What is truth?” Sometimes people ask this question because they wish to do nothing. Generic cynicism makes us feel hip and alternative even as we slip along with our fellow citizens into a morass of indifference. It is your ability to discern facts that makes you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society. The individual who investigates is also the citizen who builds. The leader who dislikes the investigators is a potential tyrant.
Change can be unwelcome or challenging even when there is no particular reason to fear its consequences. But if it threatens stability, order, or an established way of life, then fear, anger, and hatred can become epidemic. Aversion to even trivial losses is another well demonstrated trait of the human mind; how much more so if one’s entire way of life is threatened.
Political responsibility is measured against forward-looking projections, forecasts, and warnings of what is to come. The greater the future threat, the greater the responsibility. There are good reasons that states have often passed laws against fortune-tellers and prophets of doom. It is not just that their methods are suspect. Their predictions right or wrong are apt to endanger the public peace of mind. And yet, in the twenty-first century, there are no laws against social scientists and epidemiologists predicting catastrophe. Indeed, those wielding power and money cling to whatever foresight they can offer.
Steady GDP growth is the duct tape holding together this jerry-rigged social order in which low-income Americans have little to no emergency savings, many basic welfare benefits are contingent on employment, and the threadbare safety net is patchy by design. This top-heavy, gold-plated jalopy of a political economy can pass as road safe in fair weather; try to ride it through a once-in-a-century epidemiological storm and it starts to break apart.
Why not try to treat autoimmune illnesses in the same way that we do anxiety—by interrupting external feedback loops and allowing the body to return to its original baseline? Just because autoimmune illness takes place in the body doesn’t mean that’s where the conditions start.
Keynes’s fellow countryman Lord Bryce, one of the keenest observers of the age, declared in 1902 that “for economic purposes all mankind is fast becoming one people.” Later that decade, Norman Angell’s best-selling book The Great Illusion argued that the major European countries had become so interdependent that starting a war would evidently be self-defeating.
And yet the war came.
We become what we are, as Nietzsche put it, so it’s crucial today to adjust what you imagine you are, because it is already determining your perception of tomorrow.
At the same time, bad decisions, or politically objectionable decisions, are not sufficient grounds for impeachment, even if much of the nation is up in arms. The United States, unlike some other democracies, does not allow votes of no confidence.
Historical sequences take this as their model, each action standing non-causally to the other. In the chess example, however, the freedom to move one way or the other is dependent on accepting the authority of the rules of chess. Historical sequences are both rule-governed and expressive of freedom, but the rules change over time, and so, as Collingwood writes, ‘it is the task of the historian to discover what principles guided the actions of the persons he is studying, and not to assume that these have always been the same’ (IH 475).
Let us give the six their right names ["art falsely so-called;" "crafts"]. Where an emotion is aroused for its own sake, as an enjoyable experience, the craft of arousing it is amusement; where for the sake of its practical value, magic (the meaning of that word will be explained in chapter IV). Where intellectual faculties are stimulated for the mere sake of their exercise, the work designed to stimulate them is a puzzle; where for the sake of knowing this or that thing, it is instruction. Where a certain practical activity is stimulated as expedient, that which stimulates it is advertisement or (in the current modern sense, not the old sense) propaganda; where it is stimulated as right, exhortation.
Perhaps we, as therapists and as patients, can live with both eyes open and travel both roads, alternately or even both at once. T. S. Eliot wrote, “Teach us to care and not to care / Teach us to sit still” (Ash Wednesday), which could be translated for us as: “Teach us to grow and not to grow. Teach us simply to look.” Or, as Goethe said, “Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but not as interesting as looking” (Maxims and Reflections).
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