When I gave the tentative title for my talk, it was on the question, how do we know what we know,
which is a question that has kind of bugged me for at least 50 years.
I am older than that.
And when it was suggested that, well, maybe I could relate this more to the theme of the conference
and deal with the question, how do we know when the state is lying?
Well, I didn't know if this was perhaps an effort
to limit my presentation to 30 seconds.
Maybe we're going to get caught up on time constraints
and so forth, because I could summarize
my answer in the words offered by my favorite standup
philosopher, George Carlin.
He says, my first rule, I don't believe anything
the government tells me.
And he met it, and his audiences really enjoyed that.
Kurt Vonnegut made the same comment
upon his return from World War II and his experiences.
Asked a friend of his, what did you really
learn from all this experience?
And the friend said, never to believe anything
the government tells you.
Because the states are grounded in such a network of lies
and contradictions, deceptions and conflicts,
it's safe to say that political systems
are inherently in conflict with reality
and must resort to intentional distortions of truth
as a way of trying to appear coherent,
at least, to a gullible public.
The big lie, as it was called,
and as was defended by Adolf Hitler,
has long been a tool of statism.
The more colossal the lie, Hitler intoned, the greater the propensity for homo bubus, H.L. Mencken's term, not Hitler's, homo bubus to believe it.
Because human beings are accustomed to telling small lies, but would be embarrassed to tell outlandish ones, the great lie acquires credibility, said Hitler.
For this reason, the lies that have been inseparable from truth surrounding 9-11 continue to be accepted by vast numbers of Americans, just as the state-serving myth that global warming is the product of human activity continues to be recited by politicians and other government officials, academics and members of the media, despite the refutations offered by literally hundreds of highly respected scientists in the field who have refused being baptized into
to the Secular Religion of Algorithm.
With the surface temperatures of Mars increasing while its polar ice cap is melting, I've heard
none of the high church environmentalists respond to my claim that this proves the existence
of human-like beings with their SUVs and aerosol sprays on Mars.
In so many ways, are intelligent people reminded to be skeptical of consensus-based definitions
of Reality. State action does to the harmonious nature of human society what the throwing
of a rock through the network of a spiderweb does. It disrupts and sometimes destroys existing
patterns of interconnectedness. Nowhere is this more evident than in the political manipulation
and interference with the informal order of the marketplace. With the help of mainstream
Media and Academia, the state then resorts to all kinds of fabrications to convince us
of the magnificence of the emperor's new clothing.
Alternative technologies, particularly the internet, make it so much easier to uncover
and reveal the systematic lying necessary to the success of political entities.
A libertarian newscaster friend once told me, you know, I was always tempted to go on the
air and say, good morning, and hear the lies your government would like to have you believe
Today. When John Stewart's The Daily Show is a perennial award winner for television
news reporting, the habitual lying engaged in by government officials will continue to
erode the credibility of the state, the media, and its academic lackeys. The respect once
enjoyed by these major sources of information in our world have been in sharp decline in
The PI, what I call the post-internet years, the rapidly diminishing circulations of major
newspapers and viewers of television network news are due not only to the parallel competition
provided by the internet but to a widespread awakening of the dishonest nature of what the
established media report.
Or can we forget the widespread challenge of two-statism reflected in Ron Paul's efforts
and undertakings that political parties and the media try to deflect into the harmless
babblings of Sarah Palin?
I don't know what is the more fitting metaphor for our times, either A. the manner in which
the Russian people regularly laughed at government newscasts, or B. that poignant scene at the
and the end of Orwell's Animal Farm as the powerless farm animals looked in the window
of the farmhouse to see the ruling pigs partying with the hated humans.
In these early years of the fourth stage of the information revolution, we are once again
encountering a truth made evident by Johann Gutenberg's invention, that information is
is very liberating for the same reason the political establishment has long adhered to Mark Twain's advice quote truth is the most valuable thing we have let us economize it as it always has the state needs to protect itself from harsh realities of truth by warring against persons and systems that contradict the self-serving mindset it requires for an obedient and servile public
Proposals have been made by those in power to give the President the power to shut down the Internet, in the name of national security, of course.
One of the proponents of this measure, Senator Joe Lieberman, went so far as to make a favorable comparison to the Chinese government on this matter,
which, quote, can disconnect parts of the Internet in case of war, and we need to have that here, too.
that little criticism of this plan, or of Lieberman's defense of it, have been offered within the mainstream media, for whom the demise of the intermittent would be competitively advantageous, provides insight into the confrontation between those whose desire is to inform others and those who want to be keepers of the thoughts of others.
