Credo
What I Hold Sacred
by
Eric Paul Nolte
Written on the occasion of my eldest daughter's 20th birthday, as a father's blessings for her to live a hale and happy life, with some tips and pointers by which to steer through Life's whitewater rapids, and offered here for the benefit of any other soul who might profit from it. Bless us all, who strive for a mindful, peaceful, and happy life!
1. Your life is your own property, the most important property there can ever be! You have a right to live your life for your own sake in any way you want to live, so long as it’s peaceful and respectful of the same right in every other person. If freedom means anything, it means, as George Orwell put it, to say things that others do not wish to hear … even to offend others’ feelings as a consequence of the way you live or think. You do not have to justify your existence before a tribunal of misanthropes, misogynists, crabby homophobic religious absolutists, nor to nihilistic postmodern skeptics and totalitarians, nor to human-hating earth worshipers, nor to socialists, communists, fascists, or to any other moralizing or murderous busybodies or zealots who are eager to make you live their way, or to sacrifice yourself to them, or obey them, or otherwise keep you from pursuing your own happiness by your own lights!
2. You are not a sacrificial animal on the alter of Others’ happiness.
Your nature endows you with the right to be on this Earth to live your life and be happy, so long (it’s worth saying again…) as you are respectful of the equal right of every other peaceful person. This right to your own life also implies your right to defend yourself with appropriate force against any predators who would sacrifice you for any reason, no matter whether it is for their pleasure, their conscience, or their insanity.
3. The core of evil in the world is the use of other people against their will for predatory advantage. Your nature endows you with the right to be on this Earth to live your life and be happy, so long (it’s worth saying again…) as you are respectful of the equal right of every other peaceful person. This right to your own life also implies your right to defend yourself with appropriate force against any predators who would sacrifice you for any reason, no matter whether it is for their pleasure, their conscience, or their insanity.
Every horrible act I can think of is an example of this principle … murder, genocide, rape, slavery, assault, theft (including any profit by fraud to take advantage of another) … every one of these is an example of using others against their will for predatory advantage. Ironically, those who preach sacrifice for the benefit of others, and the ideal of sacrifice as the essence of the Good, often preach this altruism while demanding the forceful sacrifice of others against their will…which may be another description of the way modern politics is generally run.
4. Only the Mind can lead us rightly.
A lyricist insisted that what the World needs now is Love, sweet Love. But love is never enough. Love is an emotion, and emotions are automatic, psychological responses that bubble up during an experience to reveal beliefs we already hold. Emotions can’t yield new knowledge. Saint-Exupery famously said, “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly, for what is essential is invisible to the eye.” Saint-Ex got it backwards. Emotions can tell us only what we already believe. Only the mind can guide us rightly to discover what is true and false, and what is good and bad. Feel your feelings--don’t follow them blindly! Feelings are where we experience the glories of life, but they cannot substitute for the proper guidance of one’s mind--and it is crucial to stock the shelves of one’s mind with life-serving and effective beliefs.
5. Faith is not an alternative path to knowledge.
Faith means belief without evidence, which is essentially just another form of emotion, and a sort of wishful yearning, when it is not a willful evasion of reality. This means that, for the purpose of acquiring new knowledge, faith is as blind as any other emotion. Acquiring and validating knowledge is the province of reason, meaning logic applied to the evidence of experience. It is often claimed that Faith is an alternative to Reason as a means of knowledge, but this cannot be true for the same reason that emotion is epistemologically blind, namely that emotions embody in a raw form nothing more than the beliefs we already hold. A related claim is that hunches may feel like a road to new understanding. While hunches may prove to be correct, a hunch is an emotion or a patchy, untested thought that arises at the intersection of two or more ideas one already holds, so again, like other emotions, hunches can’t be trusted without being tested by the light of reason.
