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
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
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.
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