"Fact":
"The Truth":
Truths are multiple and often contradictory, and are also bound to geographic, temporal, cultural and subjective definition. But truths can be slipperier and more dangerous because sometimes, very occasionally, they can be true. And when they're not true, they are almost impossible to disprove.
Inside a truth is part fact, part personal perception. And it is such a heavy, ponderous, heart-stoppingly important word.
Today I happened to overhear a mother telling off one of her children, which is not a good template for how to resolve sibling arguments, but it neatly encapsulates the problem with truth.
"You stole that from your sister. Give it back."
"No. She gave it to me."
"Don't lie to your mother. Tell me the truth."
"The really true truth is she gave it to me."
"I so did not give it to him. He snatched it."
"You gave it to me, you did, you truly did."
"Stop arguing you two, or the truth is that I will make sure you both regret it."
Three different people, four different truths in two minutes. This is pretty typical. And at the core of the argument was a physical reality (the transfer of an object from the girl to the boy) and an accidental or deliberate misunderstanding of posession.
So when the legal system decided to abandon the search for truth, and constructed the idea of "beyond reasonable doubt". it was one of the best strategic moves in the development of credibility for any profession. (Up there with the Hippocratic Oath, anyway.)
It is not a new philosophical idea to abandon the search for The Truth when you recognise the multiplicity of relative truths. But outside theoretical philosophy we cling to Truth. We are just not very good at perceiving and enjoying and using the diversity of truths out there.
"It's [His/Her/Your/My/Their] Fault":
Don't we love having somebody to blame for everything that goes wrong! There must always be someone at 'fault'. Let's look at a compelling use of 'fault': motor vehicle accidents in Australia.
According to a Big Ideas on ABC radio national, in 2012 and 2013, only 45% of fatal accidents and 10% of non-fatal accidents included alcohol, drugs or speeding. A high proportion of all those other accidents were failures of the driving system: road infrastructure, environmental conditions, car technology, road rules, human limitations. At some point some human usually does something sub-optimal right before a collision, but the underlying cause is usually a property of the rest of the system, which was set up in a particularly disastrous way.
Punishing the guilty is fun. Crime stories, courtroom dramas, talkback radio, decades of research into monkey psychology and human economics, and now FMRIs and blood/saliva hormone tests involving the above show that our brains really do enjoy enforcing social norms by targeting and punishing those who break the rules. We get a dopamine hit from blaming somebody. And another one from punishing them ("Off with her Head!"). A dopamine rush feels very nice, and it is addictive. This is why it is so easy to hook us on the trigger for the dopamine. Even very young children like to play the game: "It's [His/Her/Your/My/Their] Fault".
Fault can be real, but it is not always the important thing to look for. We are far too quick to blame - and some of us to take the blame - when the important question should be "What does this mistake represent?" "How do we not make that particular mistake next time?" and then "How do we change the particular system to move away from this bad configuration?"
Just about every time there is somebody at "fault" - bad driver, financial embezzler, serial rapist, mother whose child died in a hot car - the structures around them had more to do with 'causing' the events than they did. The use of the word "fault" indicates that the speaker is not interested in prevention or improvement of the underlying structures. They just want a dopamine hit and someone's head on a plate.
"Insight":
This is a new dangerous word, but it's becoming more popular. Having more or less rejected 'closure' as not particularly useful, it seems we are collectively hankering after 'insight' instead.
To have a moment of insight is to stand on the cusp of change or discovery. This is the moment when you see that your world, or another person's world, is not as you imagined it. It feels profound. The trouble with 'insight' is fourfold:
1) Psychotherapy created the word 'insight' and has successfully marketed it as an end in itself, which journalistic media has picked up nicely. Psychotherapists are primarily interested in helping someone traverse a cusp, and turn around their mental or emotional pathway to achieve whatever change they needed when they walked into the therapist's room, getting to 'insight' is in fact a goal of psychotherapy. It is not any kind of goal in life. It is only an intermediate step towards understanding, and eventually wisdom.