6. Always pull your own weight and be generous. Faith means belief without evidence, which is essentially just another form of emotion, and a sort of wishful yearning, when it is not a willful evasion of reality. This means that, for the purpose of acquiring new knowledge, faith is as blind as any other emotion. Acquiring and validating knowledge is the province of reason, meaning logic applied to the evidence of experience. It is often claimed that Faith is an alternative to Reason as a means of knowledge, but this cannot be true for the same reason that emotion is epistemologically blind, namely that emotions embody in a raw form nothing more than the beliefs we already hold. A related claim is that hunches may feel like a road to new understanding. While hunches may prove to be correct, a hunch is an emotion or a patchy, untested thought that arises at the intersection of two or more ideas one already holds, so again, like other emotions, hunches can’t be trusted without being tested by the light of reason.
I surely don’t need to counsel you, my precious child, who possesses the most astonishing compassion of anybody I know, never to be a parasite. But I’ll say this much anyway: while independence and generosity are key virtues, Charity exists only when it is freely chosen and given by a generous soul, perhaps in recognition of our own great good fortune in the Cosmic Sweepstakes for brains, health, and opportunity. I hasten to add that taking charity is right when we are truly unable to take care of ourselves.
7. That an idea appears in your mind does not make it true!
Philosophy is the Mother of Everything. “Philo-“ plus “sophia” … these are ancient Greek word stems meaning love of wisdom, the search for wisdom. Of course, nowadays, in the mainstream of academic work, philosophy does not exemplify the pursuit of a love of wisdom, but rather the intellectual dogfight over The Big Questions. Philosophy provides answers to what is true, and what is false? What is right? What is wrong? Without answers to these questions, there is no guide to one’s actions. Philosophy should be an intellectual solvent to wash away the accumulated bullshit and insanity embodied in all those crazy, cockamamie intellectual viruses that I’m always talking about. But philosophy took a terrible wrong turn hundreds of years ago and is in an abysmal condition today, in the mainstream of discourse on these matters, resulting in the insanity of postmodern, nihilistic skepticism (a dizzy topic for another day...) Still, philosophy remains the only means by which there is any hope for rational guidance in life. And philosophy remains inescapable. Why? We are all philosophers because even the attempt to deny this statement is already the product of an underlying philosophy. It is up to each of us to sort out what is true and false, and right and wrong, by the light of Reason, or logic applied to the evidence of experience. Therefore test every important or puzzling idea by reason!
Philosophy is the Mother of Everything. “Philo-“ plus “sophia” … these are ancient Greek word stems meaning love of wisdom, the search for wisdom. Of course, nowadays, in the mainstream of academic work, philosophy does not exemplify the pursuit of a love of wisdom, but rather the intellectual dogfight over The Big Questions. Philosophy provides answers to what is true, and what is false? What is right? What is wrong? Without answers to these questions, there is no guide to one’s actions. Philosophy should be an intellectual solvent to wash away the accumulated bullshit and insanity embodied in all those crazy, cockamamie intellectual viruses that I’m always talking about. But philosophy took a terrible wrong turn hundreds of years ago and is in an abysmal condition today, in the mainstream of discourse on these matters, resulting in the insanity of postmodern, nihilistic skepticism (a dizzy topic for another day...) Still, philosophy remains the only means by which there is any hope for rational guidance in life. And philosophy remains inescapable. Why? We are all philosophers because even the attempt to deny this statement is already the product of an underlying philosophy. It is up to each of us to sort out what is true and false, and right and wrong, by the light of Reason, or logic applied to the evidence of experience. Therefore test every important or puzzling idea by reason!
8. Truth is not established by a poll of anyone’s Tribe to see who believes what.
Truth is a correspondence between one’s beliefs and the facts of reality. Truth means valid knowledge. This topic is vastly more complicated than this brief assertion, but it would take a book to defend this statement properly!
Truth is a correspondence between one’s beliefs and the facts of reality. Truth means valid knowledge. This topic is vastly more complicated than this brief assertion, but it would take a book to defend this statement properly!
9. Objectivity is possible and does not presuppose or require omniscience. Reality is whatever it is, independent of our consciousness.
