested that they separate random ideas from knowledge, pseudoscience from science; modern scientists agree. It is evident that many human dialogues are not critically rationalist. In many situations the aim of participants in dialogue is to "win," whatever that may mean in their circumstances. Accordingly, in Popper's hands, critical rationalism became more than a scientific principle, he saw it as the alternative to all authoritarianism and it guided his political thinking. To him these principles underlay the freedom of speech and democracy upon which western society prides itself. Science is often held up as a bastion against authoritarianism because of this.
Today Popper's ideas are widely accepted. So much so that they are offered as advice to prospective research students. For example, Phillips & Pugh (1987), begin their advice to students by demolishing an older scientific philosophy, the idea that science starts with the gathering of disparate facts by entirely objective and dispassionate researchers:-
The myth of scientific method is that it is inductive: that the formulation of scientific theory starts with the basic raw evidence of the senses - simple unbiased unprejudiced observation. Out of these sensory data, commonly referred to as "facts" - generalizations will form. The myth is that from a disorderly array of factual information an orderly, relevant theory will somehow emerge. However the starting point of induction is an impossible one.
They point out that even scientists are human and begin with their own prejudices:-
There is no such thing as an unbiased observation. Every act of observation is a function of what we have seen or otherwise experienced in the past. All scientific work of an experimental or exploratory nature starts with some expectation about the outcome. This expectation is an hypothesis. They provide the initiative and incentive for the enquiry and influence the method. It is in the light of an expectation that some observations are held to be relevant and some irrelevant, that one methodology is chosen and others discarded, that some experiments are conducted and others are not. Where is your naive pure and objective researcher now?
Then, crucially, they go on - all scientists start with a hypothesis, a model, but they must never think they have proved it - they must try to disprove it :-
Hypotheses arise by guesswork, or by inspiration, but having been formulated they can and must be tested rigorously, using the appropriate methodology. If the predictions you make as a result of deducing certain consequences from your hypothesis are not shown to be correct then you must discard or modify your hypothesis. If the predictions turn out to be correct then your hypothesis has been supported and may be retained until such time as some further test shows it not to be correct. Once you have arrived at your hypothesis, which is a product of your imagination, you then proceed to a strictly logical and rigorous process, based upon deductive argument - hence the term "hypothetico-deductive".
Prejudices may govern how a hypothesis is created but it is illegitimate to display the same prejudice when comparing its predictions with data. A scientist should permit criticism of his ideas and accept disproofs, even of his own models, when they are there.
Probable and Improbable Hypotheses
Not all models are equal. Apart from well thought out concepts, a whole range of improbable or downright silly notions could be created to account for a set of observed results - Heath Robinson could have worked on scientific theories had he so chosen. How one model is chosen for test, and another deemed silly, is for the judgement of scientists but the verdict should not be random. Intuition, guesswork, prejudice, analogy or any other thought process may help conceive a model but, once devised, there is little reason for the judgement of its reasonableness to be personal and absolutely none for the interpretation to be inexplicable or secret. Scientists can articulate the reasons to consider one model, while dismissing another. There are analogous situations.
[...]Great scientists may be distinguished by their insight into how to eliminate unworkable models. This is scientific strategy but it is a phase of reasoning almost never recorded. During their training, scientists do not read books explaining the principles used to reduce the number of hypotheses to be considered. Even so, practising scientists must surely use such principles, possibly subconsciously. Analysis of this thinking is quite disparate. Most thought has been due to philosophers of science, with their demarcation criteria, and to sociologists of science, who simply ask the workers concerned. In both cases their studies are little read by practising scientists, some will be reviewed later. It is strange that this stage of reasoning is so little recorded. Not only is it perfectly possible to make a record but, at times, scientists have an evident duty to do so.
[...]Three Stages of Scientific Method
The hypothetico-deductive method can be seen as requiring three phases in a scientific thought. These phases are -
1. Laying down, or brainstorming, of all possible explanations of an observation. As many hypotheses as possible can be created here as this gives the best chance of the "correct" model being among those considered. The inclusion of incorrect models should be unimportant.
2. A judgement or strategy based screening of the various models to decide between those worthy of being tested and those that can be discarded on some general principle - some demarcation criterion. For this stage to work, it should be regarded as permissible to criticise the ideas put forward in stage 1. The models surviving this stage are likely to be those for which a reasonable … priori (or prima facie) case can be made.
3. Test of surviving models against empirical observation, either by reference to available data, or by designing new and critical experiments.
The three stages need not be executed consecutively. A new hypothesis may be advanced at any time, even after attempts have been made to test other hypotheses. No theory is ever proved. All theories are open to challenge and criticism may be advanced at any time.
Moreover, there is no reason why a new hypothesis should not be proposed by anybody, including people not deemed to be "expert". Non-experts, people without considerable training, would find it difficult to produce a theoretical novelty that could not be dismissed by reference to established experimental data or a demarcation criterion. Even so, there is no logical barrier to them doing so. The task of criticising theories seems easier than that of devising them and may well be within the capabilities of non-experts but, in practice, the difficulty of the task is not the only fence an amateur would have to jump. Even if his new theory, or his criticisms, met all scientific criteria, the non-scientist may not be listened to by professionals. Even well-established scientists find it difficult to get new theories heard against earlier alternatives.
Of the three stages, generally only the third is found in the scientific literature. The processes going on during the first two stages are rarely recorded. This is unfortunate as the agenda of science, its operational timetable, is laid down during those earlier periods. The exclusion of a concept from that agenda is just as important as the inclusion of another, and more capable of invalidating scientific conclusions. Exclusion, at any stage, is equivalent to saying a theory is wrong. No experiment can ever be done without some form of screening process having been performed but the scientific literature explains these stages only after the event or, more probably, does not explain them at all. When it does, the presentation is a sanitised representation of what may have been a messy process.
To put it another way, and more baldly, it is during those first two stages of a scientific programme that decisions are made as to how research funds will be allocated. In the real world, those decisions largely prejudge the outcome of scientific inquiry, yet there is little study of their formation and only the most opaque of records.
Gatekeepers and the Management of Science
Whatever system of philosophy is adopted, science poses certain unavoidable management problems. Its fields are highly specialised and proper, effective decisions depend upon access to technical knowhow. Such expertise is normally available only from the scientists themselves. To ensure such knowledge is available during administrative decisions, certain scientists, are appointed to decision making positions involving, for example, deciding what projects should receive research funds, which individuals will be appointed or promoted, or what papers will be published. The scientists chosen for these roles have often distinguished themselves in some way and are the elite of science. These gatekeepers play a key role in scientific management.
Scientific gatekeepers decide what is, or is not, science. Their corporate decisions define science in an administrative and practical way, marking out the area of human endeavour called science. Something in the nature of gatekeeping exists for all subcultures and the role is a key and often very powerful one. Most professional subcultures try to select gatekeepers so as to avoid their having any personal vested interest in the decisions they will take. However, science is different in this regard. Because of its highly technical nature, science selects its gatekeepers solely from the field being gatekept. As a result, virtually every gatekeeping decision in science is taken by an individual with a very definite self-interest in its outcome. Also, there is almost no definition of gatekeeping responsibilities and virtually no public accountability for the way gatekeepers discharge their roles. Scientific gatekeeping decisions are taken anonymously, even those affected are kept ignorant of the identity of the person who made it and the rationale he used.[...]
It is most disturbing. The gatekeepers of a field are its existing experts. They can exclude views, not merely because those views lack sense, but simply because they "disagree" with them, and in this context "disagree" can have a range of meaning running from "disagree," through "can't reply," to "I'm jealous." In "disagreeing", gatekeepers can and do turn their back on reasoned explanations. This administrative state of affairs flies in the face of Popperian logic, the principles of critical rationalism, openness and freedom of speech. In effect, science is subject to authoritarian government by gatekeepers.
Chronological Order Dictates Merit
It seems that what matters about a theory is not whether it is right or wrong but whether it was proposed first, second or third etc. (Who proposed it also matters, if the innovator is himself already a gatekeeper things are different.) The first theory in a field is advocated by its first workers. Those workers are taken to be experts. New hypotheses are assessed, anonymously and without unaccountability, by the same men who, now acting in the role of gatekeeper, have a vested interest - an interest in thwarting any ideas that threaten to replace those from which their own influence flows. Those "experts" have complete freedom to reply to the alternative in a rationalist way, simply ignore or patronise the upstart idea or perhaps even steal it. If a good argument is available to rebut an alternative theory, they will no doubt present it in their reply. But even if the newly developed theory is plainly superior, the "expert" gatekeeper is in no way obliged to accept or even consider it. New theories can simply be stifled by gatekeeper disinterest.[...]
Weakness of the Hypothetico-deductive Method
Popper's basic idea, of model (or hypothesis) falsification based on critical rationalism and its concomitant antiauthoritarianism, is the accepted base of scientific logic. It is a testing protocol linking scientific ideas to experimental reality. This link, connecting theory, through experiment, to reality, is the reason for the great success of science as a philosophy but it is not a perfect link - it has weaknesses. The main problem is in the early phases of the process. Firstly, science makes almost no record of how it decides which models or theories it should test. Secondly, and compounding the first problem, in the real world scientific judgement is clouded by the personal subjectivities and deviations of scientists themselves. Thus it is that the initial development and selection of models to be tested, a process not necessarily linked to experiment at all, that remains the major logical difficulty inherent in the paradigm of falsification.
Robert K. Merton enunciated principles of scientific ethics which included Universalism, the belief that ideas must be considered without regard for their origins or who proposed them and this is implicit in Popper's logic. However, that cannot mean all theories must be translated into experiment, that would be impractical. To put it baldly, again, the problem is how to decide which research projects to fund. Especially, how this is decided when sociological observation indicates that the advice given by scientists themselves is hampered by personal subjectivities and deviations from logic. It is necessary to have some ground, some demarcation criterion, to decide before experiment, which theories are most likely to be correct.
In law, similar problems can arise. On the basis of the law and the evidence before him, a judge must often try a case but be unsure of the right decision. If the case is a criminal case, the benefit of this doubt will go to the defendant. In a civil action a judge may be forced to take some kind of practical line. He does not have the luxury of scratching his head for ever, he must decide on the balance of probability. He will need to find a rationale, even if it is not perfectly logical. This may lead the judge to error but it is unlikely it will lead him to fraud - he must give an open account of his judgement and explain the case and how it relates to the law. If he gets these things wrong his judgement is subject to appeal. What is more, a judge should never try a case in which there was any hint of a personal interest.
In one role, a scientist can scratch his head and vacillate between two theories for ever, or stick to a wrong theory purely to save face. There will always be some argument to put. Set against a great mass of often conflicting experimental data, no opposing scientific theory will ever be completely perfect. But gatekeepers are the judges of science and for scientists in this things are different, at the end of the day they must decide. When they go home at night, they must have made funding decisions, or job appointment decisions, or publication decisions. They must decide - whether or not they are sure. A rationale must be found even if it is not perfectly logical. However, although he is forming a judgement, the gatekeeper is not in nearly the same position as a judge. He is not subject to the discipline of explaining his decisions or recounting any scientific law or principle. What is more, he would not be deciding the issue at all unless he had a vested interest in its outcome. For the gatekeeper the temptation to follow the easy route of his interests or relativism must be very real.
In these circumstances problems arise, more for everyone else than for the gatekeeper. There are logical approaches, demarcation criteria, for selecting without experiment those theories most likely to be valid and therefore to reward funding. But how can anyone be sure the gatekeeper follows them? The observer is in a predicament. Strictly, the problem should be addressed by the administrators of science but, [...] they are content. That is not surprising - they are the gatekeepers.
Reducing the number of models - Demarcation Criteria
We will now turn to the question of which hypotheses are scientific. How to choose from a range of possibilities those hypotheses that are worthy of attention and deserve to be pursued. Philosophers of science address this problem by laying down demarcation criteria. A new theory should then be tested against the chosen criterion. Those ideas which satisfy the demarcation criteria would be most likely to be productive and most attention would be payed to them. The following sections present a series of demarcation criteria, though it may not be complete.
Popper
The main demarcation criterion associated with Popper is falsifiability - in order to be scientific, a hypothesis should be falsifiable - it should make predictions that can be tested by observation or experiment. By tested, Popper meant some of its predictions must be such that, at least in principle, the contrary could be observed. This was his primary demarcation criterion and was seen by him as very important. On this basis, for example, he criticised the various schools of psychiatric thought because each could accommodate all observations. As a result the ideas did not compete with one another and attempts to distinguish them could not be informative. This test separates the hypotheses inherent in an act of faith - religion for example - from a scientific hypothesis. The statement, "God created the heavens and the earth," cannot be contradicted by observation. Therefore, Popper would not see it as a scientific hypothesis, whether or not it is believed true.
The idea is that only models which can, in principle, be falsified are scientific - others need not be considered. It is useful to view this assertion from a different perspective. Popper is saying that, to be meaningful, a scientific theory must deny something. The idea must prohibit some observations from being made; this is extremely important, because Popper's logic is purely negative, it asserts that the actual meaning of a theory lies not in what it asserts about the universe but what it denies. Some philosophers go further, arguing that any statement has meaning only in what it denies. Thus, even a sentence as simple as, "this paper is white," actually means, "this paper is not, not white." I.e. it is not green, not blue etc.
Falsifiability is the first example of a strategy, or general principle, for reducing the number of models. It is probably the most widely discussed demarcation criterion and shows at once that asserting a scientific theory is equivalent to denying alternatives.