2) Insight feels better than wisdom or understanding. Insight feels like a profound change, a pivotal moment in your being when the world opens up a set of new possibilities. But when the 'insight' perspective is actually integrated into your being (ie understanding) and you are in a position to use it well (ie wisdom), it feels like nothing, because it is normal now. So much import is given to the possibility of change, none to the hard work of ongoing adaptation that brings the change into your being.
3) A moment of insight is hard to hold onto. It is an aberrant set of synaptic loops (an engram) which your brain structure isn't conditioned to accept. We need to get many moments of the same insight in order for it to stick, that is, in order for the engram to get strengthened. It is quite normal for a mind to test out thousands of observations and ideas at any given time subconsciously, and discard most of them as not-useful. That magnificent wash of 'insight' is simply a neurochemical bookmark for an idea: "Oh that might be handy, let's watch to see if we can use that again". And if you don't, no big deal, your brain will just re-wire any spare synapses to something more useful, eg flirting or looking for food.
4) When applied to other peoples' experience, insight can be a convenient proxy for empathy or inter-human understanding. Making statements like "That gives me an insight into what you might be experiencing" are much easier than if you actually allowed your sympathetic nervous system to feel the feelings that the other person's experience evokes. It's an intellectual rather than an empathic connection, and a very neat way to cut off the confronting conversation - leaving the other person feeling a bit more understood. But they're not understood. 'Insight' gets used to fob off the hard people and things to understand.
"The Only Option":
Don't tell me that anything is the only option. There are always other options. Always. They may not be good ones, or they may be much better ones hidden in plain sight. "The Only Option" is a way to keep me obedient. People who routinely see the other options are visionary, or from the other perspective too powerful and too dangerous. Just see:
Mahatma Ghandi (satyagraha), Mohammed Yunnus (microcredit), Nikita Kruschev (social, military & economic reforms within Russia plus a fabulous political tap-dance during the Cuban Missie Crisis).
But other options do not have to be big to be confrontational. Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls presented a nifty TED lecture about crowdfunding their albums, which she tried after she refused to take the 'only option' of signing with a record label. I am still looking for a link to back up this marvellous story that a reality TV show was made about bride kidnapping (with consent from all families), which, when screened around villages in central Africa (you get a lot of "oh somewhere in central Africa" when asking white people in mostly-white single-nation-continents like here) caused a crash in the cultural approval for, and incidence of, kidnap-marriages. I wish I could find it. It is such a clever idea to bring a personal experience of bride kidnapping into public scrutiny by making it reality TV.
If you're in a tight spot, are you really out of options? At any point, you can break off mid-sentence and start singing a Puccini aria or get up and dance to 'Campdown Races'. Sometimes this actually helps, like when I tried it with 3 kids under 5 in a long supermarket queue on a particularly hideous Easter Thursday evening. Possibly not so useful in the traffic queue for the police breathalyser after New Years Eve, if you're driving a bit drunk. Opera in an engineering meeting? Could work. Ever thought to try it?
The greater your decision-making responsibility, the more people there are with vested interests or fixed habits who would seek to convince you that the "only option is...", but paradoxically, the greater your financial resources, the greater your degrees of freedom.
Consider the following large-scale options. Some of these may not be palatable or executable for a number of reasons, but they are alternatives which exist. Stop illegal refugee boats arriving by setting up the Coast Guard to set up a discount ferry service for refugees - cheaper, more effective, more humane. Want to increase public transport use? Bulldoze key arterial roads, or else hire male and female models to be "railway hosts", serving beverages and offering headphones to passengers. Their mere presence will make people feel safe (hey, it worked for air travel....). Want to eliminate homelessness? Provide extensive shelters for short-term homeless and buy houses for long-term homeless. I am being glib, of course, but even glib options are options.
Here is the risk. Sweeping revolutionary changes have poor track record when executed as government or high-level organisational policy (Mao's GLF and Cultural Revolution are classic examples). Outside options have quite a good track record when developed and refined in small areas in context, by people who know the terrain. Examples include Bromley-By-Bow community entrepreneurship, or women holding sex strikes over a particularly important local issue, or even the September 11 2002 attack on the World Trade Centre.
Maybe we all have much broader degrees of freedom than we see when it comes to "other options".
But don't ever tell me that anything is my "only option". I might start singing opera at you.