The facts of reality are grasped by the evidence of the senses, aided and tested by the light of Reason. Consciousness is the faculty that grasps reality; it does not invent the facts of reality, contrary to Kant’s categories of mind, or to Hume’s contention that the “slightest philosophy” shows our senses to be cut off from reality. Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius, ISA, regardless of anybody’s tantrums, wishes, fears, race, class, or gender. Survival and flourishing require valid knowledge, meaning objective knowledge, to allow mindful, successful action. Mystical, magical thinking by contrast is futile and ineffective. Her radical formulation of objectivity is one of Ayn Rand’s crucial accomplishments.
The facts of reality are grasped by the evidence of the senses, aided and tested by the light of Reason. Consciousness is the faculty that grasps reality; it does not invent the facts of reality, contrary to Kant’s categories of mind, or to Hume’s contention that the “slightest philosophy” shows our senses to be cut off from reality. Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius, ISA, regardless of anybody’s tantrums, wishes, fears, race, class, or gender. Survival and flourishing require valid knowledge, meaning objective knowledge, to allow mindful, successful action. Mystical, magical thinking by contrast is futile and ineffective. Her radical formulation of objectivity is one of Ayn Rand’s crucial accomplishments.
10. There are no contradictions in reality.
Contrary to the explanations (if not the equations) of subatomic particle physicists, Aristotle’s Law of Identity holds true: a thing is what it is, independent of any consciousness or feelings, wishes, or fears. A thing, A, cannot be non-A at the same time and in the same respect. A is A. Arguments for contradictions are signs of error, the leper’s bell of postmodern skepticism, and are self-refuting nonsense. The calamity of David Hume’s infamous epistemological torpedo, the Problem of Induction, is not a problem after all because Causality is the Law of Identity applied to action: entities can act only in accordance with their nature, which allows us to make valid generalizations about universals. By induction (contra Hume … and turning his very same words against him) we know absolutely that the sun will rise tomorrow. You can bet your life on it. (Of course we remain fallible minds, and we continue to have a multitude of enduring mysteries of existence yet to explain.)
Contrary to the explanations (if not the equations) of subatomic particle physicists, Aristotle’s Law of Identity holds true: a thing is what it is, independent of any consciousness or feelings, wishes, or fears. A thing, A, cannot be non-A at the same time and in the same respect. A is A. Arguments for contradictions are signs of error, the leper’s bell of postmodern skepticism, and are self-refuting nonsense. The calamity of David Hume’s infamous epistemological torpedo, the Problem of Induction, is not a problem after all because Causality is the Law of Identity applied to action: entities can act only in accordance with their nature, which allows us to make valid generalizations about universals. By induction (contra Hume … and turning his very same words against him) we know absolutely that the sun will rise tomorrow. You can bet your life on it. (Of course we remain fallible minds, and we continue to have a multitude of enduring mysteries of existence yet to explain.)
11. You possess free will.
Existentially, you are not merely a cork tossed about by cosmic forces. Yes, we can be corks tossed about by tsunamis and earthquakes, yet this is not the crucial difference between a Homo sap and tree sap. Yes, causality and determinism govern the universe, and yet it is this lawful realm that has given you, by your nature as a human being, this power of free will. What is free will? It is the power to choose to focus your attention on this entity rather than that one … and this makes all the difference between your being a free agent instead of a fluff of cotton on the wind, or a deluded stimulus-response animal who possesses only the illusion of free will. Any argument to deny free will must surely count on your ability--your free will--to choose to agree or disagree with the self-refuting and absurd argument that you cannot choose to agree or disagree with it.
Existentially, you are not merely a cork tossed about by cosmic forces. Yes, we can be corks tossed about by tsunamis and earthquakes, yet this is not the crucial difference between a Homo sap and tree sap. Yes, causality and determinism govern the universe, and yet it is this lawful realm that has given you, by your nature as a human being, this power of free will. What is free will? It is the power to choose to focus your attention on this entity rather than that one … and this makes all the difference between your being a free agent instead of a fluff of cotton on the wind, or a deluded stimulus-response animal who possesses only the illusion of free will. Any argument to deny free will must surely count on your ability--your free will--to choose to agree or disagree with the self-refuting and absurd argument that you cannot choose to agree or disagree with it.
