Unmaking Sense

Episode 9.11: How truths and facts that begin as helpers easily become controlling tyrannies.

Inversion is the way something meant to help us becomes something that tyrannises us. This easily happens with truths and facts when we find ourselves living to serve abstract truths rather than using truths to help us through life’s difficulties.

Episode 9.10: The immutability of truth and the mistaken notion that only imperfect things change.

That truths can change means that perfection can change. We explore the idea and some implications.

Episode 9.09: Truths and facts seen as eternal, immutable and unrevisable control us from the past.

We consider some of the implications of a view of truth and fact, as changeless. We look in particular at belief in the changelessness and authority for all time of religious texts and scriptures such as the Bible.

Episode 9.08: Why neither truth nor fact can be determined by reference to external authorities.

Refusal to justify what we believe, think, do, say and how we live our lives with reference to external authority is one consequence of rejection of metaphysics, but also the basis for the way that we grow up into responsible adults each of whom plays a full part in the democratic life of a society. To pretend that we can in the end blame external authorities for what we believe, do or say, and how we live our lives is an example of what Sartre called bad faith, and it is also an infringement of the third principle of pragmatism.

Episode 9.07: Truths, facts and authority; the dilemmas of language and habit.

Language constantly lures us into using or understanding words in ways dictated by the past and traditional ways of thinking. We must resist this temptation, especially over matters of truth and facticity. There are no permanent unrevisable truths and facts; everything is in flux. The challenge is to find our way through the ever-changing landscape by choosing what it is best for us to believe.

Episode 9.06: Why truth is the first casualty of our inability to say many things at once.

Because we cannot say many things at once and must by the nature of our intellectual framework, put one word in front of another in a sequence, we inevitably appear to prioritise some things over others. The things we say first things or we say last, wherever it may be, assume predominance, but what we really want is to be able to do is to say many things at once and because we can’t truth tends to be the first casualty because we latch onto one thing and make more of it than we should. We should all resolve, rather than taking it out of the context in which it occurs, take the whole and scruple it up again into a ball with multiple dimensions before we try to make sense of it.

Episode 9.05: Truths and facts depend on values, what we think matters, what we think to be human.

One of the problems that we always face when we say anything is that our speaking, writing, listening and reading are essentially linear with one thing coming after another. If we were able to say many things at once, and our non-conscious brains are certainly able to think many things at once, even if our conscious brains can’t, we would be less likely to seize upon single things as indicative of a position or a reality, less like to to misunderstand one another, and much more able, and ready to see whatever is said, heard, written or read, as one aspect of a much more complex whole, within which alone they make proper sense.

Episode 9.04: More examples of misdirection.

All sorts of people including monarchs, political leaders, captains of industry, tribes, cultures, families and friends have a vested interest in persuading us to become passionate about things that do not matter so that we expend our energies in them rather than the things that do. These are all instances of misdirection.

Episode 9.03: Prosperity as something we think we understand. But do we? Does it cause our problems?

World does not like us to challenge its most cherished assumptions. And one of its most cherished assumptions is that we all know, and it knows what prosperity amounts to. This supposition persuades us to work in pursuit of the earning power necessary to pursue that very notion of prosperity. But suppose the notion itself is mistaken, and even fraudulent, perhaps even a or the major cause of most human misery. Might we be spending our lives in pursuit of the means to acquire a prosperity that is itself an illusion?

Episode 9.02: Metaphysics, truth and protection rackets: being controlled by external worlds.

When we reject external authority we reject metaphysics, truth and slavery to other people’s beliefs and standards.