There is a gulf between an opinion and
physical reality which few people notice. The frequently-used phrase
“... the fact that....” makes our brains feel reassured, calm and
comfortable in the confidence of the speaker, but it is so rarely true that the statement ought to trigger at best wariness, and possibly a
bit of panic. Physical reality is complex, multi-layered, frequently
contradictory, and extremely hard to describe in facts. Even a simple
'fact' statement: “The sky is blue”, is bound to a geographic
definition (here, where I am looking at it), a temporal definition
(during daylight hours, provided there are no clouds, and air
pollution is below a certain limit) and a subjective definition (as
seen by my eyes which have receptors for light in the blue part of
the visible spectrum; other eyes may not recognise it as 'blue'.).
You can tell when someone really knows
the reality of their subject matter, because their phrasing is always
buffered by definitions and exclusions, and they refuse to give 'yes'
or 'no answers. Top scientists often talk like this, and they often are very careful to avoid the word 'fact'. This indicates to me that those who are too sure of their correctness either
are ignorant of the parameters within which it holds and outside which it does not, or are spouting
opinion and trying to make it sound like fact.
"The Truth":
Truths are multiple and often contradictory, and are also bound to geographic, temporal, cultural and subjective definition. But truths can be slipperier and more dangerous because sometimes, very occasionally, they can be true. And when they're not true, they are almost impossible to disprove.
Inside a truth is part fact, part personal perception. And it is such a heavy, ponderous, heart-stoppingly important word.
Today I happened to overhear a mother telling off one of her children, which is not a good template for how to resolve sibling arguments, but it neatly encapsulates the problem with truth.
"You stole that from your sister. Give it back."
"No. She gave it to me."
"Don't lie to your mother. Tell me the truth."
"The really true truth is she gave it to me."
"I so did not give it to him. He snatched it."
"You gave it to me, you did, you truly did."
"Stop arguing you two, or the truth is that I will make sure you both regret it."
Three different people, four different truths in two minutes. This is pretty typical. And at the core of the argument was a physical reality (the transfer of an object from the girl to the boy) and an accidental or deliberate misunderstanding of posession.
So when the legal system decided to abandon the search for truth, and constructed the idea of "beyond reasonable doubt". it was one of the best strategic moves in the development of credibility for any profession. (Up there with the Hippocratic Oath, anyway.)
It is not a new philosophical idea to abandon the search for The Truth when you recognise the multiplicity of relative truths. But outside theoretical philosophy we cling to Truth. We are just not very good at perceiving and enjoying and using the diversity of truths out there.
"It's [His/Her/Your/My/Their] Fault":
Don't we love having somebody to blame for everything that goes wrong! There must always be someone at 'fault'. Let's look at a compelling use of 'fault': motor vehicle accidents in Australia.
According to a Big Ideas on ABC radio national, in 2012 and 2013, only 45% of fatal accidents and 10% of non-fatal accidents included alcohol, drugs or speeding. A high proportion of all those other accidents were failures of the driving system: road infrastructure, environmental conditions, car technology, road rules, human limitations. At some point some human usually does something sub-optimal right before a collision, but the underlying cause is usually a property of the rest of the system, which was set up in a particularly disastrous way.
Punishing the guilty is fun. Crime stories, courtroom dramas, talkback radio, decades of research into monkey psychology and human economics, and now FMRIs and blood/saliva hormone tests involving the above show that our brains really do enjoy enforcing social norms by targeting and punishing those who break the rules. We get a dopamine hit from blaming somebody. And another one from punishing them ("Off with her Head!"). A dopamine rush feels very nice, and it is addictive. This is why it is so easy to hook us on the trigger for the dopamine. Even very young children like to play the game: "It's [His/Her/Your/My/Their] Fault".
Fault can be real, but it is not always the important thing to look for. We are far too quick to blame - and some of us to take the blame - when the important question should be "What does this mistake represent?" "How do we not make that particular mistake next time?" and then "How do we change the particular system to move away from this bad configuration?"
Just about every time there is somebody at "fault" - bad driver, financial embezzler, serial rapist, mother whose child died in a hot car - the structures around them had more to do with 'causing' the events than they did. The use of the word "fault" indicates that the speaker is not interested in prevention or improvement of the underlying structures. They just want a dopamine hit and someone's head on a plate.