As there will always be practitioners of free expression and seekers of truth among us,
and as I have much more trust and confidence in the nerds, geeks and hackers who are forever looking to expand the capacities of computer technologies,
I suspect that the efforts of the established order to silence those who ask questions will fail.
The state's war against truth-seeking is also seen in its reptilian reaction to the WikiLeaks phenomenon.
its continuing efforts to classify its activities as secret,
lest boobists discover the real nature of the state.
And more recently, are the pedagons buying and destroying all of Anthony Schaeffer's
– no relation, I'm going to add – Anthony Schaeffer's book, his revelatory book,
about the underside of U.S. activities in Afghanistan,
that members of the political establishment are so economically illiterate
has to fail to see how this book burning will only increase demand for the book.
The demand, I suspect, the publishers will be eager to satisfy.
This should encourage those of us who love the marketplace all the more.
In this respect, the Pentagon has placed itself in the same position that Bill O'Reilly did when
at the outset of the war against Iraq, he urged all good patriotic Americans
to Buy French Wines and Pour Them Down the Sewer to Punish the French for Not Having
Joined in the War Effort.
Well, the laughter indicates I don't need to explain that one.
I have three books that have been published, none of which have really received much attention.
And perhaps I can persuade the Pentagon and Bill O'Reilly to undertake a campaign to
have Americans buy copies of my books and conduct highly publicized book burnings thereof.
All in all, I found Karen Kwiatkowski's recent LRC blog more to my liking.
In explaining the efforts of those in power to suppress uncomfortable information, she
reminded us that, quote, boys and girls in D.C. are just like us.
They just want to be left alone, to conduct their business and nurture their friendships,
to make their way in the world without having someone always looking over their shoulder
and judging them.
It's actually kind of sweet, don't you think?
For the aforesaid reasons, the systematic lying associated with political systems troubles me less than do the efforts of status to undertake their programs even with the very best of intentions.
I'm willing, for the sake of argument, to grant the political classes the most honest and sincere motives, to presume that they really want to promote the best possible conditions in the world for all of mankind.
The most damaging falsehood associated with governmental action is a belief, common to the entire institutional order, that social order is dependent upon pyramidal, vertical power structures. Contrary to its avowed purposes, this premise generates social disorder, brought on by two factors.
One, the refusal of the system to respect the inviolability of property interests, which in turn is destructive of individual liberty,
about which I've written extensively elsewhere, as Doug nicely pointed out.
Also, the epistemological problems associated with presuming the capacity to predict the outcomes of complex relationships.
If we understood the lesson from the study of chaos, namely that complex behavior always produces unpredictable consequences, we might be less arrogant in efforts to mandate the behavior of other people.
More than that, if we understood just how inherently and unavoidably limited is our knowledge of the world, we might be less hubristic in our insistence upon managing the lives of others.
As an example, the federal government was finalizing plans for the construction of a nuclear waste storage facility in Yucca Mountain, Nevada.
When the federal court directed the Department of Energy to predict the consequences that would be generated by this facility for a period of time ranging from, ready for this, 300,000 to 1 million years.
Now, to most of us who have a sense of responsibility for actions, I suspect the court's order satisfied the importance of considering long-term costs.
The troublesome implications of this judicial response have to do with the court's sense that it is capable of accurately predicting the course of events for the next one million years.
My study of geology, as well as human existence on this planet, convinces me otherwise.
Bearing in mind that human beings have likely been on this planet for anywhere from 200,000 to at most 1 million years, depending upon our interpretation of various skeletal remains, the Court is directing the outcome of human action for a time period equal to our entire history.
Furthermore, the Court is presuming the kind of geologic and climatological stability that would fail to consider such functions as plate tectonics, earthquakes, volcanoes, continental drift, magnetic reversals of the poles, periodic ice ages, massive flooding, solar flares, the comets and asteroids that have occasionally hit the earth, the cutting and filling functions of rivers which, along with continuing processes of wind and water erosion,
To put such inconsistencies into the context of the court's order, you should know that during the last one million years, there have likely been ten major ice ages on this planet.
The meteor that hit in Arizona and created the giant crater that many of us have seen probably did so about 200,000 years ago.
The volcanic eruption that destroyed the island of Krakatoa and produced long-term worldwide climatological changes, including tsunamis as distant as South Africa, occurred but 127 years ago.
Yucca Mountain itself was created by a number of volcanic eruptions.
There are so many interconnected variables and unknown factors at work in nature, including
the myriad consequences of human action, that it borders on magical thinking to believe
that one can anticipate the playing out of this constantly changing interplay over such
an extended period of time.
We are fortunate to get accurate predictions of next week's weather.
