Like apes cowering in a cave while leopards
roam outside, our very lives depend on our ability to use our senses and our
intellect to correctly interpret the muffled sights, sounds and smells
filtering through to us. Evolution rewards those creatures who interpret
reality best with survival and reproduction, and punishes the dreamers with
short, brutal lives commonly ending as food for the focused.
The best way of dealing with reality is by
understanding it – by distinguishing the real from the unreal. We may choose to
spend our reflective moments speculating on how things ought to be, and
striving towards this desired state, but always in the context of how things
actually are, if we are to survive.
This article identifies and discusses a number
of realities, and catalogs a few common myths, unrealities, wishful desires
sometimes presented as realities, to the detriment of those who buy into them.
Realities
Life
We exist in this mortal realm as structured
biological organisms. We are born of women (mostly), we grow and learn, build
and consume, reproduce, rot and die. There is no reliable evidence that we
exist as conscious entities before we are conceived, or after we die. This
brief span is all that we have, for better or for worse.
Given these realities, life ought to be precious, ought to be preserved and nurtured in
all its variety. In reality, it is not. There is an abundance of life, and of
death. Life may simply be a process for
improving the design of a species’ genetic structure, through trial and
error, for an as yet unexplained reason,
or for no reason.
Nevertheless, without life there is no
meaning, no purpose, no reality. Therefore, the continued existence of your life,
your survival, is the ultimate purpose of your experience of reality.
Life ain’t fair, just, equal or kind
You may not like this reality, it may seem
unfair, perhaps it ought to be different, kinder, gentler – but reality doesn’t
care. In the eternal words of Ayn Rand, it is what it is, A is A.
The Stoics of Ancient Greece understood
this well. Railing against the gods is a waste of precious time and energy.
Dealing with the reality that chance has dealt is more sensible and more
productive.
Differences exist, discrimination is real
All life forms discriminate in order to
survive. They discriminate in what they eat and drink, where they live, who
they trust, and who they reproduce with. To stop discriminating is to invite
death. Lack of discrimination is a characteristic of immaturity and insanity.
Resources are limited
We live in a finite universe of limited
resources for which we compete with other living creatures. Our quality of life is directly influenced by
our ability to marshall
these resources to our advantage. Man’s great achievement as a species has been
to reduce the element of chance in his species’ access to critical resources,
through the use of his intellect and understanding of the nature of reality.
Power
There is a hierarchy of power which sets
the odds for most contests in our daily existence. A betting man backs the lion
against the lamb, the adult against the child, the big against the small, the
many against the few. The power hierarchy determines the probability of
success, not the fact. Sometimes the lowly microbe beats all comers. The lone
soldier with a machine gun beats the 50 huge but poorly armed barbarians. There
are more lambs in the world than lions.
Nevertheless, to survive, the reality of power, the threat it poses to
the less powerful, cannot be ignored. “Successful” leaders such as Genghis
Khan, Napoleon, Hitler have understood this reality well and used it to
accomplish their ends. “God is on the side of the biggest battalions”, said
Napoleon.
However, the costs of sustaining raw power
are huge, and invariably exhaust those who rely on power exclusively to
maintain their position, but not before they may have done considerable damage.
Ideas
An idea is merely a new thought, a fresh
way of looking at the world. It has no physical existence, although some ideas
can be implemented as artifacts. It acts in the minds of human beings
exclusively, possibly causing a change in behaviour based on it’s persuasive
power. The costs of sustaining and distributing a new idea can be minimal, as
individuals freely pass the idea between them. For this reason, a powerful new
idea is often more influential in the long run than the simple exercise of
power.
An idea’s survival depends on its appeal to
new and different minds. Most human minds place ongoing survival high on their
list of priorities, so an idea which appears to improve the chance of survival
is generally well-received. This does not mean the idea actually improves survival chances – only time and experience will
reveal that.
Human behaviour
Humans as a group behave in certain
predictable, repeatable ways, as do most life forms. An understanding of realistic human behaviour
is absolutely essential to any attempts to define how humans ought to behave.
Most humans:
- act to further their own best interests, within the limits of
their available information.
- Act independently, within certain agreed norms
- are social animals, preferring to live in hierarchical groups
rather than alone.
- act rationally (ie they think and reason) rather than
instinctively
- communicate reasonably effectively
Expectations of humans that go counter to
these common behaviours are likely to be frustrated. For example, expecting
humans to consistently act against their
best interests in order to assist others (altruism) is a common mistake of many
religions and socialist philosophies.
When humans appear to be acting to their
own detriment, in the view of observers, it is generally because the
information available to them is limited or wrong.
Intentions don’t count
The universe is blissfully indifferent to
human intentions. It is only actions that have any currency in the world of
reality. Gravity sucks, whether you meant for it to do so, or not. Prayers, hopes, desperate longing have not
been shown to influence the position of a stone by the smallest distance.
Your intentions may persuade another human
to forgive a particular action, but they will not change the inevitable
physical outcome of that particular action.
Things fall apart
Nothing endures. Entropy is a state of
nature. In the absence of intervention, disorder increases. All undertakings
will fail in time. The ultimate destination of this universe is chaos.
This long term reality is counter intuitive
to the generally optimistic, short term view of most humans.
