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Your symbolic existence is your identity. When our truth or life purpose is threatened we react as though death is imminent.
To kill my illusions is to kill my identity, the “I”.
This is an act of murder in which humans gleefully participate to “reveal the truth.”
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The promise of utopia is based on more happiness. But, the master planner’s conception of happiness is an abstract wish in the distant future.
Instead of focusing on the potential positives, Karl Popper suggests we look to falsification to prove and solve problems we have today concretely.
It is not as glamorous as a holistic sweeping change, but it avoids today’s idealistic hubris for steady improvement.
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Stories have power.
The ones told first are sticky and hard to dislodge, despite more rational stories that reveal truth and work to promote harmony. And thus we perpetuate half-truths and shams out of sheer momentum and consensus popularity.
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The human mind treats rhymes as more truthful, equating clever with correct. We crave simplicity and elegance in our laws and principles, as if our ability to grasp or recite the law makes it more true.
The paradox is that we only really need to understand a handful of simple, foundational truths well to do well, but these do not imply the world is simply summed up.
examples of elegant or rhyming truths, that are not always true: E = mc2, an apple a day keeps the doctor away
examples of foundational principles: logic, inversion, falsifiability, and non-linear statistics (probability)
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Truth seeking requires curiosity and tenacity. It is somewhat pedantic and boring to question almost everything all the time, but the layered strata of sediment this persistent inquiry sweeps aside reveals our current foundation to be nothing but flotsam.
In this way, it is brave to be pedantic: to discover you are standing on nothing.
