What is true
/0 Comments/in Long Articles/by Rudolf HuberIn the 2001 movie Vanilla Sky, David Aames, owner of a large publishing company, is in prison wearing a prosthetic mask. His life went off the rails when he met the ravishing Sofia while David was still in a relationship with Julie. He wants to break up and tells Julie while they are in a car. Consequently, she had an accident that killed her and disfigured him. Things went more and more awry for him from then on.
Soon things started to not make sense anymore. Julie reappeared when she was supposed to be dead. When things got to the point where he lost his mind, he was made aware that his body was frozen in a life extension program. Everything he experienced was a dream that went off the rails.
David chose to come back to the living in the end.
How many times over the last 5 or more years have you asked yourself if any of what we are going through now is real? In David’s case, there was an off-switch, and he was allowed to escape the imagined reality he experienced. We don’t have that luxury. And I don’t want to belabour the complexities that will arise from the question if we potentially live in a vat filled with goo and are being fed a perpetual dream that simulates life.
From the moment we are born we learn to use our senses to experience the world around us. As we grow up and learn, we also learn to trust those very senses to tell us what is real and what is not.
But how do you know what you know?
When you are born, you know little. You have your senses, but you don’t know yet what to make of the received input. What you know is still what you learned through personal experience. You touched a hot surface and learned that getting burned hurts. You are being fed and cuddled by mum and dad and learn that it’s good to be around nice people. You go to the kindergarten and fight with other kids and learn that not everyone is nice.
All those experiences and many more are direct. It’s learning by experiment – learning by direct and personal exposure. You do stuff and the consequences of those actions or inactions tell you something about the world and maybe also yourself. No need for higher, more imaginative cortical function yet.
But progressively the world around you becomes more complex. When you start going to school, your conditioning starts in earnest. Not because society is evil and wants to deceive you. It’s much more because life as a human together with other humans is inherently complex. It requires different levels of abstraction to be understood so you can make appropriate decisions for yourself and others.
When you learn the principles of nuclear physics in school, chances are you can’t experience those minute processes personally. You can see hear and feel the consequences of those processes, but you can’t directly sample the processes themselves. How do you know what really happened?
Not even the researchers at CERN can. They need to put massive machines between themselves and those events as we humans cannot see them, smell them, or hear them. Those events remain hidden from us. All we get are measurements from devices we have learned to trust. This trust has built up over time as well as on the shoulders of a series of failures that have shown us what does not work or what is not correct.
We learn to trust very early in our lives, and we need to trust as in a complex society, living without a certain measure of trust is not possible. Our paleolithic forebears did not need as much trust as we need. Their immediate sensory input ruled most of their days and they could go by it. But as soon as man developed technology, this became impossible to maintain in its pure, unaltered form.
But even before we learned to trust the output of machines and processes, we had to learn to trust others. Because as soon as you don’t live in a small clan and hunt animals but rather in an organized society in a village or even a city, you need to specialize. Specialization requires you to trust that others will perform functions that are vital to you but that you can’t perform yourself anymore. Efficiency dictates that you stay in your lane.
When small villages become big cities, hierarchies develop. The smartest (or the most brutal) rise above others to direct the fate of the community. Now you must trust again, but not the professional abilities of another but rather the word of another that you will get shelter when you need it and be clothed and fed when you need those as long as you do your part by playing the cog you are designed to be.
Theoretically, there is nothing wrong with this. Modern humans cannot exist without those structures and trust. You trust that the bus comes more or less on time, you trust that your teacher won’t tell you crap, and you trust that the civil service won’t abuse you. You trust that the baker won’t poison you and that the television gives you a truthful picture of what happens in the world. Trust makes life not only possible. It makes life easier, bearable, and even nice and soothing.
If you live in the developing world or have visited those countries for longer than a few days, you will quickly find out that those people are much less trusting than those coming from the developed world. In poorer countries, things go awry much more often, and services simply don’t work or don’t exist in the first place. You as a citizen are required to take care of those yourself.
Nobody in a developed country wastes a moment of thought to the possibility of not having electric power. In poorer countries, this is a staple. Most of the developed world has not known meaningful inflation in decades so nobody thought of it. Argentinians and Turks have lived in a different reality for a while now. Their trust in money is different from ours and chances are they won’t lose those reflexes when they come to live in the more developed world.
