The limits of knowledge

I was reminded last night why I had decided to stop commenting on Iran. You probably saw that CNN “leaked” what I’m sure they hoped was a damaging treasonous secret: that the bomb strikes didn’t do much damage.

On the one hand, fuck CNN. True or not, they were HOPING to damage Trump, no matter what the potential cost to the US.

But you know, it’s possible they were right. How much do any of us know about any of this? Really and truly? How do we know we are not being lied to by everyone? Most of us pick a side and assume they are mostly accurate and the other side is mostly lying (because they disagree with our side), but what if everyone everywhere is mostly lying? How would we know? We form our opinions logically (hopefully) on the basis of what we think is true. But what if the premises of our reasoning are wrong? I call this rough idea the Null Hypothesis idea. The Truth is not on the table. So sorry.

I just wrote another post that will come out Friday comparing politics to the family. It rode off like a horse with rabies (do horses get rabies? I don’t know), and I lost sight of it.

What I started to say, though, is that one of the key developmental tasks for people who grow up in traumatized families is to mourn the love you never had. It’s an odd thing, but people from even the most fucked up families will often refuse to separate fully from them emotionally, because it’s part of who you are. But if who you are is painful, then the smart money says that growth and leaving all that behind makes solid emotional sense. No hate or forgetting, or even forgiving are needed. Just something new, a new felt sense of self that is not anchored in that limiting emotional milieu. It’s very difficult. I haven’t pulled it off. But it’s a good ideal.

I feel that likewise most of us at some point have to recognize and grieve what SHOULD be present in our societies, but isn’t. Not yet. There is no magic wand you can wave, no violence you can commit or commission that will help. This whole idea of reparations is not that different from the sense that your family SHOULD have been there to care for you. But it wasn’t, and there is NOTHING that can be done now. Not little: NOTHING. No time machine. No ability—to take this dynamic into the political—to go back and comfort the slaves and lecture the slave owners.

As obviously absurd as it is to take money from people who didn’t do anything and give it to people who didn’t suffer anything, the emotional root of “reparations” does genuinely lie in a desire to change the past, which again is obviously not possible (well, and of course the usual crooks are making use of it: I speak here only of the small number of people who are sincere).

The difference, of course, from the family of origin is that you CAN change society in the present, but only if you grow up. Until you replace a childlike naivete in all directions (positive and negative) you are not really an adult. If all you see is good, or all you see is bad, then you are child. Stop being a child.

And you need to mourn the news, in the sense that you have to admit that those responsible for telling us the truth let us down constantly. We want the news to be reliable like a good parent, but it isn’t. It is a pathological alcoholic parent with a gambling problem. Anyone who once uncritically accepted what he or she was being told as gospel truth will be sad once they realize how it really works. And that sadness need to be processed through mourning.

If you are not a moron, you realize that we never get the whole story. Everyone, on all sides, withholds something, and there is no way to know what that something is. Trump is not being told everything, in all likelihood, that our intel agencies know; and within the agencies there are probably cliques that withhold data from one another. It may literally be that NOBODY in our or other nations is getting all the facts delivered to them honestly, as known by the gatherers.

None of us is ever completely justified in feeling we have all “the facts” on any complex political or historical issue. We need to make decisions, to form perceptions, and that requires using what we think we know.

But never forget that it is only what you think you know. Always be willing to drop facts like hot potatoes, if need be.

Did we do the right thing with Iran? I don’t know. Time will have something to say, certainly (which is another way of framing the cliche). One possibility is that we didn’t even bomb Iran. Maybe Israel didn’t either. Maybe the whole nation is actually filled with peacenik hippy types who just want to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. I don’t know for sure. Maybe the Ayatollah Khamenei doesn’t exist, and was invented by Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

I have from time to time offered the idea that proper moral judgements have three attributes: they are Local, Necessary, and Imperfect. They are a creative reaction to a specific situation. Local, in that you are not in this decision generalizing. Necessary, in that what is none of your business is none of your business. Imperfect: in morality, you are just trying to avoid evil, in that there are often multiple relatively correct, or “good enough” solutions, and you should recognize that. I have a post on that too, come to think of it.

I just get up sometimes and feel like writing. I’m pretty sure I know why, but that’s another post. No matter who you are, I would encourage you to deflate your certainty balloon a bit, at least most of the time. Some people are obvious idiots. Joe Biden was never fit to be President, and that was clear. It was like the Monty Python “Dead Parrot” sketch. “This man has dementia”. “No, he doesn’t”. “Yes he does”. Etc.

But often even the morons say something intelligent from time to time. Perception is work, like anything else. And I suppose the main aspect of that work is filtering. To my main point today, though, you can only filter what is present.

Actually, let me offer one more image. It is better to think in terms of the directions your thought is flowing, than to think of thought “positions”. In flow, you can adjust on the fly, easily. A “position” sounds more like a castle, built up with considerable effort, and hard to move. The more agile you are, the closer you are likely to be able to match your perceptions to what the world is showing you.

We want the world to be knowable and stable. But it probably isn’t.

I’ll leave it there.