12. Your attitude towards life is crucial.
IBD (Investors' Business Daily) made a study of great achievers across history among men and women in every imaginable discipline and area of society. This study reveals that their success is largely due to their embodying a small number of the same qualities and practices, at the top of which is this idea that how you think is everything! Furthermore, don’t disown your sad and bad feelings, but do look for the positive. Given a choice, think of success, not failure. Avoid those whose outlook is mostly negative. Optimism is not a sufficient condition for success, but pessimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy!
IBD (Investors' Business Daily) made a study of great achievers across history among men and women in every imaginable discipline and area of society. This study reveals that their success is largely due to their embodying a small number of the same qualities and practices, at the top of which is this idea that how you think is everything! Furthermore, don’t disown your sad and bad feelings, but do look for the positive. Given a choice, think of success, not failure. Avoid those whose outlook is mostly negative. Optimism is not a sufficient condition for success, but pessimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy!
13. Self-esteem is a crucial personal achievement--it is not and cannot be a gift from others.
Self-esteem should not be taken to mean the treacly nonsense you were taught in school …that all of us are simply entitled to feel great about ourselves for no reason more impressive than that our blood is warm; or worse--that self-esteem comes from being liked by other people. A better definition of self-esteem would be, as Nathaniel Branden put it, as the sum of two personal achievements: 1.) of learning crucial life skills one needs to survive and flourish in the world; and 2.) of acquiring the deep conviction that one is worthy of happiness. Self-esteem, or self-respect, is the fuel one needs even to get out of bed in the morning. Looked at from another perspective, self-esteem amounts to a rational honoring of the self. And a right sense of honor, paraphrasing Ayn Rand, is a rightly earned self-respect made visible in action.
Self-esteem should not be taken to mean the treacly nonsense you were taught in school …that all of us are simply entitled to feel great about ourselves for no reason more impressive than that our blood is warm; or worse--that self-esteem comes from being liked by other people. A better definition of self-esteem would be, as Nathaniel Branden put it, as the sum of two personal achievements: 1.) of learning crucial life skills one needs to survive and flourish in the world; and 2.) of acquiring the deep conviction that one is worthy of happiness. Self-esteem, or self-respect, is the fuel one needs even to get out of bed in the morning. Looked at from another perspective, self-esteem amounts to a rational honoring of the self. And a right sense of honor, paraphrasing Ayn Rand, is a rightly earned self-respect made visible in action.
14. Your purpose in Life is your choice of the happiness that you want your life to be about.
This is Ayn Rand’s beautiful formulation of the concept of purpose in life. So let your imagination soar! What do you want? What do you love? If you do not now know what you love and what you want to do with your life, discovering this love should be your purpose in life until you find it!
This is Ayn Rand’s beautiful formulation of the concept of purpose in life. So let your imagination soar! What do you want? What do you love? If you do not now know what you love and what you want to do with your life, discovering this love should be your purpose in life until you find it!
15. Authentic happiness can be yours.
I get this formulation from Martin Seligman’s great and ground-breaking work, Authentic Happiness. As Seligman puts it, authentic happiness results from identifying and developing your signature strengths (so long as these are loved), and then showing up in the world while practicing and trading these accomplishments. The goal here is the unfolding of your gifts, at least those of your gifts that you love the most. [Since I wrote this, Seligman has published another wonderful book: Flourish, maybe even better than Authentic Happiness.]
I get this formulation from Martin Seligman’s great and ground-breaking work, Authentic Happiness. As Seligman puts it, authentic happiness results from identifying and developing your signature strengths (so long as these are loved), and then showing up in the world while practicing and trading these accomplishments. The goal here is the unfolding of your gifts, at least those of your gifts that you love the most. [Since I wrote this, Seligman has published another wonderful book: Flourish, maybe even better than Authentic Happiness.]
