Our Heads Are Full of Ghosts
Don't expect to find reality without help from a few enemies first.
But the secret of intellectual excellence is the spirit of criticism; it is intellectual independence. And this leads to difficulties which must prove insurmountable for any kind of authoritarianism. The authoritarian will in general select those who obey, who believe, who respond to his influence. But in doing so, he is bound to select mediocrities.
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies
Intellectual conflict is a robust subject. I’m never quite sure where to begin as it no doubt predates civilization. I suspect it is older than our species. I have an image of Neanderthals debating whether to give newly migrating humans the club or the chub.
They determined the chub eventually, according to current readings of our DNA. But there would have been prude Neanderthals, screeching about purity and bloodlines, and similar nonsenses. But the horny always prevail.
People have fought over phantoms and ghosts, ideas and beliefs, for a long while by now. Alongside our DNA, history is full of ghosts. Theories once believed rock-solid turned out to be so much nonsense. Just serpents slithering through our heads, hissing with pride.
But if everyone is haunted, how do we decide these ghosts are just phantoms? That these relics aren't real?
I’ve already given Genesis and Exodus some attention. It only seems fair to aid the less fortunate physicists among us. They starve otherwise. Theologians needn’t get all the attention - and donatives - just because they’re more creative than scientists.
If they’re not the same, anyway. They’re not. But sometimes they’re the same person.
I’ll ignore most the metaphysical arguments causing a scientist to explore the idea of a First Cause1 for brevity. We don’t have billions of years in this essay. We don't even have six days. But ‘God’ is their first cause in a long casual chain.2 The cause without a cause who isn't James Dean.
With this idea in hand, a Catholic priest named George Lemaître figured he’d sass up the traditional creation story with some novel astrophysical assertions.3
Lemaître declared everything in our universe is moving away from everything else. He also asserted it is all speeding up as it races along. Later, he would reason if all things were moving from each other, they must have all originated from the same place.
Well, he probably reasoned this out before. He was a priest. Nerds call this a priori reasoning when they want to sound less like fussy losers and more like raging, raw-egg chugging sex machines. It means knowledge derived from previous assertions.
Lemaître had the creation story in mind, not to mention Benedict Spinoza’s ruthlessly rational murder of the idea of substance and essence.4 So, with some observational data in hand, he posited his own explanation called The Primeval Atom Theory.
Without state coercion, it turns out a bible story wasn't enough evidence to justify belief in physical matters. Lemaître needed more than Genesis, St. Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, Spinoza, Democritus, et al. He needed Edwin Hubble to steal the idea from him two years later.
The idea everything is moving away from everything else tends to be credited with Hubble rather than Lemaître. Easier to name telescopes Hubble than Lemaître. How the hell do you even pronounce Lemaître? What is that gods damned T doing there?
Questions for the ages. Or the French. We are unlikely to receive a satisfactory answer in any event. Ever listen to that language? Like trying to retch up Cathedral Latin with over three hundred kinds of cheese in your mouth. A camembert nightmare.
The French language is just more evidence the universe is fleeing the Milky Way as Lemaître asserted. A priori evidence. So, not really scientific evidence. Or evidence at all. Just bigotry. Still, French sucks and I’m onto something.
But just providing evidence for something is not enough. It never has been, really. For some it is. Those already inclined to believe it. To the flock, the congregation, or a large chunk of academia actually buying into that self-correcting shit people think science does.5
A scientific theory needs to be beaten like a redhead in a Walmart. Because if it's real, it can take it. Just like a redhead on Pornhub. Apologies, no citation for this one, though I did spend several days and rolls of paper towels looking for one.
A theory held above criticism isn’t scientific at all. It is just a theory, owed no greater standing than the idea the French are ill-informed, unwashed prats unworthy of the signal honor hosting the Olympics represents just because this entire run of the 2024 Paris Olympics has been disastrously French.
That's just a single data point over centuries of extremely boring French history. Minus Joan of Arc. That chick was badass.
But according to Karl Popper, the demarcation between metaphysics (academic religion) and physics (useful religion) hinges on testability and falsification.6 A scientific theory can be tested and is possible to be shown as false. It doesn’t mean it will be false if tested, but that it can be tested.
If I say you have a 95% chance of not liking this essay that leaves a 5% possibility you might. Who knows? You could be insane, too. But no matter what, the theory can't be false no matter the outcome. If you like it, I predicted it. If you don't I also predicted that.
There's no science in this. It's barely better than economics and it's the kind of thing you say to trick people or yourself into believing what they were already inclined to believe. I have no doubt it sells newspapers.
This is particularly evident in politics where method and outcome matter less than loveable lies, a feeling of collective belonging, and one’s civic duty to act obstinately stupid. And the first rule of politics is never listen to your enemy. But I repeat myself.
