Imagine a form of continuum, perhaps for simplicity we could conceive of it as Euclidean, a spectrum like ASD if you will. This traversing of thoughts could look a bit like this:
Unknowable <—————————————————————> Known
(Inconceivable) (Communicable)
The left side represents the root mystery of existence, the “why are we here” question and the very notion of consciousness. It is unexplainable, it eludes us. I imagine this concept is akin to enlightenment. When the self gets out of one’s way we are left with the unadulterated essence of being. We know it as an experience and once witnessed by the mind it cannot ever be forgotten.
Conversely, there is the known. That which we can communicate with a degree of exactitude and which is generally agreed upon as being ‘true’. In the centre, spread across the divide, is the degrees of knowing. I’m not trying to convey the idea that anything on the continuum is objectively true. Truth would lie at the very extremes of either end and perhaps not even there; the deep mystery validated by experience and the hard pragmatic certainty of objective knowledge.
Most of life is spent floundering around in the mid latitudes, in quasi-truths propped up by all manner of imagined proofs. I see this daily. It comes from individuals who will tell you what they think is true. It comes from the internet with its trillions of words about how the way things are. The endless scrolling commentary from unknown users, with endless opinions on everything. It comes from the talking heads in the media who are downright pompous in their conflating fact with opinion - I think that comes with the suit and tie and the camera’s glass eye.
Don’t worry the irony is not lost on me as I express my opinion on what I think about people who express their opinions. I really would like to shut up. I don’t really want to write anything. I gain no great satisfaction from foisting my ideas on the void. I’d rather drink a flagon of ale and fall asleep under an olive tree, with a light summer’s breeze blowing, atop a small hillock with a view of surrounding Tuscany. Perhaps I should stop here?
But that would be unsatisfying for all concerned.
It’s not the expressing of thought that bothers me so. Why would all the authors of the world be bothered with their prose if it were all for naught? We would all be much worse off if ideas were not communicated at all. I don’t seek abolition of the word.
What frustrates me is the contemporary practice of assumed authority.
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.
Bertrand Russell
The consequences of speaking with authority on matters that you know little about can be disastrous. You might end up with a situation where billions of people are injected with a not so safe drug for an illness that they are not likely to suffer from in any substantial way. That’s an extreme example I know … that would never happen … ahem.
But aside from Covid-19, this phenomenon of overstating your case applies to all facets of contemporary thought. Once we would speak of destiny as being in the lap of the gods - something unpredictable, fate was at work and the future wide open to the extremes of life’s vagaries. But since the death of god and His usurping by science we think we know more, we think we can say A + B = C where in actuality A and B were never two functions that could be added together or the net result of such is Q. A wildly off-base result. And it happens again and again but we continue to default to these authorities for reasons I presume are the result of our evolutionary need for certainty.
Our mid latitude thinking is not serving us well. We are elevating concepts that may contain kernels of truth to absolutes all because the speaker has been anointed as an ‘expert’.
So much of the Covid-19 hysteria was wrong. And that wrongness came from traditional spheres of authority. Who got it right? The hacks. Yeah. Those amateur people who were ridiculed for ‘doing their own research’. Those biostatisticians, doctors, scientists and well intentioned enthusiasts who worked long into the night for no other reason than to extricate the truth. Those wise folk, so full of doubt who tentatively built up a picture based on information that resided on the right side of the spectrum. Carefully and with transparency they published their ideas where the corrupt and richly funded arm of censorship could not reach them.
And they were correct about almost everything.
Please enjoy some of my music:
They Don't Know Anything
Very good article. I have a term for the "truths" obtained by ultra-speciaized experts: "anti-knowledge". Steve Patterson has many examples in his "Dark Age" essay https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28VanG_0tyA - I think the meme in your post says it all!
Love it.
The greatest capital of Humanity are we...
Not Money.
Not Religion.
Not Government.
We Humans are the greatest Capital that is always will and ever was.
Love.
FF
https://fritzfreud.substack.com/p/the-greatest-capital-of-humanity