Expecting government agencies to prognosticate over a one million year period becomes a test
A belief in absolute truth coupled with a self-righteous resolve to enforce such views is a pathology that must be confronted head on if we are to preserve any semblance of our humanity.
If we are to overcome our liming-like march into mutual self-destruction, we must begin at the source of the problem.
The relevant question, in my view, is this. Is it possible for us to have an empirical understanding of the world, or to act upon the basis of philosophical principles and values, other than through our subjective undertaking?
Are there such qualities as objective truths, be they empirical or moral, that operate in the world outside of our own mind?
This is the question that troubled me for about 50 some years now. In the realm of economics, are there objective values to be ascribed to goods and services?
Apart from the values given to them by freely contracting parties. Indeed though we can speak of the price arrived at in a transaction as an objective factor, an objective price.
Price. It is also evident that the value given to that transaction, the value of the goods, is not only subjective, differing in the minds of each party in different ways, but furthermore, can never equal the objective price, otherwise the transaction wouldn't have taken place, and B, can never be known even to the parties themselves. The value of something in a transaction is inherently subjective. So is it possible for us to extend this awareness
and the awareness of the subjective underpinnings of economic transactions into our efforts to understand and function in the world in all other areas.
Using a dictionary definition, are there truths in the world that, quote, exist independently of mind? End of quote.
If there are, we can know of such matters only through our individualized opinions.
And I believe that everything you or I can know about the world, whether in the form
of empirical information or philosophical principles, derive from our subjective experiences
and nothing more.
This does not mean they're wrong or anything like that.
It just means that we are inherently limited in our understanding of the world by what
we already know.
To begin with, the very concept of knowledge necessarily implies a knower.
For the reality that exists in the universe, there can be no knowledge of it without an
observer.
This is the meaning of Bishop Barclay's teaser about the sound of a falling tree in a forest
where there's no one to hear it, because sound is something received by auditory senses.
From the moment of our birth until death, we experience ourselves and our world, including
others, not in the mechanistic fashion of a video camera recording sensory impressions.
Rather, we interact with our world, organizing our experiences into categories and concepts by which we make comparisons and contrasts.
It is the mind alone that creates these categories. They do not exist beyond the boundaries of our mind.
And the boundaries that you have for your experiences and the boundaries that I have for my experiences will be fundamentally different.
What we think of the world is simply that, thoughts about the world.
Learning, as I tell my students, is really an art form.
And like painters and sculptors, we outwardly manifest our inner visions of the world and ourselves.
We learn only because our mind is dissatisfied with its existing patterns of understanding
and wishes to create more sophisticated patterns with which to both inform and amuse itself.
In accepting dogmas about the good, the true and the beautiful, residing outside ourselves, we have surrendered to institutions the perceptive, creative and spiritual essence of what it means to be human.
We are seekers of information. The word inform means to give shape within. Within what? Other than the mind.
Gregory Bateson defined information as differences that matter, matter to whom,
who is it that notices the differences and by what criteria and who are located
are distinctions and similarities to be evaluated.
The current study of chaos or complexity is making us aware
that conditions we have heretofore regarded as disordered turbulence have regularities to them
We had not previously seen. But has nature suddenly become more orderly? Or has our subjective mind, with the help of computer technologies, only developed more sophisticated ways of organizing its experiences with nature?
We are also not simply the seekers, but the creators of the moral and aesthetic measures by which we live what Socrates called the examined life.
We are, as the poet Seamus Haney so well expressed it, I love this quote,
You are the hunters and gatherers of values.
But the quest takes place within the vast expanse of the subjective mind, wherein the hunter negotiates with the world as a means of measuring his or her own sense of being.
We think dualistically and abstractly, dividing our experiences into mutually exclusive categories.
We're probably unable to do anything other than that.
The hard-wiring of our brains probably prevents us from dealing with reality in any other way.
Our mind needs to become aware of this inherent limitation and its capacities for dealing with the world.
But the conscious mind enjoys its monopolistic position in directing our lives.
Perhaps the insights offered by Joseph Conrad may help.
He said, I used to think the mind was the most important part of a person.
Then I realized what part of me is telling me that.
The dualistic categories we employ are determined not by the inherent nature of anything we
are observing, but by systems of thought that others have taught us.
Are avocados and tomatoes fruits or vegetables?
A botanist will give you one answer, the produce manager of your local grocery store will give
you another.
We deal with the universe abstractly as images and concepts that our mind has created.
When we are engaged in abstraction, our understanding becomes, in the words of one dictionary, considered
apart from the matter or from specific examples, not concrete.
Such a process is about the world, but not of it.