16. Formulate your purpose in life as authentic dreams and goals:
Write down your specific goals! To develop a plan to reach them, begin by imagining the goal attained and ask, “What was the last step that produced the final success? Don’t know? Who would know? Still don’t know? Who might know? Ask them. What step would precede the final step before success? And the step before that? Proceed backwards until you reach the point where you are today and then begin to move forward, a step at a time, every day. Track your progress every day! Track it in a journal, a calendar, maybe on graph paper, if appropriate. This observation of our progress and behavior is like flying from point A to B, where we are at least slightly off course most of the time, but arrive safely anyway because we are constantly correcting our course. Behavior observed is behavior more easily changed or controlled.
Write down your specific goals! To develop a plan to reach them, begin by imagining the goal attained and ask, “What was the last step that produced the final success? Don’t know? Who would know? Still don’t know? Who might know? Ask them. What step would precede the final step before success? And the step before that? Proceed backwards until you reach the point where you are today and then begin to move forward, a step at a time, every day. Track your progress every day! Track it in a journal, a calendar, maybe on graph paper, if appropriate. This observation of our progress and behavior is like flying from point A to B, where we are at least slightly off course most of the time, but arrive safely anyway because we are constantly correcting our course. Behavior observed is behavior more easily changed or controlled.
17. Take action--daily, persistent, intelligent action!
As the IBD study puts it: goals are nothing without action! Don’t be afraid to get started--just do it! Among these actions, hold knowledge sacred and pursue it at school or from books. Get training and acquire skills. Focus your time and money. Don’t allow anything or anyone to distract you. Especially don’t abandon your projects to follow some lover across the world! Be persistent and work hard. Success is a marathon, not a sprint. Never, never, never give up! You can change your mind, and you can change course, but don’t ever quit just because a goal is hard. If it were easy, more people would have achieved success. Your willingness to persist in the face of difficulty makes it vastly more likely that you will succeed. Indeed, persisting is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition of success. You cannot succeed without hanging in there even when you may not see encouraging results from day to day. This is another reason that tracking your progress is important, because it makes your progress visible over a longer term than the day-to-day. This slowly emerging character of success is in the nature of the amazing effects of compound interest, which I will turn to next. Finally, remember that you can’t truly be said to fail until you actually give up!
As the IBD study puts it: goals are nothing without action! Don’t be afraid to get started--just do it! Among these actions, hold knowledge sacred and pursue it at school or from books. Get training and acquire skills. Focus your time and money. Don’t allow anything or anyone to distract you. Especially don’t abandon your projects to follow some lover across the world! Be persistent and work hard. Success is a marathon, not a sprint. Never, never, never give up! You can change your mind, and you can change course, but don’t ever quit just because a goal is hard. If it were easy, more people would have achieved success. Your willingness to persist in the face of difficulty makes it vastly more likely that you will succeed. Indeed, persisting is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition of success. You cannot succeed without hanging in there even when you may not see encouraging results from day to day. This is another reason that tracking your progress is important, because it makes your progress visible over a longer term than the day-to-day. This slowly emerging character of success is in the nature of the amazing effects of compound interest, which I will turn to next. Finally, remember that you can’t truly be said to fail until you actually give up!
18. Understand and employ the power of compound interest.
The astonishing power of compound interest is not immediately apparent, but it’s a key component in the engine of wealth creation.
Perhaps you already know this example, of a penny doubled every day. On day 2, you have 2 cents; by day 10, it’s up to $5.12. On Day 20 your compounded interest has yielded only $5,242.88. Five days later it’s up to $167,772. On day 28, it’s over a million dollars; on day 31 it’s over 10 million dollars! If you follow this example a little farther, you find that by day 38, it’s over a BILLION dollars. By day 48 it’s up to 1.4 trillion dollars, on day 51, it’s 11.3 trillion, which is around two thirds the annual size of the American economic system. By day 53, it’s over 45 trillion, a number so incomprehensible that it begins to dwarf the merely astronomical and is almost halfway to the size of the unfunded obligations of the US government for social security, Medicare, and Medicaid (seriously... it's true!)
The astonishing power of compound interest is not immediately apparent, but it’s a key component in the engine of wealth creation.