Popper listed two other criteria besides falsifiability. Firstly, a good, new theory should, "proceed from some simple, new, and powerful unifying idea," (Conjectures and Refutations). It should, in principle, be able to unify a body of knowledge that would otherwise be a set of disparate facts. Secondly, Popper held that it should pass some tests. A good new theory should make at least one successful prediction not apparent from existing theory. This seems rather restrictive but is not as bad as sounds. Popper would not have demanded that a theoretical astronomer build a radio telescope before publishing a new theory. Predictions explaining data within existing knowledge do meet this criterion.[...]
2.16 Metaphysical Logic and Scientific Logic
It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true. (Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays)
The distinction between science and metaphysics is significant because there seems to be a significant difference between the logics of metaphysics and science. Science seeks to disprove a hypothesis and a persistent failure to do so leads to its acceptance. This is the negative logic of falsification. Metaphysics is not quite like this; before the existence of a postulated entity should be accepted, there needs to be positive reason to require the existence in question. For example, the postulate of life on Mars is a postulate of existence. It may be believed or not but well-justified belief would require positive supportive evidence, such as Martian roses.
In laying down theories, scientists do not normally distinguish science from metaphysics. That may be unfortunate, much of the philosophical disputation between confirmation and elimination of theories might be removed if this were done. Metaphysical logic seems to be largely the positive logic of confirmation, while scientific logic seems largely the negative logic of falsification.
Popper's hypothetico-deductive model applies to the scientific parts of theories but not so obviously to their metaphysical elements. It is generally a very difficult, or even universally impossible, task to disprove a metaphysical postulate. Even though it seems very unlikely, it would be difficult to actually prove that there is no life on the moon.
However, it is only when a metaphysical idea has supportive evidence that it becomes important. As an example, consider the atomic theory of matter. As every schoolboy knows, the idea of atoms was originally advanced by the Greeks but in this form the idea was metaphysical speculation unsupported by evidence. The idea of atoms was merely a conjecture, unproven, unlinked to any body of experimental evidence, and irrelevant to any possible course of action. Agnosticism was a rational view of the debate about atoms until Dalton's chemical laws, based as they were on observation, began to require them for chemical interpretations. The observations that positively required atoms also made them relevant, and they began to influence men's actions. In the twentieth century, photographs of atoms have been obtained, and disbelief has become irrational.
In logic, then, you just cannot win. Theories need positive evidence for the entities whose existence they postulate. Then they need negative disproof of competing theories.[...]
Occam's Razor - the Coherence Criterion
A principle stated in correspondence by Dr. John Maddox, as Editor-in-Chief of Nature is that a hypothesis should be "grounded on previous understanding or observation." To take his example, in the nineteenth century there might have been competing hypotheses about the make up of the moon. One school of thought arguing the moon was made of rock, another school advancing the view that it was green cheese. As he says, even without experiment intelligent scientists would not have considered the green cheese hypothesis, because it was founded upon no present knowledge or observation. There are other, rather trite, reasons to reject the green cheese model. Cheese is a dairy product made by men from milk, in turn produced by lactating mammals. The green cheese hypothesis implies that men and other mammals are at large within the solar system, giving the green cheese hypothesis some very complex, improbable and unsupported implications.
The existence of such complex ramifications is a general reason for rejecting, or at least downgrading, a hypothesis without experiment. All this boils down to Occam's razor - hypotheses involving the least possible departure from the existing body of knowledge are most likely to be correct. Hypotheses that pick up well-established ideas from related areas inherit much of their supportive evidence, much as an organism inherits many characteristics from its evolutionary forebears.
Occam's razor is related to the idea of coherence with existing knowledge. To understand coherence one may think of all knowledge as being cut into a large number of small pieces much like a jigsaw puzzle. To reassemble the picture we must examine a piece to see if the pattern on it fits in with, or coheres with, the pattern on those pieces we have already assembled in that area. For a new piece of knowledge fits comfortably in place, the shape of knowledge painted onto it should form a continuous pattern with, or cohere with, surrounding pieces.
A new claim to knowledge or a hypothesis which fails to cohere with surrounding knowledge is an extraordinary claim. Its acceptance would demand the revision of knowledge within those surrounding areas and, consequently, its acceptance demands extraordinary evidence.
Coherence, or Occam's razor, is a well known and important principle but two important caveats should be stated. Firstly, the coherence criterion must be used with care and moderation, applied rigidly it produces closed systems of thought. The pieces of the jigsaw already assembled may actually be in the wrong places. Secondly, the existing body of knowledge means exactly what it says and knowledge is well-founded belief (Popper). The existing body of knowledge does not mean the existing body of hypotheses. To be of any real value, a new idea must compete with existing suppositions used to explain the same data set. It is diametrically wrong to demand of a new hypothesis that it be consistent with the ideas it sets out to replace.
Hypothesis Testing and Probability
Many years before Popper, Bayes investigated the branch of mathematics applied to formal hypothesis evaluation and now known as Bayesian statistics. A scientific investigation links experimental results with the probability assignments attached to particular hypotheses. Before any experimental test is performed initial probabilities (known as antecedent probabilities) must be assigned to the various hypotheses. As experimental data become available these antecedent probabilities are adjusted up or down depending on whether the observations support or do not support the corresponding hypothesis. The theorem used to adjust the probabilities is known as Bayes' theorem. Some fields can use the procedure quite formally. For example, in medical diagnostics, antecedent probabilities reflect the incidence of a disease in the population. In practical science Bayes' theorem has little formal use because of the general difficulty giving objective numerical values to the antecedent probabilities. Accordingly, the theorem is neither stated nor used here. Even so, scientists must intuitively use Bayes' theorem, assigning antecedent probabilities by judgement.
Mathematicians have investigated the fallacies arising in Bayesian statistics, some of which help to clarify points made earlier. A hypothesis is meaningful only if it partitions the possibility space; for example, the hypotheses that a dice will fall as a five or as an odd number are both meaningful in that they can both be wrong - it may fall as a four. On the other hand, the hypothesis that the dice will fall with a number uppermost is not meaningful because all possible outcomes are numbers - the hypothesis cannot be falsified because it fails to partition the possibility space. This failure is what philosophers of science mean when a hypothesis is described as vacuous.
A hypothesis may be "academic" (in a pejorative sense); whether it be true or not will make no difference to actions or beliefs flowing from the statistical analysis. The distinction is important for doctors making a diagnosis - only if two diseases require different treatment, is the physician concerned to know which his patient suffers from. Returning to the example of the dice, whether it falls as a five or not will affect my actions only if I am playing snakes and ladders or have some other link to this test. For most people, the outcome of throwing dice is academic and uninteresting. In science, this pejorative form of the word academic means that whether a hypothesis is true will have no effect on perceptions of the world or how people act.
Finally, note again that a hypothesis set should be well chosen and, without overlap, cover all possible explanations. It is hard, in science, to prove that a hypothesis set does entirely cover the possibility space. The proper response to this problem is to contemplate the possibility that all the considered hypotheses are wrong. It remains very wrong to use a hypothesis set that is known not cover the possibility space.
Assessment of Antecedent Probabilities
Much of the intuitive Bayesian statistics used by practising scientists consists of the assignment of antecedent probabilities to any suggested hypotheses. This is the statistical equivalent of initial hypothesis screening [...]. If a hypothesis fails to cohere with existing knowledge, it is right to assign it a low antecedent probability. Only very clear evidence supporting it, and contradicting more cohering hypotheses, will bring its probability assignment up to a point where it would be accepted.
Invalid criteria such as relativism and self-interest will intrude on the intuitive assignment of antecedent probabilities. They will lead to the assignment of a low antecedent probability to a correct hypothesis and vice versa. However, unless the correct theory is actually assigned an antecedent probability of zero, this should only slow things down. The objective application of Bayes' theorem would steadily improve the probability assigned to the correct hypothesis as experimental data became available. (In Bayesian statistics, antecedent probabilities can, in principle, be assigned randomly but still ultimately produce good knowledge. This may be how some sciences arose from areas we would today classify as mythology. Alchemy for example led to chemistry and astrology to astronomy.) Only if the correct hypothesis is dismissed entirely will Bayesian statistics fail. If the antecedent probability assigned to a correct hypothesis is zero, Bayes' theorem will keep the probability at zero no matter what the outcome of experiment and the remaining ideas will become a closed system of thought. This seems to be true of the intuitive Bayesian scientist, just as it is of the formal statistical process.
Intuitive Bayesian statistics are applied both by individuals and by the community of scientists. Both levels will assign intuitive antecedent probabilities to hypotheses and both, being human, will err. [...] In general, the scientific community is too willing both to assign a probability of zero to dissenting ideas and to assign a probability of one its own beliefs.
The Origins of Uncertainty
It is universally accepted, and implied by use of probability theory in hypothesis testing, that no scientific theory can be known, with total certainty, to be true. Scientific certainty is lost in two general ways - uncertainty in the outcome of experiments and uncertainty in their interpretation. Our certainty in the outcome of experiments is greatly increased by care in its execution and repetition by other groups or on analogous systems. Unfortunately, these hardly improve our confidence in the interpretation of the results.
Clearly repeat experiments and studies on related systems has a role in ensuring validity of results but there are also structural and social reasons for such studies. If an experiment is cheap, quick and already within the laboratory's range, it is quite easy to perform a series of studies around a theme. Moreover, results that accord with earlier data are theoretically uncontroversial and, if the field already understands a technique, other workers are less likely to obstruct publication by raising queries about the validity of the observations. Thus, a large body of publication can quickly accumulate that hinges round one basic experiment.
For purposes of interpretation it is important to realise that, for all its size, that body of papers only amounts to one experiment. Failing to recognise this is to act like the man Wittgenstein mentions in Philosophical Investigations, who purchases several copies of the morning paper to reassure himself that what he reads there is true. Committing this fallacy is both a common individual fault and also structurally embedded in modern scientific administration. Of course, scientists do not buy many copies of their morning paper, but they do publish many copies of the same, or very similar, experiment; then they point to the "mountain of evidence" supporting their ideas.
Experiments report reality much as newspapers report news. The hypothesis used to explain their outcome is the impression of reality they give. Like a newspaper article, the scientific observations may be clear and accurate, or misleading and inaccurate. Because observations may be inaccurate, they need to be reported in a way that enables other workers to replicate them. Because the observation may be misleading, even though accurate, the generated hypothesis should be confirmed by data which is as unrelated to the original observations as possible. Reverting to Wittgenstein's analogy, his man would have been well advised to read another newspaper, one which employed a different reporter who, himself, employed different sources for the news he reported.
This point has been made by many philosophers of science; for example, in the nineteenth century, Whewell, adopted it as a criterion of induction, referring to it as the consilience of hypotheses. Although we no longer think there is a logic of induction, his point remains valid as a means of increasing our confidence in a theory. On the same lines, Popper asserted that a hypothesis supported by data of two or more distinctly different types should be preferred to an alternative able to explain only a narrow domain of data.
In summary, repetition offers confidence that the published data are accurate but those scientists who believe that repetition of data can support ideas are buying too many copies of the morning paper. No matter how many times an experiment, or its close siblings, are repeated - one hundred times or one thousand papers - repetition adds no assurance that any particular interpretation of that result into a hypothesis is valid. If another idea will explain the data from one such experiment, then it will equally apply to any number of repetitions. Assurance of interpretation can come only by comparing the success of competing hypotheses in interpreting data from disparate areas. The more dissimilar are the sources of data used the better, providing only that they do fall within the range of application of the hypotheses in question. Modern scientific administrations fail to recognise this fallacy, a failure linked closely to the procedures they use for quality assessment.
Quality Assessment - Peer Review and Citation Analysis
Science managers and gatekeepers base many policies and decisions on quality assessments. Consequently, how quality is defined, maintained and assessed, is a pivotal issue for modern science - it is also one of the few areas in which scientific practice overlaps with scientific philosophy. In principle assessment of quality in research programmes should include a rational assignment of the antecedent probability of the underlying ideas. In practice, however, the methods adopted simply abandon rationality and one of them jumps head first into Wittgenstein's fallacy, buying as many copies of the morning paper as leaders in a field might find convenient. Assessments are made at several levels, for example of :-
* Research projects before they are funded.
* The value of work before it is published in the scientific literature.
* The worth of researchers before they are appointed to posts.
These prospective evaluations are usually made by peer review. Referees, anonymous experts in the field, are selected by scientific authorities. The expert will then write a report, which is taken to be an objective evaluation of the work in question, but that report is unlikely to make any attempt at explanation and it may not be seen by the scientist concerned, who will have little or no opportunity to reply if he does see it. Besides these initial screening steps, post hoc assessments are also made of :-
* The "success" of published articles in terms of their scientific impact when set against competing articles.
* The "success" of published scientists in terms of their scientific impact when set against competing workers.
* The "status" of institutions and journals.
Sometimes such assessments are made by committees of experts but one of the most important tools used for the appraisal is citation analysis, a tool developed over the past twenty to thirty years.
A scientific paper does not stand alone, it builds on what has gone before, using other workers ideas, techniques and results. To place the work in context, the scientific article ends with a list of relevant publications showing where the ideas it used came from[...]. These are citations and they interested an American named Eugene Garfield. His Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) notes every scientific paper published and, from their citation lists, constructs a computer database, called the Science Citations Index (SCI). Scientists can use the SCI to find all papers citing any earlier article. It has proved to be a very valuable research tool, enabling workers to research a topic forward through the literature, whereas traditional abstracting media permitted only a backwards search.
The SCI is also used in quality assessments. Using it, one can easily determine how often, or whether, a paper is cited by subsequent publications, a process called citation analysis. The argument is that rarely-cited studies cannot have been very important. In making this count, the ISI itself carefully avoids the term "quality", preferring to call the resulting measure the "impact" of a paper, but scientific institutions do take this impact as a measure of quality. Journals and institutions can also be ranked according to the impact of articles published during a given period. Journals even tout their impact rating when advertising to libraries for sales or soliciting the scientific community for new papers.