Things can go terribly wrong
We like to believe that there is an
indulgent god-like father figure who has our interests at heart and who will
intervene on our behalf before things become unbearably bad. We will not be
tried beyond our limits.
This is a wishful fallacy. Nature has destroyed most life on our planet
several times, through meteorite impacts, climate changes, and the like. Man
himself, in his short history, has taken numerous disastrous wrong turns, and
continues to do so. The golden years of the Greeks and Romans were followed by
the dark and middle ages. The Chinese have periodically destroyed in a later
dynasty all they accomplished in an earlier. Great sections of humanity failed
to discover the wheel, or the written word.
Our reason, our intellect, our understanding of the real world is our
best guarantor of ongoing survival in this harsh, cold, empty universe.
Science
Science is the formal study of reality. The
scientific method provides a set of rules for theorizing about the nature of
reality, for validating or dismissing these theories through experiment,
observation and repetition, and for recording the results of these theories and
experiments in a consistent manner.
Reality can be hidden, compromised(through
drugs, fraud, perception), disputed, even denied. Repeatable, reproducible, quantitative
experiments help to discover reality, generally for the benefit of all mankind.
Competition and consensus
The truth is best approached from two
directions. Competition stimulates
progress, movement, advance by pitting competing parties, ideas, interests
against each other, and rewarding the smartest, strongest, and luckiest.
Competition ranks competitors from first to last, and favours the first at the
expense of the last.
Consensus, the opposite of competition,
results in discussion, delay, and ultimately destruction. Consensus ranks all
competitors equally, and rewards all efforts equally. Consensus is inconsistent
with human nature, and with reality.
Unrealities
Gods and demons
In our daily experience of life we
encounter no gods or demons in any predictable, repeatable, testable
fashion. When called upon to present
their credentials, they are always away on other business, temporarily out of
town, not taking calls.
Whilst there are numerous real phenomena
which are equally shy about honouring appointments (supernovas, black holes,
quarks), none of these phenomona are claimed to directly intervene in the
everyday affairs of us mortals, to take on human forms and intentions, or to
represent our interests.
Gods and demons are a part of human nature,
figments of our fertile imaginations, errors in our programming. This is their reality, inside our heads, not
in the real world beyond our bony craniums.
Rights and Laws
Human rights, sometimes expressed as laws, have no correspondence with reality. They are an expression of how some people
think the world OUGHT to be, but they have no independent reality of their own,
like a stone.
Claiming a particular right is merely the
expression of a wish. The universe is quite indifferent to rights or wishes
expressed by the elements of the universe, they are all equally bound by the
same set of physical laws which define reality.
You may believe that you ought to have a
right to security, food, shelter or wings. You will actually have whatever you
can find in the real world, through your own efforts, through the efforts of
others, or through chance.
Equality
In nature, due to its glorious diversity,
no two things are equal. No two snowflakes in all the Antarctic, no two grains
of sand in the Sahara, no two humans on the
planet are identical or equal. Attempting to make them so is a fool’s
enterprise, worthy of King Canute. One might say that the opportunities offered
to individuals OUGHT to be equal, but in reality, they never are.
Truth
There is no absolute truth, there are only
competing theories with greater or lesser levels of proof. Virtually every truth sacred to the mind of
man has been shown to be flawed, incomplete or just wrong over the course of
time. Mathematics itself is based on seven unprovable assumptions.
Although logically true statements can be
made, (eg A is A) they are normally trite and prosaic, so low in information
content as to be worthless.
Patriotism
Although the word “patriotism” can be
defined (love of one’s fatherland), the concept itself is meaningless. The
definition of the geographical space that may be considered the fatherland is
subject to endless reinterpretation and change. The likelihood that one loves
or even likes or even knows all the occupants of that space is vanishingly
small. The idea that one agrees with and shares all the actions, ambitions and
intentions of these occupants is simply laughable.
Like most “isms”, patriotism is simply a
mechanism for influencing many individuals to act in a way favourable to one
individual, or a small elite group.
Democracy
There are only two “fair” ways of making a
decision that affects individuals. The first way is for each individual to
separately and independently make each decision affecting that specific
individual. The only other way is for
every individual affected by the decision to be in full consensus with all
other affected individuals. Democracy,
majority rule, is a crude and unfair system which allows an arbitrarily
specified majority of people to impose their will on a smaller group, and to
claim moral sanction while doing so.
Ought to be
Philosophy deals with how the world is, and
politics deals with how the world ought to be.
Politics is easy, philosophy is hard. Everyone knows how things ought to
be, hardly anyone knows or agrees how things really are.
The ultimate purpose of politics is to
define the optimum system within which humans may live together in order to
optimize their individual life objectives. Individuals search for differing and
competing objectives in life. Obviously, any system which optimizes the
objectives of some at the expense of others is not optimum for all.
How our systems ought to be is the subject
of endless debate. All we can really do is define the desired outcomes from the
system, such as peace, prosperity, health, and then observe which systems best
deliver these outcomes over time, for all the participants. Intentions, as mentioned above, are of little
value in defining outcomes.
I believe there is ample evidence from around
the world to suggest that the following set of “oughts” are worthy of serious
consideration when searching for an optimum system of human governance.
Individual freedom
Ownership of one’s life
No unwanted obligations
Property rights
Self responsibility
Courtesy
Privacy
Charity