We expect that the police will not want to be bribed and that there is public transport to almost anywhere. We expect social services to work well enough, so people don’t die and that medical professionals won’t kill you.
We live in high-trust societies. It is paradoxical that those who depend most on others for the basic necessities, their utter survival even, are exposed to the untrustworthiest elements. But as paradoxical as it may seem, it’s also the most natural consequence of living the way we live.
Am I cryptic? Allow me to expand on that.
When lots of people depend on the structures of society, there will always be those who seek to exploit those very structures for their personal gain.
The Italian economist Carlo Cipolla divided human society into groups. Every single human being belongs to one of four possible groups. 2 of those groups were beneficial to society. 2 of them were detrimental to it. The detrimental ones he called the bandits and the idiots.
Idiots are those that through their actions and inactions harm society but without deriving any personal benefit from their actions aside from a vague feeling of superiority maybe. They are convinced to be right in what they do or what they do not. Fanatics of sorts as rational thought plays minimal role in their lives. Idiots are a huge group in any society. They may constitute 50% or more of the people you see every day.
The other negative group is the bandits. They harm society as well, but they derive personal gain from it. Personally, I would put most politicians into this group. Many managers would fall into it as well.
To preserve their cushy benefits, the bandit often uses narratives. Those narratives are designed to goad the rest of society to behave in a certain way or to make them accept a certain set of policies, all beneficial to the bandit.
That can be done by using data from the real world. If that was it, the manipulation would not be so bad. Bandits are a comparatively small group in any society and if we stick to facts, their machinations cannot get too sophisticated.
But here comes the rub. What are facts? What are the things you are allowed to know? Supposed to know? Required to know?
Those facts cannot come from personal observation anymore as we have seen above. If someone tells you that Polar Bears are dying, chances are you won’t go there to see for yourself. And when someone tells you that temperatures are rising or falling on average, you could check your immediate local temperature but anything that’s not local to you becomes hard or impossible to verify.
What happens to the data coming from a satellite? How do we verify that the data is correct? How do we verify that the measuring mechanism does what it is supposed to do or if it was a direct observation or the result of a mathematical equation?
Let’s face it. Most of what we are supposed to know for a fact is utterly unverifiable. When we are told that a certain procedure is safe and effective, all we can do is trust that this is true. Or reject it outright. But we can’t verify for ourselves. Not reliably.
We can’t live without trust in a 21st-century world. But we can’t trust either. The dilemma is palpable.
I have been a sceptic in anything pretty much since I set out to live on my own and I left home as a teenager. I spent quite some time in some sketchy countries and regions of the globe and have even seen live combat. I am often asked how I survived it all. My answer is always the same – a mixture of being wary of anyone and anything heavily laced with a certain dose of restrained paranoia.
When I traveled with a backpack in my youth, I always made sure nobody was able to put anything into my bags as I did not want to become an unaware mule for drug dealers. I am very careful with alcohol when I am in a setting where I cannot feel sufficiently safe, and I try to keep a low, unassuming profile before locals.
Did I overdo it? I sure did most of the time, but I also prevented more than one bad situation from even arising.
How do we deal with a low-trust-required environment in the developed world then? Nobody can live in a zero-trust world. We are not equipped to handle everything ourselves. But we can set our minds to ask questions more readily and not take anything on faith.
We can require reasonable proof that would at least tick some boxes in our own personal menagerie of experiences and some direct observation.
When I am told that I have lived through the warmest April since the temperature is measured and I need a thick jacket when going out, my sensory input does not match with what I am told.
Not being numb and taking in the world for what it is. Questioning narratives not to bring them down but to look for the flesh on the bones helps a lot. Not every narrative is deceptive, but we must probe each one for that to know.
We cannot ever have personal certainty about most things that affect us every day. But we can ask questions and when the answers are not coming or are simply idiotic, we know that something is seriously wrong.
Being circumspect on a personal level won’t change the world or a narrative or even the bad things that are bound to happen because of it all, but it will change your perspective on life and how you set yourself up to deal with what’s to come.
And don’t forget – no reason for not having fun. The real world is a magnificent place to be in once you come to terms with the fact that we can’t know or control everything. But we can ask.
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