This way of assessing quality means that the citation practices of authors influence the assessment of the work done by their contemporaries and colleagues. If a scientific theory is not mentioned by establishment figures, and the articles which propose it are not cited by them, the theory is automatically assessed as of low quality, even if no reason for disregarding it has been given. By contrast, if scientists go to great lengths to rebut an incorrect theory, that theory will be assessed as being of high quality, even if most observers regarded the theory as absurd from the outset.
Whatever its value as a management tool, quality assessment by citation analysis is clearly prone to Wittgenstein's fallacy. Moreover, its practical implications for the assessment of theories are clear. Under that process, ignoring, or not citing, a theory is the same as rejecting it. For their part, scientists are well aware of the quality assessment procedures used and the implications of their actions. When a scientist disregards a theory, he knows the result this will have for its assessment and presumably intends that outcome. In short, a scientist who chooses to ignore a theory, is broadcasting a message about that theory - namely that he rejects the theory as of low quality. The message thus broadcast may be implicit but the scientist knows it is sent, he knows who receives it and he knows how they will interpret and act upon it.
Both citation analysis and peer review are highly questionable as methods of quality assessment and amount to little more than statements of establishment opinion[...].
© Copyright John A Hewitt.
[Source: John A Hewitt - A Habit of Lies - How Scientists Cheat : http://freespace.virgin.net/john.hewitt1/pg_ch02.htm]
The Slave's Revenge
If the slave cannot escape, and is beaten if he does not work hard, then his vengeance will always take on a more subtle form. The slave will perform his work slightly more slowly – not enough to be punished, but enough to irritate his master. The slave will pretend to be less intelligent than he really is, so that when he loses or breaks things, he will be more likely to escape punishment, since he is pretending in effect to be a child.
[...] the slave will also do what he can to promote any negative habits his master may have. If his master likes to drink, the slave will always be on hand to refill his cup. If his master has a tendency towards jealousy, the slave will innocently “mention” that he saw his master’s wife chatting with another man.
If the slave is particularly cunning, he will also do everything that he can to inflate his master’s ego. He will sing his master’s praises, claim joy in “knowing his place,” thank the master for everything he does, and remain fanatically “loyal.” This hyperinflation of the master’s ego inevitably creates pettiness, vanity, hyper-irritability, and unbearable pomposity.
In other words, the slave will always turn his master into an unhappy man – who is constantly annoyed, who cannot experience love, and who engenders no respect from those around him – particularly his children. (One of the worst aspects of being a slave-owner is that it turns you into a terrible and abusive father.) As a result of the slave’s passive-aggressive manipulations, the master becomes prone to violence – verbal and physical – self-abusive habits, crippling self-blindness, and sinks into a bottomless pit of discontent and misery.
This is the vengeance of the slave. All slaves are Iago. And, for the most part, all children are slaves. As you were.
[...] the great danger for the slave is his capacity to become addicted to the dark “satisfactions” of passive-aggressive vengeance. By enslaving his master, the slave gains a sense of control – and also re-creates in his master his own experience of enslavement. It is a subtle cry of hatred – and plea for empathy. [...]A slave can only hope for freedom by making owning slaves unbearable for his master. Not only might the slave’s endless passive-aggressive noncompliance and provocation provoke suicide on the part of his master – but his master’s miserable existence might also serve as a warning for others who might wish to own slaves.
[...]However, as mentioned above, the greatest danger for the slave is that he becomes addicted to the sense of control that comes from manipulating his master. In other words, the great danger for the slave is that he becomes addicted to his slavery. If a slave begins to believe his own master-destroying propaganda, then in the absence of masters, he will create them.
[...]Most of us are raised as slaves. Our opinions are rarely sought, rules are rarely explained – and moral rules never are – we are shipped off to schools where we are treated disrespectfully; our subservience is bought with rewards, and our independence is punished with detentions. Scepticism and curiosity are scorned and belittled, while empty abilities like throwing balls, learning dates, sitting still and “being pretty” are praised and elevated.
Lies about our history become cages for our futures. Lies about our own intelligence and originality lead us to the petty enslavement of “good citizenship” – and horrifying fairy tales about life in the absence of coercive or religious control scare us back into our slave pens the moment we even think of glancing outside to the green and beautiful hills beyond our bars.
Collective punishments turn us against each other; the “kibbles and whips” of the classroom reward us for laughing at each other to gain the favor of the teacher; terrifying and brutal “morality” is inflicted upon us. We are punished for not treating those in authority with “respect” (do they treat us with respect?) – and we are bred for a life of subservience, fear, productivity and dependence as surely as fattened calves are bred for veal.
Where in the past we were not taught to fear the priests, but rather the imaginary devils the priests warned us of, now we are not taught to fear our politicians, who can debase our currency, throw us in prison and send us to war – but rather we are taught to fear each other. We are taught to imagine that the real predators in this world are not those who control prison cells, national debts and nuclear weapons, but rather our fellow citizens, who in the absence of brutal control would surely tear us apart!
The entire purpose of state education is to make sure that we never truly “leave” our childhoods: that we spend our lives trembling in fear of imaginary predators, begging for “protection” from those who threaten us with the most harm.
[Source: http://freedomainradio.com/BOARD/blogs/freedomain/]
[...] the slave will also do what he can to promote any negative habits his master may have. If his master likes to drink, the slave will always be on hand to refill his cup. If his master has a tendency towards jealousy, the slave will innocently “mention” that he saw his master’s wife chatting with another man.
If the slave is particularly cunning, he will also do everything that he can to inflate his master’s ego. He will sing his master’s praises, claim joy in “knowing his place,” thank the master for everything he does, and remain fanatically “loyal.” This hyperinflation of the master’s ego inevitably creates pettiness, vanity, hyper-irritability, and unbearable pomposity.
In other words, the slave will always turn his master into an unhappy man – who is constantly annoyed, who cannot experience love, and who engenders no respect from those around him – particularly his children. (One of the worst aspects of being a slave-owner is that it turns you into a terrible and abusive father.) As a result of the slave’s passive-aggressive manipulations, the master becomes prone to violence – verbal and physical – self-abusive habits, crippling self-blindness, and sinks into a bottomless pit of discontent and misery.
This is the vengeance of the slave. All slaves are Iago. And, for the most part, all children are slaves. As you were.
[...] the great danger for the slave is his capacity to become addicted to the dark “satisfactions” of passive-aggressive vengeance. By enslaving his master, the slave gains a sense of control – and also re-creates in his master his own experience of enslavement. It is a subtle cry of hatred – and plea for empathy. [...]A slave can only hope for freedom by making owning slaves unbearable for his master. Not only might the slave’s endless passive-aggressive noncompliance and provocation provoke suicide on the part of his master – but his master’s miserable existence might also serve as a warning for others who might wish to own slaves.
[...]However, as mentioned above, the greatest danger for the slave is that he becomes addicted to the sense of control that comes from manipulating his master. In other words, the great danger for the slave is that he becomes addicted to his slavery. If a slave begins to believe his own master-destroying propaganda, then in the absence of masters, he will create them.
[...]Most of us are raised as slaves. Our opinions are rarely sought, rules are rarely explained – and moral rules never are – we are shipped off to schools where we are treated disrespectfully; our subservience is bought with rewards, and our independence is punished with detentions. Scepticism and curiosity are scorned and belittled, while empty abilities like throwing balls, learning dates, sitting still and “being pretty” are praised and elevated.
Lies about our history become cages for our futures. Lies about our own intelligence and originality lead us to the petty enslavement of “good citizenship” – and horrifying fairy tales about life in the absence of coercive or religious control scare us back into our slave pens the moment we even think of glancing outside to the green and beautiful hills beyond our bars.
Collective punishments turn us against each other; the “kibbles and whips” of the classroom reward us for laughing at each other to gain the favor of the teacher; terrifying and brutal “morality” is inflicted upon us. We are punished for not treating those in authority with “respect” (do they treat us with respect?) – and we are bred for a life of subservience, fear, productivity and dependence as surely as fattened calves are bred for veal.
Where in the past we were not taught to fear the priests, but rather the imaginary devils the priests warned us of, now we are not taught to fear our politicians, who can debase our currency, throw us in prison and send us to war – but rather we are taught to fear each other. We are taught to imagine that the real predators in this world are not those who control prison cells, national debts and nuclear weapons, but rather our fellow citizens, who in the absence of brutal control would surely tear us apart!
The entire purpose of state education is to make sure that we never truly “leave” our childhoods: that we spend our lives trembling in fear of imaginary predators, begging for “protection” from those who threaten us with the most harm.
[Source: http://freedomainradio.com/BOARD/blogs/freedomain/]
Love
Mythological Love
Our whole lives, we are surrounded by people who claim to love us. Our parents perpetually claim to be motivated by what is best for us. Our teachers eternally proclaim that their sole motivation is to help us learn. Our priests voice concern for our eternal souls, and extended family members endlessly announce their devotion to the clan.
When people claim to love us, it is not unreasonable to expect that they know us. If you tell me that you love Thailand, but it turns out that you have never been there, and know very little about it, then it is hard for me to believe that you really love it. If I say that I love opera, but I never listen to opera – well, you get the general idea!
If I say that I love you, but I know little about your real thoughts and feelings, and have no idea what your true values are – or perhaps even what your favourite books, authors or movies are – then it should logically be very hard for you to believe me.
This is certainly the case in my family. My mother, brother and father made extravagant claims about their love for me. However, when I finally sat down and asked each of them to recount a few facts about me – some of my preferences and values – I got a perfect tripod of “thousand yard stares.”
So, I thought, if people who know almost nothing about me claim to love me, then either they are lying, or I do not understand love at all.
I will not go into details about my theories of love here, other than to say that, in my view, love is our involuntary response to virtue, just as well-being is our involuntary response to a healthy lifestyle. (Our affection for our babies is more attachment than mature love, since it is shared throughout the animal kingdom.)
Virtue is a complicated subject, but I am sure we can agree that virtue must involve some basics that are commonly understood, such as courage, integrity, benevolence, empathy, wisdom and so on.
If this is the case, it cannot be possible to love people that we know very little about. If love requires virtue, then we cannot love perfect strangers, because we know nothing about their virtues. Love depends both on another person’s virtue, and our knowledge of it – and it grows in proportion to that virtue and knowledge, if we are virtuous ourselves.
Throughout my childhood, whenever I expressed a personal thought, desire, wish, preference or feeling, I was generally met with eye rolling, incomprehension, avoidance or, all too often, outright scorn. These various “rejection tactics” were completely co-joined with expressions of love and devotion. When I started getting into philosophy – through the works of Ayn Rand originally – my growing love of wisdom was dismissed out of hand as some sort of psychological dysfunction.
Since my family knew precious little about my virtues – and what they did know they disliked – then we could not all be virtuous. If they were virtuous, and disliked my values, then my values could not be virtuous. If I was virtuous, and they disliked my values, then they could not be virtuous.
And so I set about trying to create an “ethical map” of my family.
It was the most frightening thing I have ever done. The amount of emotional resistance that I felt towards the idea of trying to rationally and morally understand my family was staggering – it literally felt as if I were sprinting directly off a cliff.
Why was it so terrifying?
Well, because I knew that they were lying. I knew that they were lying about loving me, and I knew that, by claiming to be confused about whether they loved me, I was lying as well – and to myself, which is the worst of all falsehoods.
Love: The Word versus the Deed
Saying the word “success” is far easier than actually achieving success. Mouthing the word “love” is far easier than actually loving someone for the right reasons – and being loved for the right reasons.
If we do not have any standards for being loved, then laziness and indifference will inevitably result. If I have a job where I work from home, and no one ever checks up on me, and I never have to produce anything, and I get paid no matter what, and I cannot get fired, how long will it be before my work ethic decays? Days? Weeks? Certainly not months.
One of the most important questions to ask in any examination of the truth is “compared to what?” For instance, if I say I love you, implicit in that statement is a preference for you over others. In other words, compared to others, I prefer you. We prefer honesty compared to falsehood, satiation to hunger, warmth to cold and so on.
It is not logically valid to equate the word “love” with “family.” The word “family” is a mere description of a biological commonality – it makes no more sense to equate “love” with “family” than it does to equate “love” with “mammal.” Thus the word “love” must mean a preference compared to – what?
It is impossible to have any standards for love if we do not have any standards for truth. Since being honest is better than lying, and courage is better than cowardice, and truth is better than falsehood, we cannot have honesty and courage unless we are standing for something that is true. Thus when we say that we “love” someone, what we really mean is that his actions are consistent, compared to a rational standard of virtue. In the same way, when I say that somebody is “healthy,” what I really mean is that his organs are functioning consistently, relative to a rational standard of well-being.
Thus love is not a subjective preference, or a biological commonality, but our involuntary response to virtuous actions on the part of another.
If we truly understand this definition, then it is easy for us to see that a society that does not know truth cannot ever know love.
If nothing is true, virtue is impossible.
If virtue is impossible, then we are forced to pretend to be virtuous, through patriotism, clan loyalties, cultural pride, superstitious conformities and other such amoral counterfeits.
If virtue is impossible, then love is impossible, because actions cannot be compared to any objective standard of goodness. If love is impossible, we are forced to resort to sentimentality, or the shallow show and outward appearance of love.
Thus it can be seen that any set of principles that interferes with our ability to know and understand the truth hollows us out, undermining and destroying our capacity for love. False principles, illusions, fantasies and mythologies separate us from each other, from virtue, from love, from the true connections that we can achieve only through reality.