I suspect that the main reason we do not have memories of our first days and weeks out of
of the womb is that we've had numerous experiences, but no conceptual tools, no words that allowed
us to define, categorize and organize those experiences.
We did not have labels to attach to our world.
Because of this interplay between our experiences and how those experiences have been recorded
and organized, we have been trained as what we are capable of knowing about the world
may rise no higher than how we have subjectively defined the world.
The words that we use to describe things are fundamentally different from what it is we
are describing.
Unless you have not learned this important lesson, let me remind you that the word water
will not quench your thirst.
If you think that it will, try drinking it.
What about these plastic glasses?
Are these the same as these glasses?
These glasses the same as these glasses?
No, they're not.
What's more, even greater interest?
Neither one of these are made of glass.
They're made of plastic.
We project onto the world the patterns
We Find Meaningful, the ones we have put together that best explain our experiences in the world.
The experiment that I have used with my students has been to ask them to draw a picture of a previously undiscovered life form,
one that is not simply a composite of life forms already familiar to you.
You will quickly discover the difficulty associated with seeing the universe other than in the
patterns that are already familiar to you.
We've all seen small babies putting some item in their mouths, then hearing Aunt Edith
shriek, oh, look out, she's going to eat that pen, then grabbing it from her.
Babies are not trying to eat everything they encounter, but they are trying to discover
for the nature of pens and other objects by testing them through the sensory tools
in which many of their earliest experiments have been conducted, and that's their sense of taste.
The baby, having found out that other things placed in her mouth produced a pleasurable effect,
now discovers that the pen does not, and so puts it down.
She's learned a lesson.
She's also learned an important social lesson.
The world is plagued with a variety of Aunt Ediths who insist upon interfering with and restraining their life experiences.
I'm kind of running short on time here, so I'm going to have to rush through some of this, but I want to make it clear.
I'm not taking a solopsistic approach, you know, that what exists in the world is simply a product of my mind, and when I die, the world goes away.
I believe there's a real objective world out there, I really do, but I believe it only is a matter of opinion, there's no way I can move beyond my prior experiences in evaluating that.
I'm also not taking the position that I'm dealing in some kind of moral relativism. I have no use for moral relativism.
It's the idea that somehow or other, if your moral principles differ from mine, I'm not going to say,
well, you know, your principles are as good as mine. The heck they are, you know,
if your principles differ from mine, you're wrong.
But I will still accept that, I will still insist that whatever my principles are, are the product
I once had a discussion on the topic of, do we live in a heliocentric or geocentric universe?
A friend of mine who was a very good libertarian and also has a very good science background,
was insisting that we live in a heliocentric rather than geocentric world and I said well
I think you're probably right but how do you know that to be true? How do you know we do?
Because when I look up at the sky you know in the early morning sun's over there,
high noon it's over there and the evening it's over there, sure seems to suggest to me that maybe
the sun does go around the earth. We still talk that way don't we? We still talk about sunrises
So, how do you know? He said, well, the math justifies the conclusion that the earth goes around the sun.
I said, well, okay, let's take two responses to that.
Number one, how do you know that mathematics is a way of evaluating something like that,
rather than just, you know, physical observation?
And secondly, more importantly, have you done the math?
Or are you just taking the word of other people who say they have done the math?
How do you know what you know?
How do you know that your understanding of the world is valid?
Well, in the areas of religion, people who know me know I'm basically an agnostic about
everything.
Religion, politics, you name it, which simply means I want to be convinced.
All for me evidence and so forth.
And, but I find it interesting when I put the, say the book of Genesis alongside the
explanations of Big Bang Theory, seems to be such a similarity that maybe the religionist
and maybe the scientist are looking for the same thing, answer to the questions, where
did it all come from, where is it all going, and what rules are in place while we're here.
Part of the problem here is that we humans are destroying ourselves through a self-righteousness
grounded in a belief in the objective truths that we like to imagine we are dealing with
and some objective truth, whether it comes from, you know, the area of religion, politics, philosophy, science, whatever.
And as I've said, I think that we are forever tied to the notion, tied to the reality,
If truth and moral principles reside beyond the individual, why should we not want to
mandate uniform, standardized social systems and practices to forcibly direct people to
comply with such eternal and transcendent principles?
If this is really the nature of the world, then why wouldn't we expect to want to control
Why would we be expected to show any tolerance for those whose ideas or conduct differ from these objective truths?
We are unable to transcend the limited capacities of our mind, other than perhaps to become and remain constantly aware of such limitations.
If we can do that, we may put an end to our horribly destructive habits, while in so doing transfuse those anti-life energies into the wonderfully creative pursuits that have generated a life-sustaining civilization.
So with that, I think I've run over time enough. Thank you.
Thank you very much.