Recall Charles Sanders Peirce’s dictum: “It will appear that individualism and falsity are one and the same.” And: “Unless truth be recognized as public—as that of which any person would come to be convinced if he carried his inquiry, his sincere search for immovable belief, far enough—then there will be nothing to prevent each one of us from adopting an utterly futile belief of his own which all the rest will disbelieve.”
Or we might paraphrase this: "N=1 isn't a reliable source for knowledge."
Absent sophisticated and responsible gatekeepers, public discourse is subject to Gresham’s Law. Bad ideas and information drive out good; saner voices are drowned out by a digital mob of charlatans, schemers, extremists, and trolls disgorging misinformation, disinformation, and venom. Yes, “elite” gatekeepers have biases, blindspots, and axes to grind, but these can usually be kept in check by competing gatekeepers. To expect a good result from throwing the crooked timber of humanity together into one giant arena, instead of allowing the truest timbers to set standards and make rules, is a kind of madness.
Compare Rauch/Peirce above and think about, for instance, Facebook today.
Our republic should learn this lesson from Hitler, for we might one day vote into power a hero who wins a giant TV trivia contest and educate our children to believe the Information Superhighway is the road to knowledge. If one clue to psychopathy is a trivial mind expressing itself in high-sounding phrases, then an education emphasizing facts rather than thinking, and patriotic, politically or religiously correct “values” rather than critical judgment may produce a nation of achieving high school graduates who are also psychopaths.
Compare to Rauch/Peirce and Ophuls above: do you discern a trend here? Worth considering?
...even the great golden calf itself, the national economy, lost its power to organize the national polity.
Although with less context than I normally like, isn't the phrase "the great golden calf itself, the national economy" spot-on? Think of the Texas lieutenant governor who wanted us old folks to self-sacrifice to this idol.
Economic development as we know it started with Europe’s conquest of the New World, a bonanza of found wealth. Before the conquest, European societies were politically, economically, and socially closed. But once flooded by a surge of new energy from the Americas, they began to open and develop. All the philosophies, institutions, and values characteristic of modern life, above all liberal democracy, slowly emerged. Over time, as the New World bonanza was supplemented and then supplanted by fossil fuels, economic and political development proceeded in tandem to transform the world and to create the luxuries and freedoms we enjoy today. With a return of ecological scarcity, however, what abundance has given will be taken away—to what extent and how rapidly remains to be seen, but we can hardly expect liberal democratic institutions fostered by abundance and predicated on abundance to survive in their current form.
Perhaps why we're so loath to deal with climate change and other concurrent ecological disasters.
Man lives in this in-between, and what he calls the present is a life-long fight against the dead weight of the past, driving him forward with hope, and the fear of a future (whose only certainty is death), driving him backward toward “the quiet of the past” with nostalgia for and remembrance of the only reality he can be sure of.
Indigenous medicine takes a different tack. Experience takes precedence. Instead of reducing symptoms, medicines like ayahuasca accentuate them. Psychotherapy in the Amazon involves facing, not suffocating your demons. It can be unpleasant and uncover ugly things that you’d rather not look at, but if you weather the experience, you have access to the root of the issue. To put it another way, if we bury our symptoms in the West, then in the Amazonian tradition, we expose the symptoms to sunlight in the hope of burning them away altogether.
Isn't this what psychotherapy is supposed to do? But we do prefer drugs don't we?
In the battle of man versus nature, nature always wins.
Yup. Always.
From its beginnings Real America has also been religious, and in a particular way—evangelical and fundamentalist, hostile to modern ideas and intellectual authority. The truth will enter every simple heart, and it doesn’t come in shades of gray.
Beginning in the 1960s, America’s “culture war” effectively dissolved the political consensus that had prevailed since the end of the Second World War.
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