In fantasy, there is only isolation and pretence. Mythology is, fundamentally, loneliness and emptiness.
Imagination versus Fantasy
At this point, I think it would be well worth highlighting the differences between imagination and fantasy, because many people, on hearing my criticisms of mythology, think that they are now not supposed to enjoy Star Wars.
Imagination is a creative faculty that is deeply rooted in reality. Fantasy, on the other hand, is a mere species of intangible wish fulfillment. It took Tolkien decades of study and writing to produce “The Lord of the Rings” – and each part of that novel was rationally consistent with the whole. That is an example of imagination. If I laze about daydreaming that one day I will make a fortune by writing a better novel than “The Lord of the Rings” – but never actually set pen to paper – that is an example of fantasy. Imagination produced the theory of relativity, not fantasizing about someday winning a Nobel Prize.
Daydreams that are never converted into action are the ultimate procrastination. Imagining a wonderful future that you never have to act to achieve prevents you from achieving a wonderful future.
In the same way, imagining that you know the truth when you do not prevents you from ever learning the truth. Nothing is more dangerous than the illusion of knowledge. If you are going the wrong way, but do not doubt your direction, you will never turn around.
As Socrates noted more than 2,000 years ago, doubt is the midwife of curiosity, and curiosity breeds wisdom.
Fantasy is the opposite of doubt. Mythology provides instant answers when people do not even know what the questions are. In the Middle Ages, when someone asked “Where did the world come from?” he was told: “God made it.” This effectively precluded the necessity of asking the more relevant question: “What is the world?”
Because religious people believed they knew where the world came from, there was little point asking what the world was. Because there was little point asking what the world was, they never learned where the world came from.
Fantasy is a circle of nothingness, forever eating its own tail.
Defining Love
If people fantasize that they know what is true, then they inevitably stop searching for the truth. If I am driving home, I stop driving when I get there. If people fantasize that they know what goodness is, they inevitably stop trying to understand goodness.
And, most importantly, if people fantasize that they already are good, they stop trying to become good. If you want a baby, and you believe that you are pregnant, you stop trying to get pregnant.
The question – which we already know the answer to – thus remains: why do people who claim to love us never tell us what love is?
If I am an accomplished mathematician, and my child comes to me and asks me about the times tables, it would be rude and churlish of me to dismiss his questions. If I go to my mother, who for 30 years has claimed to love me, and ask her what love is, why is it that she refuses to answer my question? Why does my brother roll his eyes and change the subject whenever I ask him what it is that he loves about me? Why does my father claim to love me, while continually rejecting everything that I hold precious?
Why does everyone around me perpetually use words that they refuse to define? Are they full of a knowledge that they cannot express? That is not a good reason for refusing to discuss the topics. A novelist who writes instinctually would not logically be hostile if asked about the source of his inspiration. He may not come up with a perfect answer, but there would be no reason to perpetually avoid the subject.
Unless…
Unless, of course, he is a plagiarist.
What We Know
This is the knowledge that we have, but hate and fear.
We know that the people who claim to love us know precious little about us, and nothing at all about love.
We know that the people who claim to love us make this claim in order to create obligations within us.
We know that the people who claim to love us make this claim in order to control us.
And they know it too.
It is completely obvious that they know this, because they know exactly which topics to avoid. A counterfeiter will not mind if you ask him what the capital of Madagascar is. A counterfeiter will mind, however, if you ask him whether you can check the authenticity of his money. Why is this the one topic that he will try to avoid at all costs?
Because he knows that his currency is fake.
And he also knows that if you find that out, he can no longer use it to rob you blind.
Obligations
If I own a store, and take counterfeit money from a con man, but do not know that it is counterfeit, then I am obligated to hand over what he has “bought.”
In the same way, if I believe that I am loved – even when I am not loved – I am to a degree honour-bound to return that love. If my mother says that she loves me, and she is virtuous, then she must love me because I am virtuous. Since she is herself virtuous, then I “owe” her love as a matter of justice, just as I owe trust to someone who consistently behaves in a trustworthy manner.
Thus when somebody tries to convince you that they love you, they’re actually attempting to create an obligation in you. If I try to convince you that I am a trustworthy person, it is because I want all the benefits of being treated as if I were a trustworthy person. If I am in fact a trustworthy person, then I must understand the nature of trust – at least at some level – and thus I must know that it cannot be demanded, but must be earned. Since earning trust is harder than just demanding trust, I must know the real value of trust, otherwise I would not have taken the trouble to earn it through consistent behaviour – I would have just demanded it and skipped all the hard stuff!
If you demand trust, you are demanding the unearned, which indicates that you do not believe you can earn it. Thus anyone who demands trust is automatically untrustworthy.
Why do people demand trust?
To rob others.
If I want to borrow money from you, and I demand that you trust me, it’s because I am not trustworthy, and will be unlikely to pay you back.
In other words, I want to steal your money, and put you in my power.
It’s the same with love.
Love and Virtue
If I am virtuous, then virtuous people will regard me with at least respect, if not love. Corrupt or evil people may regard me with a certain respect, but they will certainly not love me.
Thus being virtuous and refusing to demand love from anyone is the best way to find other virtuous people. If you are virtuous and undemanding, then other virtuous people will naturally gravitate towards you. Virtue that does not impose itself on others is like a magnet for goodness, and repels corruption.
The practical result of true virtue is fundamental self-protection.
If my stockbroker consistently gets me 30% return on my investments, is there any amount of money that I will not give him, other than what I need to live? Of course not! Because I know I will always get back more than I give.
It’s the same with real love.
If I am virtuous, then I will inevitably feel positively inclined towards other virtuous people – and the more virtuous they are, the more I will love them. My energy, time and resources will be at their disposal, because I know that I will not be exploited, and that they will reciprocate my generosity.
If you and I have lent money to each other over the years, and have always paid each other back, then the next time you come to me for a loan, it would be unjust for me to tell you that I will not lend you anything because I do not think you will pay me back. Your continued and perpetual honesty towards me in financial matters has created an obligation in me towards you. This does not mean that I must lend you money whenever you ask for it, but I cannot justly claim as my reason for not lending you money a belief that you will not pay me back.
In the same way, if you have been my wife for 20 years, and I have never been unfaithful, if a woman calls and then hangs up, it would be unjust for you to immediately accuse me of infidelity.
A central tactic for creating artificial and unjust obligations in others is to demand their positive opinion, without being willing to earn it. The most effective way to do this is to offer a positive opinion, which has not been earned – to claim to love others.
If, over the past 20 years, I have rarely paid back any money I have borrowed from you, it is perfectly reasonable to refuse me an additional loan. I may then get angry, and call you unfair, and demand that you treat me as if I were trustworthy, but it would scarcely be virtuous for you to comply with my wishes. Indeed, it would be dishonest and unjust for you to ignore my untrustworthiness, because you would be acting as if there was no difference between someone who pays back loans, and someone who does not.
When we act in a virtuous manner towards others, we are creating a reservoir of goodwill that we can draw upon, just as when we put our savings into a bank. A man can act imperfectly and still be loved, just as a man can eat an occasional candy bar and still be healthy, but there is a general requirement for consistency in any discipline. I could probably hit a home run in a major-league ballpark once every thousand pitches, but that would scarcely make me a professional baseball player!
If I act in a trustworthy manner, I do not have to ask you to trust me – and in fact, I would be very unwise to do so. Either you will trust me voluntarily, which means that you respect honourable and consistent behaviour, and justly respond to those who do good, or you will not trust me voluntarily, which means that you do not respond in a just manner to trustworthy behaviour, and thus cannot be trusted yourself.
If, on the other hand, I come up to you and demand that you trust me, I am engaged in a complex calculation of counterfeiting and plunder.
The first thing I am trying to do is establish whether or not you know anything about trust. The second thing is to figure out your level of confidence and self-esteem. The third thing is figure out if you know anything about integrity.
An attacker will always try to find the weakest chink in your armour. If I demand trust from you, and you agree to provide it – without any prior evidence – then I know that you do not know anything about trust. Similarly, if you do not require that your trust be earned, then I know that you lack confidence and self-esteem. If you are willing to treat me as if I were trustworthy when I am not trustworthy, then it is clear to me you know very little about integrity.
This tells me all I need to know about your history. This tells me that you were never treated with respect as a child, and that you were never taught to judge people according to independent standards, and that every time you tried to stand up for yourself, your family attacked you.
In other words, I will know that you are easy prey.
I cannot create an obligation in you unless you accept that I have treated you justly in the past. As in all things, it is far easier to convince a weak person that you have treated him justly, than it is to actually treat people in a just and consistent manner. If I can convince you that I have treated you justly in the past, then you “owe” me trust and respect in the present.
“Love” as Predation
Imagine that we are brothers, and one day you awake from a coma to see me sitting by your bed. After some small talk, I tell you that you owe me $1,000, which you borrowed from me the day of your accident. I tell you that because I am a kind brother, and you are in the hospital, you do not have to pay me back the thousand dollars – I would just like you to remember it, so that the next time I need to borrow $1,000, you will lend it to me.
You might look in the pockets of the jeans you wore the day of your accident, and you might look around your apartment to see if there was $1,000 lying around, but there would be no real way to prove that I had not lent you the money. You would either have to call me a liar – an accusation for which you have no certain proof – or you would feel substantially more obligated to lend me money in the future.
If you call me a liar, I will get angry. If you accept the obligation without ever finding the $1,000, you will feel resentful. Either way, our relationship is harmed – and by telling you about the $1,000, I have voluntarily introduced a complication and a suspicion into our relationship, which is scarcely loving, just or benevolent.
This is the kind of brinksmanship and deception that goes on all the time in relationships – particularly in families.
When our parents tell us that they love us, they are in fact demanding that we provide for them. They are basically telling us that they have lent us $1,000 – even if we cannot remember it – and thus we owe them trust in the future, if not $1,000 in the present!
In other words, our parents spend an enormous amount of energy convincing us that they “love” us in order to create artificial obligations within us. In doing so, they take a terrible risk – and force us to make an even more terrible choice..
Brinksmanship
When somebody tells you that they love you, it is either a statement of genuine regard, based on mutual virtue, or it is an exploitive and unjust demand for your money, time, resources, or approval.
There is very little in between.
Either love is real, and a true joy, or love is false, and the most corrupt and cowardly form of theft that can be imagined.
If love is real, then it inflicts no unjust obligations. If love is real, then it is freely given without demands. If a good man gives you his love, and you do not reciprocate it, then he just realizes that he was mistaken, learns a little, and moves on. If a woman tells you that she loves you, and then resents any hesitation or lack of reciprocation you display, then she does not love you, but is using the word “love” as a kind of hook, to entrap you into doing what she wants, to your own detriment.
How can you possibly know whether the love that somebody expresses towards you is genuine or not?
It’s very, very simple.
When it is genuine, you feel it.
What happens, though, when a parent demands love from us?
Well, we must either submit to this demand, and pretend to respond in kind, or we must confront her on her manipulation – thus threatening the entire basis of the relationship.
Would someone who truly loves us ever put us in this terrible position?
Society and Religion
The principle of inflicting a good opinion in order to create an unjust obligation occurs at a social level, as well as at a personal level. Soldiers are supposed to have died “protecting us,” which creates an obligation for us to support the troops. The mere act of being born in a country creates a lifelong obligation to pay taxes at the point of a gun, in order to receive services that we never directly asked for. John F. Kennedy’s famous quote, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but rather what you can do for your country,” is another way of saying, “One of us is going to get screwed in this interaction, and it ain’t gonna be me!”
The same thing occurs in the realm of religion, of course, as well. Jesus died for your sins, God loves you, you will be punished if you do not obey, Hell is the destination of unbelievers etc. etc. etc.
All of these emotional tricks are designed to create an obligation in you that would not exist in any reasonable universe.
“Sacrifice,” in other words, is merely demand in disguise.
[Source: http://freedomainradio.com/BOARD/blogs/freedomain/archive/2008/09/11/book-on-truth-the-tyranny-of-illusion.aspx]
Our whole lives, we are surrounded by people who claim to love us. Our parents perpetually claim to be motivated by what is best for us. Our teachers eternally proclaim that their sole motivation is to help us learn. Our priests voice concern for our eternal souls, and extended family members endlessly announce their devotion to the clan.
When people claim to love us, it is not unreasonable to expect that they know us. If you tell me that you love Thailand, but it turns out that you have never been there, and know very little about it, then it is hard for me to believe that you really love it. If I say that I love opera, but I never listen to opera – well, you get the general idea!
If I say that I love you, but I know little about your real thoughts and feelings, and have no idea what your true values are – or perhaps even what your favourite books, authors or movies are – then it should logically be very hard for you to believe me.
This is certainly the case in my family. My mother, brother and father made extravagant claims about their love for me. However, when I finally sat down and asked each of them to recount a few facts about me – some of my preferences and values – I got a perfect tripod of “thousand yard stares.”
So, I thought, if people who know almost nothing about me claim to love me, then either they are lying, or I do not understand love at all.
I will not go into details about my theories of love here, other than to say that, in my view, love is our involuntary response to virtue, just as well-being is our involuntary response to a healthy lifestyle. (Our affection for our babies is more attachment than mature love, since it is shared throughout the animal kingdom.)
Virtue is a complicated subject, but I am sure we can agree that virtue must involve some basics that are commonly understood, such as courage, integrity, benevolence, empathy, wisdom and so on.