Back in 2016, a strangely energetic fruit was narrowly elected President of the United States. Immediately after taking office, the Whitehouse issued an obviously illegal and unconstitutional order banning or restricting travel from several Muslim countries.7
This was naturally opposed by anyone interested in the rule of law, as well as a bunch of socialists in Seattle. Socialists often consider themselves technocratic and scientific. So, naturally, they piled into airports, beat their chests, and called everyone trying to visit their granny a racist.
Hey, speaking of. If only dogs can hear dog whistles and people call crypto-racist statements dog whistles, how is it only the current generation of socialists can hear them? Nevermind. Don't worry about it.
More intelligent, pragmatic individuals - as well as those pursuing a free political win - challenged the travel ban in court. The plaintiffs argued the ban was illegal due to some pesky words on paper called the 5th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
As expected, the courts ruled the ban as illegal and blasted it back to the Whitehouse. The Trump administration, attempting to keep a completely stupid campaign promise, probably shouldn’t have soft-balled it in like that. Like DEI for bad policy.
But the idiocy wasn’t over yet, nor limited to one party. Because that’s not how idiocy works. The super-scientifically minded, self-styled technocratic turds at the Socialist Alternative took credit for swaying the United States 9th District Court’s decision.
Millions of people across the United States celebrated on February 9 when an appeals court blocked Donald Trump’s efforts to reinstate his ban on immigrants and refugees from seven predominantly Muslim countries. This was an important victory for our movement and the more than 100,000 people who marched, protested, and shut down airports to win the release of immigrants detained under Trump’s bigoted order.
Inside the SeaTac Airport Shutdown, The Socialist Alternative8
The Pharaohs of Egypt would approve, having pulled the same stunt on their own dim-witted acolytes centuries before. But socialists, rather than waving their arms in the air to flood the Nile, got the court decision they wanted by calling everyone a racist.
The more things change, the more useful idiots stay the same.
Around the same time the Pharaohs were bamboozling ancestral socialists with magic words, King Agamemnon was engaged in similar but more monstrously personal methods.
He wanted to kill a lot of Trojans. He had his coalition of armies and a will to murder a bunch of people because his friend couldn’t keep his slut wife Hellen satisfied. Sadly, there was a large body of water between him and Troy with nary a breeze in sight.
The scientists of the day determined Artemis was the one to pray to for a stiff breeze. Unfortunately, she was also willing and hoping for human sacrifice. So, the equally bloodthirsty King Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia to her. With a knife.
Not long after, a fair wind rose up over the Aegean Sea and the coalition of Greeks set sail to spend a decade destroying a single city. There was a 95% chance it would work and if not… well, the priests would still have been correct, if down a princess.
Something both these examples have in common - other than their obviously insane nature - is their utter reliance on positive confirmation to the exclusion of falsification. Even if the socialists hadn’t called you a racist and Agamemnon hadn’t killed his kin, the outcome would have been the same.
But neither ever entertained the notion they just weren't that important.
Critics in both cases pointed that out. But since both issues were a matter of religion more than science, criticisms were waved away as so much nonsense. As bad actors, or shills for Troy, or right-wing lunatics, or whatever Satan was fashionable at the time.
Satan changes more than CDC pandemic guidance.
Without criticism, you still get change. But only a fool believes any change is a good one. Some changes are bad. Real bad. Like 1940’s bad. And the benefit of hindsight fueled by foresight shows us they can be mitigated by combating fanaticism itself.
The fanatic believes they know the only way forward, or backward, or any direction striking their fancy. You will know them by their utter confidence in the illusory comfort their beliefs bring them. And they do not allow criticism of their comforting ghosts.
They cancel people. They scream. They make the world a worse place. Their arguments and media make no sense. They believe the ends justify the means, without ever noticing the ends never arrive.
This is often held up as strong, to be so certain one is correct they cannot and will not entertain any notion to the contrary. But it’s really just intensely common. The vast majority of history is made by people just like this. Lunatics, psychos, tyrants, idiots.
But history is also made by smart people, not just kings or politicos. Common people, often working class rowdies, will tell you when you're full of it just for fun. If your erudite, elite enemies aren't good enough, anyway.
Everyone has their thing. Mine is Mountain Dew. There is but one acceptable flavor of my thing and I’ll brook no nonsense about Code Red or any other sugared heresy. But we all share reality. We may not enjoy living together but dying together is unlikely to solve anything.9
More than that, it seems to me reality means something. And it’s not whatever our silly little ghosts are. What our beliefs are, or what we think we are, or how we go about our daily lives. Reality exists with or without the ghosts screaming lies in our heads.
We should act accordingly. There’s no need to be super scientific about it. But we do need to be smarter about it and that means listening to your enemies now and then. If just so you can insult them and their mothers in better, more sexually deviant ways.
I’ll end this thing with a quote from a favorite of mine. If you’ve ever heard of the stoics, cynics, or read that horrible The Dog story, you should know about him. He was a smarty pants and definitely no weakling. He was likely the manliest man of all time.
“Listen to your enemies. They’re the first to point out your mistakes.”
Antisthenes the Cynic