Perhaps you already know this example, of a penny doubled every day. On day 2, you have 2 cents; by day 10, it’s up to $5.12. On Day 20 your compounded interest has yielded only $5,242.88. Five days later it’s up to $167,772. On day 28, it’s over a million dollars; on day 31 it’s over 10 million dollars! If you follow this example a little farther, you find that by day 38, it’s over a BILLION dollars. By day 48 it’s up to 1.4 trillion dollars, on day 51, it’s 11.3 trillion, which is around two thirds the annual size of the American economic system. By day 53, it’s over 45 trillion, a number so incomprehensible that it begins to dwarf the merely astronomical and is almost halfway to the size of the unfunded obligations of the US government for social security, Medicare, and Medicaid (seriously... it's true!)
Save and invest your wealth rationally, of course, but know that this important concept of compounding effects applies equally well to intelligent work, done daily, which, over time, also compounds enormously! Examples would be learning to play seemingly impossible passages on a musical instrument or learning higher math.
You cannot understand human action in the world without knowing some sound economics. I recommend that you study Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson, for starters, then Mises, Rothbard, and George Reisman. 19. Learn to think logically and to take account of the full context of every matter.
Study logic formally (I believe that David Kelley’s The Art of Reasoning is wonderful) and learn to spot logical fallacies. Sound thinking is a learned skill. All of us are fallible human beings, and we can profit enormously if we learn from our own mistakes and those of others. As Nietzsche (who I hasten to add is not always a reliable authority!) observed, what does not kill us can make us stronger and wiser, with the right attitude and perspective.
20. Learn to communicate well, and deal with people effectively:
No person can flourish as a lone Robinson Crusoe on an island. Learn to understand and motivate yourself and others. Leadership begins with self-mastery, which should include the following: be squared away and run your life ship shape! Make a place for everything, and put everything in its place. Develop an efficacious mind in a healthy body.
21. Be honest, dependable, and responsible.
Honesty means nothing if it does not begin with oneself, in looking all matters squarely in the eye and acknowledging what is honestly so. Moreover, nothing else matters if others can’t depend on you to speak the truth and do what you say you’ll do. One becomes ostracized, cast adrift, shunned by the world. Nobody can succeed without the cooperation of others in this division-of-labor economic and social system.
22. Think for yourself. Your Independence of Mind is of Supreme Importance!
There is no Santa Claus, no Easter Bunny, and no Tooth Fairy (except for the love your parents showered on you in the name of these harmless childhood fantasies!) It makes no sense to say there is a God bossing us around or telling us how to live, or who is there to reveal what’s True and Right, or False and Wrong. There is certainly no god of Abraham, or any other gods, and no arguments for the existence of God that will hold water, much less walk on water--unless, by “god,” one simply points to the impersonal forces that obviously animate the universe, however yet incompletely understood.
There is no Santa Claus, no Easter Bunny, and no Tooth Fairy (except for the love your parents showered on you in the name of these harmless childhood fantasies!) It makes no sense to say there is a God bossing us around or telling us how to live, or who is there to reveal what’s True and Right, or False and Wrong. There is certainly no god of Abraham, or any other gods, and no arguments for the existence of God that will hold water, much less walk on water--unless, by “god,” one simply points to the impersonal forces that obviously animate the universe, however yet incompletely understood.
Don’t worry about what percentage of the world believes in God … that any of us shows evidence of independent and rational thinking gives hope for the world. Thinking for yourself helps you to know yourself and to show up in the world as the authentic, unique, and irreplaceable person you were born to be.
Following any herd leads one to a false self, to mediocrity, and precludes the possibility of being innovative or uniquely yourself. Herds are vulnerable to the madness of crowds, and to swallowing crazy, cockamamie intellectual viruses, such as the idea of the God of Abraham, or that the true nature of government allows it to be an effective and benevolent institution that is worthy of our trust. Don’t be one of the “Sheeple,” one of those hybrid creatures who is a cross between people and sheep.