If this is the case, it cannot be possible to love people that we know very little about. If love requires virtue, then we cannot love perfect strangers, because we know nothing about their virtues. Love depends both on another person’s virtue, and our knowledge of it – and it grows in proportion to that virtue and knowledge, if we are virtuous ourselves.
Throughout my childhood, whenever I expressed a personal thought, desire, wish, preference or feeling, I was generally met with eye rolling, incomprehension, avoidance or, all too often, outright scorn. These various “rejection tactics” were completely co-joined with expressions of love and devotion. When I started getting into philosophy – through the works of Ayn Rand originally – my growing love of wisdom was dismissed out of hand as some sort of psychological dysfunction.
Since my family knew precious little about my virtues – and what they did know they disliked – then we could not all be virtuous. If they were virtuous, and disliked my values, then my values could not be virtuous. If I was virtuous, and they disliked my values, then they could not be virtuous.
And so I set about trying to create an “ethical map” of my family.
It was the most frightening thing I have ever done. The amount of emotional resistance that I felt towards the idea of trying to rationally and morally understand my family was staggering – it literally felt as if I were sprinting directly off a cliff.
Why was it so terrifying?
Well, because I knew that they were lying. I knew that they were lying about loving me, and I knew that, by claiming to be confused about whether they loved me, I was lying as well – and to myself, which is the worst of all falsehoods.
Love: The Word versus the Deed
Saying the word “success” is far easier than actually achieving success. Mouthing the word “love” is far easier than actually loving someone for the right reasons – and being loved for the right reasons.
If we do not have any standards for being loved, then laziness and indifference will inevitably result. If I have a job where I work from home, and no one ever checks up on me, and I never have to produce anything, and I get paid no matter what, and I cannot get fired, how long will it be before my work ethic decays? Days? Weeks? Certainly not months.
One of the most important questions to ask in any examination of the truth is “compared to what?” For instance, if I say I love you, implicit in that statement is a preference for you over others. In other words, compared to others, I prefer you. We prefer honesty compared to falsehood, satiation to hunger, warmth to cold and so on.
It is not logically valid to equate the word “love” with “family.” The word “family” is a mere description of a biological commonality – it makes no more sense to equate “love” with “family” than it does to equate “love” with “mammal.” Thus the word “love” must mean a preference compared to – what?
It is impossible to have any standards for love if we do not have any standards for truth. Since being honest is better than lying, and courage is better than cowardice, and truth is better than falsehood, we cannot have honesty and courage unless we are standing for something that is true. Thus when we say that we “love” someone, what we really mean is that his actions are consistent, compared to a rational standard of virtue. In the same way, when I say that somebody is “healthy,” what I really mean is that his organs are functioning consistently, relative to a rational standard of well-being.
Thus love is not a subjective preference, or a biological commonality, but our involuntary response to virtuous actions on the part of another.
If we truly understand this definition, then it is easy for us to see that a society that does not know truth cannot ever know love.
If nothing is true, virtue is impossible.
If virtue is impossible, then we are forced to pretend to be virtuous, through patriotism, clan loyalties, cultural pride, superstitious conformities and other such amoral counterfeits.
If virtue is impossible, then love is impossible, because actions cannot be compared to any objective standard of goodness. If love is impossible, we are forced to resort to sentimentality, or the shallow show and outward appearance of love.
Thus it can be seen that any set of principles that interferes with our ability to know and understand the truth hollows us out, undermining and destroying our capacity for love. False principles, illusions, fantasies and mythologies separate us from each other, from virtue, from love, from the true connections that we can achieve only through reality.
In fantasy, there is only isolation and pretence. Mythology is, fundamentally, loneliness and emptiness.
Imagination versus Fantasy
At this point, I think it would be well worth highlighting the differences between imagination and fantasy, because many people, on hearing my criticisms of mythology, think that they are now not supposed to enjoy Star Wars.
Imagination is a creative faculty that is deeply rooted in reality. Fantasy, on the other hand, is a mere species of intangible wish fulfillment. It took Tolkien decades of study and writing to produce “The Lord of the Rings” – and each part of that novel was rationally consistent with the whole. That is an example of imagination. If I laze about daydreaming that one day I will make a fortune by writing a better novel than “The Lord of the Rings” – but never actually set pen to paper – that is an example of fantasy. Imagination produced the theory of relativity, not fantasizing about someday winning a Nobel Prize.
Daydreams that are never converted into action are the ultimate procrastination. Imagining a wonderful future that you never have to act to achieve prevents you from achieving a wonderful future.
In the same way, imagining that you know the truth when you do not prevents you from ever learning the truth. Nothing is more dangerous than the illusion of knowledge. If you are going the wrong way, but do not doubt your direction, you will never turn around.
As Socrates noted more than 2,000 years ago, doubt is the midwife of curiosity, and curiosity breeds wisdom.
Fantasy is the opposite of doubt. Mythology provides instant answers when people do not even know what the questions are. In the Middle Ages, when someone asked “Where did the world come from?” he was told: “God made it.” This effectively precluded the necessity of asking the more relevant question: “What is the world?”
Because religious people believed they knew where the world came from, there was little point asking what the world was. Because there was little point asking what the world was, they never learned where the world came from.
Fantasy is a circle of nothingness, forever eating its own tail.
Defining Love
If people fantasize that they know what is true, then they inevitably stop searching for the truth. If I am driving home, I stop driving when I get there. If people fantasize that they know what goodness is, they inevitably stop trying to understand goodness.
And, most importantly, if people fantasize that they already are good, they stop trying to become good. If you want a baby, and you believe that you are pregnant, you stop trying to get pregnant.
The question – which we already know the answer to – thus remains: why do people who claim to love us never tell us what love is?
If I am an accomplished mathematician, and my child comes to me and asks me about the times tables, it would be rude and churlish of me to dismiss his questions. If I go to my mother, who for 30 years has claimed to love me, and ask her what love is, why is it that she refuses to answer my question? Why does my brother roll his eyes and change the subject whenever I ask him what it is that he loves about me? Why does my father claim to love me, while continually rejecting everything that I hold precious?
Why does everyone around me perpetually use words that they refuse to define? Are they full of a knowledge that they cannot express? That is not a good reason for refusing to discuss the topics. A novelist who writes instinctually would not logically be hostile if asked about the source of his inspiration. He may not come up with a perfect answer, but there would be no reason to perpetually avoid the subject.
Unless…
Unless, of course, he is a plagiarist.
What We Know
This is the knowledge that we have, but hate and fear.
We know that the people who claim to love us know precious little about us, and nothing at all about love.
We know that the people who claim to love us make this claim in order to create obligations within us.
We know that the people who claim to love us make this claim in order to control us.
And they know it too.
It is completely obvious that they know this, because they know exactly which topics to avoid. A counterfeiter will not mind if you ask him what the capital of Madagascar is. A counterfeiter will mind, however, if you ask him whether you can check the authenticity of his money. Why is this the one topic that he will try to avoid at all costs?
Because he knows that his currency is fake.
And he also knows that if you find that out, he can no longer use it to rob you blind.
Obligations
If I own a store, and take counterfeit money from a con man, but do not know that it is counterfeit, then I am obligated to hand over what he has “bought.”
In the same way, if I believe that I am loved – even when I am not loved – I am to a degree honour-bound to return that love. If my mother says that she loves me, and she is virtuous, then she must love me because I am virtuous. Since she is herself virtuous, then I “owe” her love as a matter of justice, just as I owe trust to someone who consistently behaves in a trustworthy manner.
Thus when somebody tries to convince you that they love you, they’re actually attempting to create an obligation in you. If I try to convince you that I am a trustworthy person, it is because I want all the benefits of being treated as if I were a trustworthy person. If I am in fact a trustworthy person, then I must understand the nature of trust – at least at some level – and thus I must know that it cannot be demanded, but must be earned. Since earning trust is harder than just demanding trust, I must know the real value of trust, otherwise I would not have taken the trouble to earn it through consistent behaviour – I would have just demanded it and skipped all the hard stuff!
If you demand trust, you are demanding the unearned, which indicates that you do not believe you can earn it. Thus anyone who demands trust is automatically untrustworthy.
Why do people demand trust?
To rob others.
If I want to borrow money from you, and I demand that you trust me, it’s because I am not trustworthy, and will be unlikely to pay you back.
In other words, I want to steal your money, and put you in my power.
It’s the same with love.
Love and Virtue
If I am virtuous, then virtuous people will regard me with at least respect, if not love. Corrupt or evil people may regard me with a certain respect, but they will certainly not love me.
Thus being virtuous and refusing to demand love from anyone is the best way to find other virtuous people. If you are virtuous and undemanding, then other virtuous people will naturally gravitate towards you. Virtue that does not impose itself on others is like a magnet for goodness, and repels corruption.
The practical result of true virtue is fundamental self-protection.
If my stockbroker consistently gets me 30% return on my investments, is there any amount of money that I will not give him, other than what I need to live? Of course not! Because I know I will always get back more than I give.
It’s the same with real love.
If I am virtuous, then I will inevitably feel positively inclined towards other virtuous people – and the more virtuous they are, the more I will love them. My energy, time and resources will be at their disposal, because I know that I will not be exploited, and that they will reciprocate my generosity.
If you and I have lent money to each other over the years, and have always paid each other back, then the next time you come to me for a loan, it would be unjust for me to tell you that I will not lend you anything because I do not think you will pay me back. Your continued and perpetual honesty towards me in financial matters has created an obligation in me towards you. This does not mean that I must lend you money whenever you ask for it, but I cannot justly claim as my reason for not lending you money a belief that you will not pay me back.
In the same way, if you have been my wife for 20 years, and I have never been unfaithful, if a woman calls and then hangs up, it would be unjust for you to immediately accuse me of infidelity.
A central tactic for creating artificial and unjust obligations in others is to demand their positive opinion, without being willing to earn it. The most effective way to do this is to offer a positive opinion, which has not been earned – to claim to love others.
If, over the past 20 years, I have rarely paid back any money I have borrowed from you, it is perfectly reasonable to refuse me an additional loan. I may then get angry, and call you unfair, and demand that you treat me as if I were trustworthy, but it would scarcely be virtuous for you to comply with my wishes. Indeed, it would be dishonest and unjust for you to ignore my untrustworthiness, because you would be acting as if there was no difference between someone who pays back loans, and someone who does not.
When we act in a virtuous manner towards others, we are creating a reservoir of goodwill that we can draw upon, just as when we put our savings into a bank. A man can act imperfectly and still be loved, just as a man can eat an occasional candy bar and still be healthy, but there is a general requirement for consistency in any discipline. I could probably hit a home run in a major-league ballpark once every thousand pitches, but that would scarcely make me a professional baseball player!
If I act in a trustworthy manner, I do not have to ask you to trust me – and in fact, I would be very unwise to do so. Either you will trust me voluntarily, which means that you respect honourable and consistent behaviour, and justly respond to those who do good, or you will not trust me voluntarily, which means that you do not respond in a just manner to trustworthy behaviour, and thus cannot be trusted yourself.
If, on the other hand, I come up to you and demand that you trust me, I am engaged in a complex calculation of counterfeiting and plunder.
The first thing I am trying to do is establish whether or not you know anything about trust. The second thing is to figure out your level of confidence and self-esteem. The third thing is figure out if you know anything about integrity.
An attacker will always try to find the weakest chink in your armour. If I demand trust from you, and you agree to provide it – without any prior evidence – then I know that you do not know anything about trust. Similarly, if you do not require that your trust be earned, then I know that you lack confidence and self-esteem. If you are willing to treat me as if I were trustworthy when I am not trustworthy, then it is clear to me you know very little about integrity.
This tells me all I need to know about your history. This tells me that you were never treated with respect as a child, and that you were never taught to judge people according to independent standards, and that every time you tried to stand up for yourself, your family attacked you.
In other words, I will know that you are easy prey.
I cannot create an obligation in you unless you accept that I have treated you justly in the past. As in all things, it is far easier to convince a weak person that you have treated him justly, than it is to actually treat people in a just and consistent manner. If I can convince you that I have treated you justly in the past, then you “owe” me trust and respect in the present.
“Love” as Predation
Imagine that we are brothers, and one day you awake from a coma to see me sitting by your bed. After some small talk, I tell you that you owe me $1,000, which you borrowed from me the day of your accident. I tell you that because I am a kind brother, and you are in the hospital, you do not have to pay me back the thousand dollars – I would just like you to remember it, so that the next time I need to borrow $1,000, you will lend it to me.
You might look in the pockets of the jeans you wore the day of your accident, and you might look around your apartment to see if there was $1,000 lying around, but there would be no real way to prove that I had not lent you the money. You would either have to call me a liar – an accusation for which you have no certain proof – or you would feel substantially more obligated to lend me money in the future.
If you call me a liar, I will get angry. If you accept the obligation without ever finding the $1,000, you will feel resentful. Either way, our relationship is harmed – and by telling you about the $1,000, I have voluntarily introduced a complication and a suspicion into our relationship, which is scarcely loving, just or benevolent.
This is the kind of brinksmanship and deception that goes on all the time in relationships – particularly in families.
When our parents tell us that they love us, they are in fact demanding that we provide for them. They are basically telling us that they have lent us $1,000 – even if we cannot remember it – and thus we owe them trust in the future, if not $1,000 in the present!
In other words, our parents spend an enormous amount of energy convincing us that they “love” us in order to create artificial obligations within us. In doing so, they take a terrible risk – and force us to make an even more terrible choice..
Brinksmanship
When somebody tells you that they love you, it is either a statement of genuine regard, based on mutual virtue, or it is an exploitive and unjust demand for your money, time, resources, or approval.
There is very little in between.
Either love is real, and a true joy, or love is false, and the most corrupt and cowardly form of theft that can be imagined.
