I was thinking about this a lot this election.
The narratives. The consensus around narratives. The distortion of perception. How fear is used as an instrument to craft perception. It keeps people enslaved to their perceptions, and expression of their latent denial of death.
Why it happens. To which demographics. How it happens. Who is most susceptible.
I thought about the Dunning Kruger effect: The rational model holds that overly positive prior beliefs about one’s skills are the source of false self-assessment.
I have a statue in my office that I look at everyday named Rising Sun, by Adolf Weinmann. It represents Icarus, and the consequences of Hubris. When they were preparing their flight to escape, his father Daedalus, the genius engineer and architect, advised his son to “to take the middle way”, but his son was “drawn by desire for the heavens” and perished by not heeding his fathers advice, taking too much stock in his ability.
–Metamorphoses (Kline) 8, the Ovid Collection, Univ. of Virginia E-Text Center
(https://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/trans/Metamorph8.htm#482327661)
There is a similar story of Phaeton and his father Phoebus, who guided the chariots that pulled the sun across the sky. Phaeton wished to drive the chariot and failed to heed his father’s guidance and proceed in the middle way. He lost control of the chariots, destroying the earth, and himself in the process.
–Metamorphoses (Kline) 2, the Ovid Collection, Univ. of Virginia E-Text Center (https://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/trans/Metamorph2.htm#476707490)
A reminder that our self-assurance is more than often a flaw in our self-assessment, a self deception of our inflated ability to reason and accurately perceive.
The more sure you are, the more skeptical you should be. Self virtue is fatal. There is a natural tendency to accumulate self virtue as we grow in education, knowledge, status, money, prestige, success, titles, degrees.
The true value of education, of knowledge, is the ability to recognize your ignorance, not escape it. We never arrive. It is the realization that, as the island of knowledge grow, so too do the shores of ignorance.
A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool. WS
This year I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on narratives, channels of influence, personalities, righteousness.
Thales (the “first” philosopher) is attributed with the aphorism: “Know thyself” . It was inscribed on the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, who was the god of Truth.
I think it’s easy to get caught up in trying to determine what’s true, versus what is true of ourselves. And seeking the ends of the former is often what leads to these threads of self deception, as we lose sense of the self which serves as the basis of the reality we seek.
It’s unsettling, yet liberating, to gain an awareness that there are alternative realities that exist. It should humiliating, and can be embarrassing, that our perceptions are not the only perceptions, that there may be narratives supporting perceptions which more closely align to a truer base reality.
But getting to that truth, that base reality, requires humility.
Our closeness to God is proportional to the size of our ego. God is reality, nothing more and nothing less, and the reality can only be experienced in the present. The present requires a loss of self. Only then can you experience reality for what it is, rather than what you think it is. Reality is truth.
“We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.” Emerson said.
I think of how malleable groups of people can be, and why, and reflect on the institutions they affiliate with, and why. Institutions are groups of people under the spell of a moral authority. Government. Media. Academic. Religious. Corporate.
Institutions are allergic to original thought.
They commit atrocities by leveraging a populous when people appeal to the authority of their association, rather than the authority of their own truth. But cultivating a population that can appeal to self-evident truths requires a humility.
“The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs. Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.” Emerson
When the oracle of Delphi proclaimed that none was wiser than Sacrates, he was in disbelief, because “I know that I have no wisdom.”
So he went in search of all the men wiser to refute the oracle but “found that the men most in repute were all but the most foolish; and that some inferior men were really wiser and better.” “They were good workmen they thought that they also knew all sorts of high matters, and this defect in them overshadowed their wisdom.”
After his search he concluded “that God only is wise; and in this oracle he means to say that the wisdom of men is little or nothing”
“He is the wisest who knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing.”
But “the fear of death is indeed the pretence of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being the appearance of knowing the unknown; since no one knows whether death, which they in their fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good. Is there not here conceit of knowledge, which is a disgraceful sort of ignorance?”
William Dare 