23. There is no life after death, and no Heaven or Hell ... except on Earth.
There is no persuasive evidence for a second chance in a life to come, no eternal life to follow. This is it, here and now. Love it now or lose it forever. By the way, I suspect that Faith is wishful thinking that tries to make death go away--which Forrest Church always cited as the crucial origin of all the world’s religions … or, in other words, that our foreknowledge of our own death is the horrifying conundrum that challenges the very meaning of life and thereby inspires our pondering of the deepest matters of existence. If everything we have achieved in life disappears in the moment of death, what does this say about the meaning of life? Every human must come to grips with this matter.
There is no persuasive evidence for a second chance in a life to come, no eternal life to follow. This is it, here and now. Love it now or lose it forever. By the way, I suspect that Faith is wishful thinking that tries to make death go away--which Forrest Church always cited as the crucial origin of all the world’s religions … or, in other words, that our foreknowledge of our own death is the horrifying conundrum that challenges the very meaning of life and thereby inspires our pondering of the deepest matters of existence. If everything we have achieved in life disappears in the moment of death, what does this say about the meaning of life? Every human must come to grips with this matter.
For myself, the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus put the problem in a way that gives me some comfort: “Where Death is, I am not. Where I am, Death is not.” I take this to mean that death is a threshold that a human consciousness cannot cross. In other words, we will not be there beside our own death bed, looking down at our own corpse and muttering, “Damn! I’m dead! Now what am I gonna do!”
I would love to live forever! Imagine what wisdom and knowledge and skill one could acquire! But this is not to be, and one could argue that death’s limit is the most profound spur to make us appreciate life. And because it is likely that Epicurus was right, we, which is to say the consciousness embodied in the personal pronoun “I,” simply will not be there to witness the actual moment of our own death. There is nothing to fear. There is everything to make sense of, in the matter of choosing the things we value because of life’s inherent limits, and all the other standards by which we hold these values. Ayn Rand deftly addressed this matter in crucial essays on the nature of morality and ethics, which you should study.
24. Never fear these most powerful Magic Words: “I DON’T KNOW.”
Avoid oracular pontification like the plague! This godawful style of carrying oneself in the world is fascistic to the core, and is a characteristic of those religious and political leaders who shout slogans as short as bumper stickers and never defend their assertions with logic and evidence.
When the ancients asked why the sun troops across the sky every day, they answered, “Ah! It’s Apollo, the Sun God who harnesses this brilliant orb behind his chariot and drags it daily from east to west.” With this crazy answer, the ancients closed off their minds to any better answers. They said, “Now I know! Yup, it’s the Sun God!”
But had these ancients simply acknowledged the true state of things, they should have said, “I don’t know the answer.” This statement of ignorance is a policy, a state of mind, that leaves open the possibility of finding better explanations as these emerge. Moreover, acknowledging that we do not know all the answers encourages the free and open search for knowledge and wisdom.
Never fear the admission of your own ignorance. To say, “I don’t know,” when this is so, is an attitude that embodies magic words. No other attitude will allow the improvement of knowledge and wisdom! Knowledge must always be stated in the form of statements that can be tested by logic applied to the evidence of experience. We should hold all our knowledge in a form that remains open to the possibility of reexamination and revision in the face of new evidence. Anything less is not knowledge, it is dogma, unexamined, unanalyzable, pure and simple. Dogma is perhaps the principle means by which evil marches through the world.
Avoid oracular pontification like the plague! This godawful style of carrying oneself in the world is fascistic to the core, and is a characteristic of those religious and political leaders who shout slogans as short as bumper stickers and never defend their assertions with logic and evidence.
When the ancients asked why the sun troops across the sky every day, they answered, “Ah! It’s Apollo, the Sun God who harnesses this brilliant orb behind his chariot and drags it daily from east to west.” With this crazy answer, the ancients closed off their minds to any better answers. They said, “Now I know! Yup, it’s the Sun God!”
But had these ancients simply acknowledged the true state of things, they should have said, “I don’t know the answer.” This statement of ignorance is a policy, a state of mind, that leaves open the possibility of finding better explanations as these emerge. Moreover, acknowledging that we do not know all the answers encourages the free and open search for knowledge and wisdom.