If love is real, then it inflicts no unjust obligations. If love is real, then it is freely given without demands. If a good man gives you his love, and you do not reciprocate it, then he just realizes that he was mistaken, learns a little, and moves on. If a woman tells you that she loves you, and then resents any hesitation or lack of reciprocation you display, then she does not love you, but is using the word “love” as a kind of hook, to entrap you into doing what she wants, to your own detriment.
How can you possibly know whether the love that somebody expresses towards you is genuine or not?
It’s very, very simple.
When it is genuine, you feel it.
What happens, though, when a parent demands love from us?
Well, we must either submit to this demand, and pretend to respond in kind, or we must confront her on her manipulation – thus threatening the entire basis of the relationship.
Would someone who truly loves us ever put us in this terrible position?
Society and Religion
The principle of inflicting a good opinion in order to create an unjust obligation occurs at a social level, as well as at a personal level. Soldiers are supposed to have died “protecting us,” which creates an obligation for us to support the troops. The mere act of being born in a country creates a lifelong obligation to pay taxes at the point of a gun, in order to receive services that we never directly asked for. John F. Kennedy’s famous quote, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but rather what you can do for your country,” is another way of saying, “One of us is going to get screwed in this interaction, and it ain’t gonna be me!”
The same thing occurs in the realm of religion, of course, as well. Jesus died for your sins, God loves you, you will be punished if you do not obey, Hell is the destination of unbelievers etc. etc. etc.
All of these emotional tricks are designed to create an obligation in you that would not exist in any reasonable universe.
“Sacrifice,” in other words, is merely demand in disguise.
[Source: http://freedomainradio.com/BOARD/blogs/freedomain/archive/2008/09/11/book-on-truth-the-tyranny-of-illusion.aspx]
Parrents attitude toward children
Integrity
Integrity can be defined as consistency between reality, ideas and behaviour. Consistency with reality is not telling a child that daddy is “sick” when he is in fact drunk. Consistency with behaviour is not slapping a child for hitting another child. The value of this kind of integrity is also well understood by many, even if imperfectly practiced, and we will not deal with it much here either.
It is consistency with ideas that causes the most problems for families – and the most long-term suffering for children throughout their lives.
When you were a child, you were told over and over that certain actions were either good or bad. Telling the truth was good; stealing was bad. Hitting your brother was bad; helping your grandmother was good. Being on time was good; failing to complete chores was bad.
Implicit in all these instructions – moral instructions – was the premise that your parents knew what was right and what was wrong; what was good, and what was bad.
Do you think that was really true? Do you think that your parents knew what was right and wrong when you were a child?
When we tell a child that something is wrong – not just incorrect, but morally wrong – there are really only two possibilities. The first is that we actually know what is right and wrong in general, and we are applying our universal knowledge of right and wrong to a specific action committed by the child.
This is how it is always portrayed to the child. It is almost always the most dangerous lie in the world.
The second possibility is that we are telling our child that his actions are “wrong” for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with morality whatsoever.
For instance, we might tell a child that stealing is wrong because:
1. We are embarrassed at our child’s actions.
2. We are afraid of being judged a poor parent.
3. We are afraid that our child’s theft will be discovered.
4. We are simply repeating what was told to us.
5. We enjoy humiliating our child.
6. Correcting our child on “ethics” makes us feel morally superior.
7. We want our child to avoid behaviour that we were punished for as children.
... and so on
Assuming they are not terrified, most children, on first receiving moral instructions, will generally respond by asking “why?” Why is stealing wrong? Why is lying wrong? Why is bullying wrong? Why is hitting wrong?
These are all perfectly valid questions, akin to asking why the sky is blue. The problem arises in the fact that parents have no rational answers, but endlessly pretend that they do.
When a child asks us why something is wrong, we are put in a terrible bind. If we say that we do not know why lying is universally wrong, we believe we will lose our moral authority in the eyes of our children. If we say that we do know why lying is wrong, then we retain our moral authority, but only by lying to our children.
Since the fall of religion, we have lost our way in terms of ethics. As an atheist, I do not mourn the loss of the illusions of gods and devils, but I am alarmed at the fact that we have not yet admitted that the fall of religion has not provided us an objective and rational moral compass. By failing to admit to the fact that we do not know what we are doing ethically, we are perpetrating a grave moral error on our children.
Basically, we are lying to them about being good.
We tell them that certain things they do are right or wrong – yet we do not tell them that we do not know why those things are right or wrong. If our child asks us why lying is wrong, we can say that it causes people pain – but so does dentistry – or we can say “you don’t like it when someone lies to you” – which would be an incentive to not get caught, not to refrain from lying – and so on. Every answer we come up with leads to more questions and inconsistencies. What do we do then?
Why, then, we must bully them.
This does not mean hitting them or yelling at them – though sadly all too often this is the case – because as parents we have a near-infinity of passive-aggressive tactics such as sighing, acting exasperated, changing the subject, offering them a cookie, taking them for a walk, claiming to be “too busy,” distracting or rejecting them in a million and one ways.
These kinds of innocent questions about morality represent a kind of horror for parents. As parents, we must retain our moral authority over our children – but as citizens of modernity, we have no rational basis for that moral authority. Thus we are forced to lie to our children about being good, and about our knowledge of goodness, which transforms virtue from a rational discipline into a fearful fairy tale.
In the past, when religious mythology was dominant, when children asked “Where does the world come from?” parents could reply that God made it. Despite the superstitious ignorance of those who even now make the same claim, most modern parents provide the scientific and rational explanation of where the world came from, or at least send their children to the Web, an encyclopaedia, or the library.
There was a time, though, when the question of where the world came from was very difficult to answer. When religious explanations were becoming less and less credible, but scientific explanations had not become completely established, parents had to say – if they wanted to speak with integrity – “I don’t know where the world came from.”
By openly expressing their lack of certainty, parents not only acted with honesty and integrity, but also stimulated their children to pursue a truth that was admittedly absent from their world.
Alas, we suffer similar difficulties today, but about a far more important topic. The religious basis for ethics has fallen away from us, and we lack any credible or accepted theory to replace it. For a time, patriotism and allegiance to culture had some power to convince children that their elders knew something objective about ethics, but as government and military corruption have become increasingly evident, allegiance to a country, a state or a military ethos has become an increasingly fragile basis for ethical absolutes. Even our cherished theories about the virtues of democracy have come under increasing pressure, as gargantuan governments continue to separate themselves from the wishes of their citizens and act in a virtual “state of nature.”
Religious explanations of virtue have failed not just because we no longer believe in God, but also because it is now completely self-evident that when most people refer to “truth,” they are really referring to culture.[...]
Too Harsh?
I have often been accused of being too harsh on parents. “Parents do the best they can under difficult circumstances; you cannot judge the practical instructions of parents according to some abstract and absolute philosophical standard. My parents were not philosophers – they were simply telling me the truth that they believed, that they thought was accurate.”
The wonderful thing about applying philosophical concepts to our own lives is that theories are very easy to test. Discussing a philosophical theory about the causes of the decline of the Roman Empire is a largely theoretical exercise, since we cannot go back in time and test it.
Theories about our families, however, are very easy to test, assuming that we have access to the relevant family members.
It is my firm belief that most human beings are absolutely brilliant. I have come to this conclusion after decades of studying philosophy and having the most amazing conversations with countless people. I am now certain that parents know exactly what they are doing – and a relatively simple test can prove this to the satisfaction of any rational person.
A Practical Exercise
Sit down with your parents and ask them what the capital of Madagascar is – or some other piece of trivia that they are unlikely to know. They will very likely smile, shake their heads and say, “I don’t know.” They will not avoid the question. They will be more than happy to help you look it up. It will be a trivial fact-finding interaction.
After you have established what the capital of Madagascar is, ask them: “What is goodness?”
I absolutely guarantee you that there will be an instant chill in the room – there will be an enormous amount of tension, and your parents – and probably you – will feel a very strong desire to change the subject, or drop the question.
Why is that? Why is it that when you ask your parents to explain what goodness is, the tension in the room spikes dramatically?
Well, for the same reason that Socrates was introduced to a grim libation called hemlock.
There is terror in the face of the question “What is goodness?” because authority figures claim the right to tell us what to do based on their superior knowledge. If we decide to learn karate, we submit ourselves to the judgment and instruction of somebody who is an expert in karate. If we become ill, we submit our judgment to a doctor, an expert in the field. In other words, when we lack knowledge, we defer to those who claim greater knowledge.
Our parents claimed the right to instruct us on good and bad based on their great knowledge of ethics, not based on their power as parents. Our fathers did not say to us: “Obey me or I will beat you.” Although that terrible sentence might have come out of their mouths at some point, the basis of their ethics was that we owed them obedience as a just debt, and thus could be punished for failing to provide it. “Honour thy father and thy mother” is a staple of moral instruction the world over, both religious and secular. However, the honour that we are supposed to bestow upon our parents must be based upon their superior knowledge and practice of virtue – otherwise the word “honour” would make no sense. If we were thrown in jail, we would obey the prison guards because they held power over us, not because we “honoured” them. If a mugger presses a knife to our ribs, we hand him our wallet – obey his wishes – not because we honour him, but because he has the power to harm us.
By using the word “honour,” parents are claiming that we owe them allegiance due to their superior knowledge and practice of virtue.
Currently, the foundational “ethic” of the family – the entire basis for the authority of adults – is that parents know right from wrong, and children do not. Metaphorically, the parents are the doctors, and the children are the patients. Parents claim the authority to tell their children what to do for the same reason that doctors claim the authority to tell their patients what to do – the superior knowledge of the former, and the relative ignorance of the latter.
If you are unwell, and put yourself in the care of a doctor, and follow his instructions, but find that you do not get better – but in fact seem to get worse – it would be wise to sit down with that doctor and review his abilities – particularly if you cannot change physicians for some reason. Since following his instructions is making you worse, you must ask: “Why should I follow your instructions?”
It would be logical to begin by asking the doctor to confirm his actual credentials. Then, you might continue by asking what his definition of health is, to make sure that you were both on the same page. Then, you would continue to drill down to more specific questions about the nature of your illness, the nature of his knowledge of the human body, and his understanding of your ailments and the methodology by which he came up with your cure.
This is the conversation that you must have with your parents regarding the nature of virtue and their knowledge of it. Your parents were the moral doctors of your being while you were growing up – if, as an adult, you are happy and healthy, full of joy and engaged in deep and meaningful relationships, it is still worthwhile to examine the knowledge of your parents, since you may have children in time, and will yourself become a “doctor” to them.
If, however, you are not happy and fulfilled as an adult, then it is essential that you examine your parents’ ethical knowledge. If your health regimen has been established by a quack who has no idea what he is doing, you will never be healthy as long as you follow his instructions, since one can never randomly arrive at the truth.
If a madman passes himself off as a doctor, when a patient asks for his credentials, he will smile, spread his hands, and say, “Well of course I don’t have any!” His openness about his lack of knowledge and credentials establishes his relative innocence.
However, when the patient asks for a doctor’s credentials, if the doctor evades the question, or becomes hostile, or dismissive, then clearly the “doctor” is fully aware of what he is doing at some level. A man who commits a murder in a police station may claim insanity; a man who murders in secret and then hides the body has the capacity for rationality, if not virtue, and thus cannot claim to be mad.
The fact that your parents will do almost anything to avoid the question “What is goodness?” is the most revealing piece of knowledge that you can possess. It is the fact that blows the cage of culture wide open. It is the horrifying knowledge that will set you free.
You will not just benefit from examining your parents. You can also sit down with your priest, and examine him with regards to the nature of the existence of God (this is a useful conversation to have with religious parents as well). If you are persistent, and do your research in advance, you will very quickly discover that your priest also has no certain knowledge about the existence of God – and will become very uncomfortable and/or aggressive if you persist, which you should.
Is it wrong for a priest to say that he only believes in God because he “has a feeling”? In terms of truth, not exactly – in terms of integrity, absolutely.
The fundamental problem is not that the priest claims the emotional irrationality of “faith” as his justification for his belief in God, but rather that the existence of God was presented to you as an objective fact, and also that you were not allowed the same criteria for “knowledge.”
These two facets of the falsehoods you were told as a child are essential to your liberation as an adult.
Fiction as Facts
[...]A counterfeiter necessarily respects the value of real money, since he does not spend his time and energies creating exact replicas of Monopoly banknotes. The counterfeiter wishes to accurately reproduce real money because he knows that real money has value – he wishes his reproduction to be as accurate as possible because he knows that his fake money does not have value.
Similarly, parents present their opinions as facts because they know that objective facts have more power and validity than mere opinion. A “doctor” who fakes his own credentials does so because he knows credentials have the power to create credibility.
Recognizing the power of truth – and using that power to reinforce lies – is abominably corrupt. A man who presents his opinions as facts does so because he recognizes the value of facts. Using the credibility of “truth” to make falsehoods more plausible simultaneously affirms and denies the value of honesty and integrity. It is a fundamental logical contradiction in theory, and almost unbearably hypocritical in practice.
Thus it always happens that when grown children begin to examine their elders, they rapidly discover that those elders do not in fact know what they claimed to know – but knew enough about the value of the truth to present their subjective opinions as objective knowledge. This hypocritical crime far outstrips the abuses of mere counterfeiting, or the faking of credentials, because adults can protect themselves against false currency and fake diplomas.
Children have no such defences.[...]
Is Ignorance Hypocrisy?
The argument is often made that parents are not aware of all the complexities of their own hypocrisies, and thus are not morally responsible for their inconsistencies.
Fortunately, there is no need for us to rely on mere theory to establish the truth of this proposition.
