Tuesday, March 14, 2006
source: http://depletion.blogspot.com/
Relativity Dogma & Truth

Relativity - The doctrine that measurements and perceptions are true
only in relation to a given observer at a given place and time.

Dogma - A generally held set of formulated beliefs.

Truth - The actual state of things.

“If you own a hammer… every problem looks like a nail.”

So what?

Of course reality is objective; That is a trite truism. What am I supposed to do about the things I don’t know I’m not aware of? Magically become aware of them somehow? Of course not… But our relative perceptions of truth, and the expression of these beliefs as dogma in our lives, have an insidious and dangerous potential to pigeon-hole our critical thinking in subtle ways. It is this conundrum which is at the root of our struggle to make good choices. What you are doing today, is most likely what you will be doing tomorrow. Our default positions, developed through our lives, describe a set of assumptions about ourselves & our world. We coalesce meaning from the vapor of nuance, deriving a set of values based on our experiences. Absent new information, we assume our core values to be correct; that is to say consistent with objective reality. But the very nature of objective reality itself implies that all our acknowledged truths, are subject to the vagaries of perception. As with the story of the 3 blind men & the elephant, each will perceive a different aspect of the same larger reality, glimpsing only this small fraction of truth upon which their own objective reality is based. And this is precisely the problem. It is the common assumptions we make, which blind us to the bigger picture. We are all slaves to our own version of truth, held captive in a prison we can neither see, nor feel… The worst part of this captivity, is that it replicates itself, and grows stronger over time. We hijack those elements which fit our existing worldview, further entrenching & hardening our positions. Everyone who can read this blog, is firmly entrenched in the western values & dogma, which tells you that we can overcome the terrible challenges of life on Earth. We have all but conquered hunger, disease & illness, slavery, poverty… the list is almost endless. But this is only an illusion of our relative perception of truth. The larger reality says that in spite of, (or perhaps even because of), modern agriculture more starve today than ever before. The highest standard of living ever known to man, is accompanied by unprecedented poverty in never before seen numbers. Unparalleled advances in energy efficiency have propelled our consumption of energy to unseen heights. The freedom our ancestors provided for us through great sacrifice does not make you free. Freedom is something you do… not something you have. The truth is that none of these ”modern advances” we cherish have delivered on their promises of a better tomorrow. Instead, they have ushered in an era of unprecedented poverty, misery, suffering and death which shows no sign of retreating. The problem dear Brutus, lies not within our stars… but within ourselves. The punchline here is that actual reality does not respect our dogmatic beliefs… or even know of such nonsense. As the impoverished, huddled masses are discovering as I write this…

Coming soon to a theater near you.

Appologies for the nit-pick, but all the places the word "objective" is used make the post bloody hard to read.

Objective:
emphasizing or expressing things as perceived without distortion of personal feelings, insertion of fictional matter, or interpretation; "objective art"

I'm hoping it was meant to be
Subjective:
taking place within the mind and modified by individual bias; "a subjective judgement"



I think there's some good stuff in there, and I know it was probably just a mental splurge of ideas, but using the wrong/opposite word makes the article somewhat confusing & a little incoherent.

This kind of reduces the credibility of the author. To me, it's reminiscent of some of the more ranting writing styles of many bloggers and online authors, who choose to write in an authoritative manner, whilst including fundamental contradictions of false factual assertions.

Due to the sheer volume of tripe that appears on the net every minute, I tend to judge harshly when I find a couple of glaring problems. If for nothing else, so save the brain-ache of trawling deciphering and correcting in my head, any genuine accidental mistakes and filtering out the lies, overstatements, wilful omissions, half-truths, mis-information, dis-information, mis-quotes/out of context quotes etc. etc. that seem to be par for the course among many web journo's and authors.

Hence, I skippd most of the article, and ended up spending less time reading it than writing this.


Sorry for the rant.