Never fear the admission of your own ignorance. To say, “I don’t know,” when this is so, is an attitude that embodies magic words. No other attitude will allow the improvement of knowledge and wisdom! Knowledge must always be stated in the form of statements that can be tested by logic applied to the evidence of experience. We should hold all our knowledge in a form that remains open to the possibility of reexamination and revision in the face of new evidence. Anything less is not knowledge, it is dogma, unexamined, unanalyzable, pure and simple. Dogma is perhaps the principle means by which evil marches through the world.
25. The Original Sin of Humanity is not Adam’s Fall, but Confirmation Bias.
Confirmation bias is the tendency of all Homo saps to live in their own echo chamber, deaf and blind to anything we do not already hold to be true and right. Adam and Eve's expulsion from Paradise captures metaphorically the human situation, that we can survive and flourish in the world only by acquiring knowledge and living consciously by the light of reason. Knowledge itself is not the sin, but any claim to knowledge, held as unassailable, unquestionable dogma, is indeed a sin. Confirmation Bias is the transmission belt of crazy destructive dogma. The only antidote is to read books with which we know in advance we’ll disagree and to do this reading with sympathy and interest, trying always to embody the innocent presumption that the author is a reasonable person who was persuaded by some logic to believe such “nonsense.” By this policy, I have actually come to change my own mind on some foundational issues. I highly recommend this policy.
Confirmation bias is the tendency of all Homo saps to live in their own echo chamber, deaf and blind to anything we do not already hold to be true and right. Adam and Eve's expulsion from Paradise captures metaphorically the human situation, that we can survive and flourish in the world only by acquiring knowledge and living consciously by the light of reason. Knowledge itself is not the sin, but any claim to knowledge, held as unassailable, unquestionable dogma, is indeed a sin. Confirmation Bias is the transmission belt of crazy destructive dogma. The only antidote is to read books with which we know in advance we’ll disagree and to do this reading with sympathy and interest, trying always to embody the innocent presumption that the author is a reasonable person who was persuaded by some logic to believe such “nonsense.” By this policy, I have actually come to change my own mind on some foundational issues. I highly recommend this policy.
26. Never forget that your father and mother love you as much as life itself.
Remember to leave the blinds open enough to let in the light and warmth of that love.
Remember to leave the blinds open enough to let in the light and warmth of that love.
* * *
P.S. In arriving at these precepts to share with you on life, love, and the cosmos, I owe many thanks: to Plato (because, even though his other-worldly speculations made him mad as a hatter, he was the first systematic philosopher in history, which makes him a genius of unique importance); to Aristotle (Plato’s more advanced and worldly student); to David Hume and Immanuel Kant (again, as foils for thought, these evil geniuses were even dottier than Plato, and Kant was even more other-worldly than Plato); to Ayn Rand (with but a few reservations, I hold Rand as a singularly important genius who, more than anybody else, radically improved the dithering condition of philosophy in its raggedy-ass, modern and postmodern insanity); David Kelley; Leonard Peikoff (about whom I have only one main reservation, which is that he does not admire David Kelley); to economists Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, George Reisman; to physicist and philosopher David Harriman (who collaborated with Peikoff on a brilliant book on physics and philosophy); to psychologists Martin Seligman, Aaron T. Beck, Nathaniel Branden, and Michael J. Hurd; to the worldly thinkers at IBD (Investors Business Daily), principally William J. O’Neill, who assembled their practical Ten Secrets to Success; and to many, many others too numerous to catalog here.
In fact, there is nobody in the world with whom I agree completely, but so many have inspired me to search deeply and helped me telephone Celestial Directory Assistance so I could call my Better Angels for advice, and to assemble my own lights to see my path more clearly through life. Do you have that phone number already?
* * *
revised 2013.1119
(and again 2015.1103)
(and yet again, in No. 23. on 2016.0320.)
(and again, in the title, which was "What I Believe to Be Sacred." 2017.0316)
revised 2013.1119
(and again 2015.1103)
(and yet again, in No. 23. on 2016.0320.)
(and again, in the title, which was "What I Believe to Be Sacred." 2017.0316)
No comments:
Post a Comment