If I tell you to take Highway 101 to get to your destination, and it turns out that this takes you in the exact opposite direction, what would be a rational response if I were truly ignorant of the fact that I was giving you really bad directions?
Well, I would first insist that they were the correct directions, since I genuinely believe that they are. However, when you sat me down with a map and pointed out exactly why my directions were so bad, I would see the truth, apologize profusely, and openly promise never to give out bad directions again – and buy a whole bunch of maps to boot, and spend some significant amount of time studying them.
However, if I got angry the moment that you brought up that I had sent you in the wrong direction, and refused to look at any maps, and refused to admit that I was wrong, and kept changing the subject, and kept distracting you with emotional tricks, and got more and more upset, and refused to tell you how I came up with my directions – and ended up storming out of the room, you may be unsure of many things, but you would not be unsure of one thing at least.
You would no longer imagine that I was ever interested in giving good directions.
In the realm of the parent-child relationship, this realization comes as a profound and terrible shock. This realization lands like a nuclear blast over a shantytown, radiating out in waves of destruction, smashing down the assumptions you have about all of your existing relationships.
The moment you realize that your parents, priests, teachers, politicians – your elders in general – only used morality to control you, to subjugate you – as a tool of abuse – your life will never be the same again.
The terrifying fact that your elders knew the power of virtue, but used that power to control, corrupt, bully and exploit you, reveals the genuine sadism that lies at the core of culture – it reveals the awful “cult” in culture.
A doctor who fakes his credentials is bad enough – how would any sane person judge a doctor who studies the human body not to heal it, but to more effectively cause pain?
A fraud is still better than a sadist.
What can we say, then, about parents and other authority figures who know all there is to know about the power and effectiveness of using moral arguments to control the actions and thoughts of children – who respect the power of virtue – and then use that power to destroy any capacity for moral integrity in their children?
In movies, terrorists almost invariably kidnap the wife or child of the hero in order to enforce his compliance with their wishes. His virtues – love and loyalty – are thus turned into the service of evil. The better he is, the worse he must act. The more he loves virtue, the more he is controlled by evil.
And thus do the best become the worst.
And thus are children raised.
And this was your instruction.
[...]
The Contradictory Appeal
When your father says, “Honour thy father and thy mother,” he is invoking both a principle and a person. The principle is that all mothers and fathers are honourable, and so deserving of respect. The person that he is invoking is himself and your mother specifically – thy mother and father.
Logically, this makes no sense.
Saying, “Honour thy father and thy mother,” is like saying, “Honour all the women who are my wife.” If I must honour all women, then I will automatically honour your wife, since she is a woman. If I must honour your wife, then there is no point saying that I must honour her as a woman, because that would involve honouring all women again. It’s one or the other.
If you must honour the category “father” and “mother,” then you must respect all mothers and fathers equally. Showing preference for your own parents would be unjust.
If you must show preference for your own mother and father, then the category of “mother” and “father” is irrelevant. It must be for some other reason, then, that you should honour these particular individuals.
If you should bestow honour upon your mother and father as individuals, and for no objective principle, then what is really being demanded is not honour, but obedience towards individuals in the guise of honour as a principle.
This basic logical contradiction, while complicated to discuss syllogistically, is something that every child instinctually understands. When our mother demands that we respect her, do we not feel contempt, frustration and despair? Demanding respect is like demanding love, or hijacking an aircraft. It is commanding a destination, rather than respecting the free choices of individuals.
We cannot imagine someone hijacking an aircraft on its way to Vladivostok and demanding, “Take me to Vladivostok!” People hijack planes because the plane is not going where they want to go.
[...]
The Open Cage…
I’d like you to imagine a man standing in the middle of a large meadow. You spend some time watching this man, and it doesn’t take you very long to notice that he paces back and forth in a small square, about 10 feet on either side. That’s all. Just 10 feet.
After a few hours of watching him do this, you walk up to him. When you reach forward to shake his hand, however, your fingers are burned by a strong electrical shock from an invisible barrier.
Startled – and hurt – you cry out. The man looks up.
“What’s the matter?” he asks.
“I just ran into this invisible wall which gave me a hell of a shock!” you cry.
He frowns. “I didn’t see anything.”
You blink. “Really? You’ve never heard or seen or felt this invisible barrier?”
He shakes his head slowly. “What invisible barrier?”
“The one that surrounds you – the one that keeps you penned in this little 10 foot square!”
“What little 10 foot square?” he demands. “There’s no little 10 foot square! I can go wherever the hell I want!”
“No you can’t!”
“Who the hell are you to tell me where I can and cannot go? I decide that!”
“I’m not telling you where you can and cannot go – I’m just telling you what you are actually doing!”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“Well, I’ve been watching you for the past few hours, and you’re standing in the middle of this great big meadow, and yet all you do is pace back and forth 10 feet.”
“I can go anywhere I damn well please!” the man repeats angrily.
“You say that, but all you do is pace around and around in a little 10 foot square! If you can go anywhere you please, why don’t you just try taking one extra step?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he growls. “Now get the hell off my damn property!”
“Wait – I can show you!” You reach down and pick up some grass. You throw it towards the man. A few feet away from his face, the blades of grass burst into flame and evaporate. You do this several times, proving definitively that there is in fact an invisible force field that surrounds him, roughly 10 feet by 10 feet.
“Do you see?” you ask eagerly. “Do you see that you are in an invisible cage?”
“Get the hell off my property, you madman!” he cries, shaking with rage.
“But you must know that you are in an invisible cage,” you cry out. “You must know that, because you never try to go outside these walls. You must have at one time tried to break free of this cage, and were burned by the electric shock, which is why you never take more than a few steps before turning around! Don’t you see?”
He pulls out a gun, screams that he has a principle of shooting trespassers, and, quite sensibly, you run away.
This is the great paradox of attempting to teach people what they already know. Everybody claims complete freedom, but paces back and forth, trapped in a little square. Everyone is surrounded by the invisible cages of culture and mythology, and denies it completely. The evidence of these cages is very clear, because people always turn back just before they hit them. But then they deny that these cages exist.
Everybody acts as if they are perfectly free, and perfectly enslaved at the same time. Nobody admits to being in a prison, but everyone shuffles around in an invisible 10 x 10 cell.
In the same way, everyone tells you that they are free, but in fact everyone is trapped in little tiny cells of allowable conversation. Everybody tells you they love you, but strenuously avoids talking about what love is, or what about you they love.
Everyone tells you to be good, but they have no idea what goodness is – and will savage you for even having the temerity to ask the question.
Everybody talks about the truth, but the real truth is that nobody can talk about the truth – what it is, how it is defined, how it is verified, and its value.
Responsibility
If the man in the meadow were put into his cage when he was a toddler, he would have discovered the limits of his confinement – painfully – when he was very young. It is entirely conceivable that he would end up just avoiding his invisible prison bars, to retain his illusion of freedom, and repress the pain of imprisonment. If you cannot escape your prison, then you might as well imagine that you’re free.
The man is not responsible for being put in the cage when he was a toddler, and he is not responsible for his resulting repression, and he is not responsible for not testing the bars of his cage, but instead turning away before he touches them.
There are two things, however, that he is responsible for.
The first thing that he is responsible for denying is clear and tangible evidence that contradicts his belief. There are two primary pieces of evidence: the grass that bursts into flame, and the fact that although he says he is free, he never takes more than a few steps in any direction before turning around.
The second thing that he is responsible for is shutting down the conversation when it makes him uncomfortable.
The essence of wisdom is learning the value of “staying in the conversation,” even when it makes you uncomfortable.
Especially when it makes you uncomfortable.
[Source: http://freedomainradio.com/BOARD/blogs/freedomain/archive/2008/09/11/book-on-truth-the-tyranny-of-illusion.aspx ]
Integrity can be defined as consistency between reality, ideas and behaviour. Consistency with reality is not telling a child that daddy is “sick” when he is in fact drunk. Consistency with behaviour is not slapping a child for hitting another child. The value of this kind of integrity is also well understood by many, even if imperfectly practiced, and we will not deal with it much here either.
It is consistency with ideas that causes the most problems for families – and the most long-term suffering for children throughout their lives.
When you were a child, you were told over and over that certain actions were either good or bad. Telling the truth was good; stealing was bad. Hitting your brother was bad; helping your grandmother was good. Being on time was good; failing to complete chores was bad.
Implicit in all these instructions – moral instructions – was the premise that your parents knew what was right and what was wrong; what was good, and what was bad.
Do you think that was really true? Do you think that your parents knew what was right and wrong when you were a child?
When we tell a child that something is wrong – not just incorrect, but morally wrong – there are really only two possibilities. The first is that we actually know what is right and wrong in general, and we are applying our universal knowledge of right and wrong to a specific action committed by the child.
This is how it is always portrayed to the child. It is almost always the most dangerous lie in the world.
The second possibility is that we are telling our child that his actions are “wrong” for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with morality whatsoever.
For instance, we might tell a child that stealing is wrong because:
1. We are embarrassed at our child’s actions.
2. We are afraid of being judged a poor parent.
3. We are afraid that our child’s theft will be discovered.
4. We are simply repeating what was told to us.
5. We enjoy humiliating our child.
6. Correcting our child on “ethics” makes us feel morally superior.
7. We want our child to avoid behaviour that we were punished for as children.
... and so on
Assuming they are not terrified, most children, on first receiving moral instructions, will generally respond by asking “why?” Why is stealing wrong? Why is lying wrong? Why is bullying wrong? Why is hitting wrong?
These are all perfectly valid questions, akin to asking why the sky is blue. The problem arises in the fact that parents have no rational answers, but endlessly pretend that they do.
When a child asks us why something is wrong, we are put in a terrible bind. If we say that we do not know why lying is universally wrong, we believe we will lose our moral authority in the eyes of our children. If we say that we do know why lying is wrong, then we retain our moral authority, but only by lying to our children.
Since the fall of religion, we have lost our way in terms of ethics. As an atheist, I do not mourn the loss of the illusions of gods and devils, but I am alarmed at the fact that we have not yet admitted that the fall of religion has not provided us an objective and rational moral compass. By failing to admit to the fact that we do not know what we are doing ethically, we are perpetrating a grave moral error on our children.
Basically, we are lying to them about being good.
We tell them that certain things they do are right or wrong – yet we do not tell them that we do not know why those things are right or wrong. If our child asks us why lying is wrong, we can say that it causes people pain – but so does dentistry – or we can say “you don’t like it when someone lies to you” – which would be an incentive to not get caught, not to refrain from lying – and so on. Every answer we come up with leads to more questions and inconsistencies. What do we do then?
Why, then, we must bully them.
This does not mean hitting them or yelling at them – though sadly all too often this is the case – because as parents we have a near-infinity of passive-aggressive tactics such as sighing, acting exasperated, changing the subject, offering them a cookie, taking them for a walk, claiming to be “too busy,” distracting or rejecting them in a million and one ways.
These kinds of innocent questions about morality represent a kind of horror for parents. As parents, we must retain our moral authority over our children – but as citizens of modernity, we have no rational basis for that moral authority. Thus we are forced to lie to our children about being good, and about our knowledge of goodness, which transforms virtue from a rational discipline into a fearful fairy tale.
In the past, when religious mythology was dominant, when children asked “Where does the world come from?” parents could reply that God made it. Despite the superstitious ignorance of those who even now make the same claim, most modern parents provide the scientific and rational explanation of where the world came from, or at least send their children to the Web, an encyclopaedia, or the library.
There was a time, though, when the question of where the world came from was very difficult to answer. When religious explanations were becoming less and less credible, but scientific explanations had not become completely established, parents had to say – if they wanted to speak with integrity – “I don’t know where the world came from.”
By openly expressing their lack of certainty, parents not only acted with honesty and integrity, but also stimulated their children to pursue a truth that was admittedly absent from their world.
Alas, we suffer similar difficulties today, but about a far more important topic. The religious basis for ethics has fallen away from us, and we lack any credible or accepted theory to replace it. For a time, patriotism and allegiance to culture had some power to convince children that their elders knew something objective about ethics, but as government and military corruption have become increasingly evident, allegiance to a country, a state or a military ethos has become an increasingly fragile basis for ethical absolutes. Even our cherished theories about the virtues of democracy have come under increasing pressure, as gargantuan governments continue to separate themselves from the wishes of their citizens and act in a virtual “state of nature.”
Religious explanations of virtue have failed not just because we no longer believe in God, but also because it is now completely self-evident that when most people refer to “truth,” they are really referring to culture.[...]
Too Harsh?
I have often been accused of being too harsh on parents. “Parents do the best they can under difficult circumstances; you cannot judge the practical instructions of parents according to some abstract and absolute philosophical standard. My parents were not philosophers – they were simply telling me the truth that they believed, that they thought was accurate.”
The wonderful thing about applying philosophical concepts to our own lives is that theories are very easy to test. Discussing a philosophical theory about the causes of the decline of the Roman Empire is a largely theoretical exercise, since we cannot go back in time and test it.
Theories about our families, however, are very easy to test, assuming that we have access to the relevant family members.
It is my firm belief that most human beings are absolutely brilliant. I have come to this conclusion after decades of studying philosophy and having the most amazing conversations with countless people. I am now certain that parents know exactly what they are doing – and a relatively simple test can prove this to the satisfaction of any rational person.
A Practical Exercise
Sit down with your parents and ask them what the capital of Madagascar is – or some other piece of trivia that they are unlikely to know. They will very likely smile, shake their heads and say, “I don’t know.” They will not avoid the question. They will be more than happy to help you look it up. It will be a trivial fact-finding interaction.
After you have established what the capital of Madagascar is, ask them: “What is goodness?”
I absolutely guarantee you that there will be an instant chill in the room – there will be an enormous amount of tension, and your parents – and probably you – will feel a very strong desire to change the subject, or drop the question.
Why is that? Why is it that when you ask your parents to explain what goodness is, the tension in the room spikes dramatically?
Well, for the same reason that Socrates was introduced to a grim libation called hemlock.
There is terror in the face of the question “What is goodness?” because authority figures claim the right to tell us what to do based on their superior knowledge. If we decide to learn karate, we submit ourselves to the judgment and instruction of somebody who is an expert in karate. If we become ill, we submit our judgment to a doctor, an expert in the field. In other words, when we lack knowledge, we defer to those who claim greater knowledge.
Our parents claimed the right to instruct us on good and bad based on their great knowledge of ethics, not based on their power as parents. Our fathers did not say to us: “Obey me or I will beat you.” Although that terrible sentence might have come out of their mouths at some point, the basis of their ethics was that we owed them obedience as a just debt, and thus could be punished for failing to provide it. “Honour thy father and thy mother” is a staple of moral instruction the world over, both religious and secular. However, the honour that we are supposed to bestow upon our parents must be based upon their superior knowledge and practice of virtue – otherwise the word “honour” would make no sense. If we were thrown in jail, we would obey the prison guards because they held power over us, not because we “honoured” them. If a mugger presses a knife to our ribs, we hand him our wallet – obey his wishes – not because we honour him, but because he has the power to harm us.
By using the word “honour,” parents are claiming that we owe them allegiance due to their superior knowledge and practice of virtue.
Currently, the foundational “ethic” of the family – the entire basis for the authority of adults – is that parents know right from wrong, and children do not. Metaphorically, the parents are the doctors, and the children are the patients. Parents claim the authority to tell their children what to do for the same reason that doctors claim the authority to tell their patients what to do – the superior knowledge of the former, and the relative ignorance of the latter.
If you are unwell, and put yourself in the care of a doctor, and follow his instructions, but find that you do not get better – but in fact seem to get worse – it would be wise to sit down with that doctor and review his abilities – particularly if you cannot change physicians for some reason. Since following his instructions is making you worse, you must ask: “Why should I follow your instructions?”
It would be logical to begin by asking the doctor to confirm his actual credentials. Then, you might continue by asking what his definition of health is, to make sure that you were both on the same page. Then, you would continue to drill down to more specific questions about the nature of your illness, the nature of his knowledge of the human body, and his understanding of your ailments and the methodology by which he came up with your cure.
This is the conversation that you must have with your parents regarding the nature of virtue and their knowledge of it. Your parents were the moral doctors of your being while you were growing up – if, as an adult, you are happy and healthy, full of joy and engaged in deep and meaningful relationships, it is still worthwhile to examine the knowledge of your parents, since you may have children in time, and will yourself become a “doctor” to them.
If, however, you are not happy and fulfilled as an adult, then it is essential that you examine your parents’ ethical knowledge. If your health regimen has been established by a quack who has no idea what he is doing, you will never be healthy as long as you follow his instructions, since one can never randomly arrive at the truth.
If a madman passes himself off as a doctor, when a patient asks for his credentials, he will smile, spread his hands, and say, “Well of course I don’t have any!” His openness about his lack of knowledge and credentials establishes his relative innocence.
However, when the patient asks for a doctor’s credentials, if the doctor evades the question, or becomes hostile, or dismissive, then clearly the “doctor” is fully aware of what he is doing at some level. A man who commits a murder in a police station may claim insanity; a man who murders in secret and then hides the body has the capacity for rationality, if not virtue, and thus cannot claim to be mad.
The fact that your parents will do almost anything to avoid the question “What is goodness?” is the most revealing piece of knowledge that you can possess. It is the fact that blows the cage of culture wide open. It is the horrifying knowledge that will set you free.
You will not just benefit from examining your parents. You can also sit down with your priest, and examine him with regards to the nature of the existence of God (this is a useful conversation to have with religious parents as well). If you are persistent, and do your research in advance, you will very quickly discover that your priest also has no certain knowledge about the existence of God – and will become very uncomfortable and/or aggressive if you persist, which you should.
Is it wrong for a priest to say that he only believes in God because he “has a feeling”? In terms of truth, not exactly – in terms of integrity, absolutely.
The fundamental problem is not that the priest claims the emotional irrationality of “faith” as his justification for his belief in God, but rather that the existence of God was presented to you as an objective fact, and also that you were not allowed the same criteria for “knowledge.”
These two facets of the falsehoods you were told as a child are essential to your liberation as an adult.
Fiction as Facts
[...]A counterfeiter necessarily respects the value of real money, since he does not spend his time and energies creating exact replicas of Monopoly banknotes. The counterfeiter wishes to accurately reproduce real money because he knows that real money has value – he wishes his reproduction to be as accurate as possible because he knows that his fake money does not have value.
Similarly, parents present their opinions as facts because they know that objective facts have more power and validity than mere opinion. A “doctor” who fakes his own credentials does so because he knows credentials have the power to create credibility.
Recognizing the power of truth – and using that power to reinforce lies – is abominably corrupt. A man who presents his opinions as facts does so because he recognizes the value of facts. Using the credibility of “truth” to make falsehoods more plausible simultaneously affirms and denies the value of honesty and integrity. It is a fundamental logical contradiction in theory, and almost unbearably hypocritical in practice.
Thus it always happens that when grown children begin to examine their elders, they rapidly discover that those elders do not in fact know what they claimed to know – but knew enough about the value of the truth to present their subjective opinions as objective knowledge. This hypocritical crime far outstrips the abuses of mere counterfeiting, or the faking of credentials, because adults can protect themselves against false currency and fake diplomas.
Children have no such defences.[...]
Is Ignorance Hypocrisy?
The argument is often made that parents are not aware of all the complexities of their own hypocrisies, and thus are not morally responsible for their inconsistencies.
Fortunately, there is no need for us to rely on mere theory to establish the truth of this proposition.
If I tell you to take Highway 101 to get to your destination, and it turns out that this takes you in the exact opposite direction, what would be a rational response if I were truly ignorant of the fact that I was giving you really bad directions?
Well, I would first insist that they were the correct directions, since I genuinely believe that they are. However, when you sat me down with a map and pointed out exactly why my directions were so bad, I would see the truth, apologize profusely, and openly promise never to give out bad directions again – and buy a whole bunch of maps to boot, and spend some significant amount of time studying them.
However, if I got angry the moment that you brought up that I had sent you in the wrong direction, and refused to look at any maps, and refused to admit that I was wrong, and kept changing the subject, and kept distracting you with emotional tricks, and got more and more upset, and refused to tell you how I came up with my directions – and ended up storming out of the room, you may be unsure of many things, but you would not be unsure of one thing at least.
You would no longer imagine that I was ever interested in giving good directions.
In the realm of the parent-child relationship, this realization comes as a profound and terrible shock. This realization lands like a nuclear blast over a shantytown, radiating out in waves of destruction, smashing down the assumptions you have about all of your existing relationships.
The moment you realize that your parents, priests, teachers, politicians – your elders in general – only used morality to control you, to subjugate you – as a tool of abuse – your life will never be the same again.
The terrifying fact that your elders knew the power of virtue, but used that power to control, corrupt, bully and exploit you, reveals the genuine sadism that lies at the core of culture – it reveals the awful “cult” in culture.
A doctor who fakes his credentials is bad enough – how would any sane person judge a doctor who studies the human body not to heal it, but to more effectively cause pain?
A fraud is still better than a sadist.
What can we say, then, about parents and other authority figures who know all there is to know about the power and effectiveness of using moral arguments to control the actions and thoughts of children – who respect the power of virtue – and then use that power to destroy any capacity for moral integrity in their children?
In movies, terrorists almost invariably kidnap the wife or child of the hero in order to enforce his compliance with their wishes. His virtues – love and loyalty – are thus turned into the service of evil. The better he is, the worse he must act. The more he loves virtue, the more he is controlled by evil.
And thus do the best become the worst.
And thus are children raised.
And this was your instruction.
[...]
The Contradictory Appeal
When your father says, “Honour thy father and thy mother,” he is invoking both a principle and a person. The principle is that all mothers and fathers are honourable, and so deserving of respect. The person that he is invoking is himself and your mother specifically – thy mother and father.
Logically, this makes no sense.
Saying, “Honour thy father and thy mother,” is like saying, “Honour all the women who are my wife.” If I must honour all women, then I will automatically honour your wife, since she is a woman. If I must honour your wife, then there is no point saying that I must honour her as a woman, because that would involve honouring all women again. It’s one or the other.
If you must honour the category “father” and “mother,” then you must respect all mothers and fathers equally. Showing preference for your own parents would be unjust.
If you must show preference for your own mother and father, then the category of “mother” and “father” is irrelevant. It must be for some other reason, then, that you should honour these particular individuals.
If you should bestow honour upon your mother and father as individuals, and for no objective principle, then what is really being demanded is not honour, but obedience towards individuals in the guise of honour as a principle.
This basic logical contradiction, while complicated to discuss syllogistically, is something that every child instinctually understands. When our mother demands that we respect her, do we not feel contempt, frustration and despair? Demanding respect is like demanding love, or hijacking an aircraft. It is commanding a destination, rather than respecting the free choices of individuals.
We cannot imagine someone hijacking an aircraft on its way to Vladivostok and demanding, “Take me to Vladivostok!” People hijack planes because the plane is not going where they want to go.
[...]
The Open Cage…
I’d like you to imagine a man standing in the middle of a large meadow. You spend some time watching this man, and it doesn’t take you very long to notice that he paces back and forth in a small square, about 10 feet on either side. That’s all. Just 10 feet.
After a few hours of watching him do this, you walk up to him. When you reach forward to shake his hand, however, your fingers are burned by a strong electrical shock from an invisible barrier.
Startled – and hurt – you cry out. The man looks up.
“What’s the matter?” he asks.
“I just ran into this invisible wall which gave me a hell of a shock!” you cry.
He frowns. “I didn’t see anything.”
You blink. “Really? You’ve never heard or seen or felt this invisible barrier?”
He shakes his head slowly. “What invisible barrier?”
“The one that surrounds you – the one that keeps you penned in this little 10 foot square!”
“What little 10 foot square?” he demands. “There’s no little 10 foot square! I can go wherever the hell I want!”
“No you can’t!”
“Who the hell are you to tell me where I can and cannot go? I decide that!”
“I’m not telling you where you can and cannot go – I’m just telling you what you are actually doing!”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“Well, I’ve been watching you for the past few hours, and you’re standing in the middle of this great big meadow, and yet all you do is pace back and forth 10 feet.”
“I can go anywhere I damn well please!” the man repeats angrily.
“You say that, but all you do is pace around and around in a little 10 foot square! If you can go anywhere you please, why don’t you just try taking one extra step?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he growls. “Now get the hell off my damn property!”
“Wait – I can show you!” You reach down and pick up some grass. You throw it towards the man. A few feet away from his face, the blades of grass burst into flame and evaporate. You do this several times, proving definitively that there is in fact an invisible force field that surrounds him, roughly 10 feet by 10 feet.
“Do you see?” you ask eagerly. “Do you see that you are in an invisible cage?”
“Get the hell off my property, you madman!” he cries, shaking with rage.
“But you must know that you are in an invisible cage,” you cry out. “You must know that, because you never try to go outside these walls. You must have at one time tried to break free of this cage, and were burned by the electric shock, which is why you never take more than a few steps before turning around! Don’t you see?”
He pulls out a gun, screams that he has a principle of shooting trespassers, and, quite sensibly, you run away.
This is the great paradox of attempting to teach people what they already know. Everybody claims complete freedom, but paces back and forth, trapped in a little square. Everyone is surrounded by the invisible cages of culture and mythology, and denies it completely. The evidence of these cages is very clear, because people always turn back just before they hit them. But then they deny that these cages exist.
Everybody acts as if they are perfectly free, and perfectly enslaved at the same time. Nobody admits to being in a prison, but everyone shuffles around in an invisible 10 x 10 cell.
In the same way, everyone tells you that they are free, but in fact everyone is trapped in little tiny cells of allowable conversation. Everybody tells you they love you, but strenuously avoids talking about what love is, or what about you they love.
Everyone tells you to be good, but they have no idea what goodness is – and will savage you for even having the temerity to ask the question.
Everybody talks about the truth, but the real truth is that nobody can talk about the truth – what it is, how it is defined, how it is verified, and its value.
Responsibility
If the man in the meadow were put into his cage when he was a toddler, he would have discovered the limits of his confinement – painfully – when he was very young. It is entirely conceivable that he would end up just avoiding his invisible prison bars, to retain his illusion of freedom, and repress the pain of imprisonment. If you cannot escape your prison, then you might as well imagine that you’re free.
The man is not responsible for being put in the cage when he was a toddler, and he is not responsible for his resulting repression, and he is not responsible for not testing the bars of his cage, but instead turning away before he touches them.
There are two things, however, that he is responsible for.
The first thing that he is responsible for denying is clear and tangible evidence that contradicts his belief. There are two primary pieces of evidence: the grass that bursts into flame, and the fact that although he says he is free, he never takes more than a few steps in any direction before turning around.
The second thing that he is responsible for is shutting down the conversation when it makes him uncomfortable.
The essence of wisdom is learning the value of “staying in the conversation,” even when it makes you uncomfortable.
Especially when it makes you uncomfortable.
[Source: http://freedomainradio.com/BOARD/blogs/freedomain/archive/2008/09/11/book-on-truth-the-tyranny-of-illusion.aspx ]
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