"Insight":
This is a new dangerous word, but it's becoming more popular. Having more or less rejected 'closure' as not particularly useful, it seems we are collectively hankering after 'insight' instead.
To have a moment of insight is to stand on the cusp of change or discovery. This is the moment when you see that your world, or another person's world, is not as you imagined it. It feels profound. The trouble with 'insight' is fourfold:
1) Psychotherapy created the word 'insight' and has successfully marketed it as an end in itself, which journalistic media has picked up nicely. Psychotherapists are primarily interested in helping someone traverse a cusp, and turn around their mental or emotional pathway to achieve whatever change they needed when they walked into the therapist's room, getting to 'insight' is in fact a goal of psychotherapy. It is not any kind of goal in life. It is only an intermediate step towards understanding, and eventually wisdom.
2) Insight feels better than wisdom or understanding. Insight feels like a profound change, a pivotal moment in your being when the world opens up a set of new possibilities. But when the 'insight' perspective is actually integrated into your being (ie understanding) and you are in a position to use it well (ie wisdom), it feels like nothing, because it is normal now. So much import is given to the possibility of change, none to the hard work of ongoing adaptation that brings the change into your being.
3) A moment of insight is hard to hold onto. It is an aberrant set of synaptic loops (an engram) which your brain structure isn't conditioned to accept. We need to get many moments of the same insight in order for it to stick, that is, in order for the engram to get strengthened. It is quite normal for a mind to test out thousands of observations and ideas at any given time subconsciously, and discard most of them as not-useful. That magnificent wash of 'insight' is simply a neurochemical bookmark for an idea: "Oh that might be handy, let's watch to see if we can use that again". And if you don't, no big deal, your brain will just re-wire any spare synapses to something more useful, eg flirting or looking for food.
4) When applied to other peoples' experience, insight can be a convenient proxy for empathy or inter-human understanding. Making statements like "That gives me an insight into what you might be experiencing" are much easier than if you actually allowed your sympathetic nervous system to feel the feelings that the other person's experience evokes. It's an intellectual rather than an empathic connection, and a very neat way to cut off the confronting conversation - leaving the other person feeling a bit more understood. But they're not understood. 'Insight' gets used to fob off the hard people and things to understand.
"The Only Option":
Don't tell me that anything is the only option. There are always other options. Always. They may not be good ones, or they may be much better ones hidden in plain sight. "The Only Option" is a way to keep me obedient. People who routinely see the other options are visionary, or from the other perspective too powerful and too dangerous. Just see:
Mahatma Ghandi (satyagraha), Mohammed Yunnus (microcredit), Nikita Kruschev (social, military & economic reforms within Russia plus a fabulous political tap-dance during the Cuban Missie Crisis).
But other options do not have to be big to be confrontational. Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls presented a nifty TED lecture about crowdfunding their albums, which she tried after she refused to take the 'only option' of signing with a record label. I am still looking for a link to back up this marvellous story that a reality TV show was made about bride kidnapping (with consent from all families), which, when screened around villages in central Africa (you get a lot of "oh somewhere in central Africa" when asking white people in mostly-white single-nation-continents like here) caused a crash in the cultural approval for, and incidence of, kidnap-marriages. I wish I could find it. It is such a clever idea to bring a personal experience of bride kidnapping into public scrutiny by making it reality TV.
If you're in a tight spot, are you really out of options? At any point, you can break off mid-sentence and start singing a Puccini aria or get up and dance to 'Campdown Races'. Sometimes this actually helps, like when I tried it with 3 kids under 5 in a long supermarket queue on a particularly hideous Easter Thursday evening. Possibly not so useful in the traffic queue for the police breathalyser after New Years Eve, if you're driving a bit drunk. Opera in an engineering meeting? Could work. Ever thought to try it?
The greater your decision-making responsibility, the more people there are with vested interests or fixed habits who would seek to convince you that the "only option is...", but paradoxically, the greater your financial resources, the greater your degrees of freedom.
Consider the following large-scale options. Some of these may not be palatable or executable for a number of reasons, but they are alternatives which exist. Stop illegal refugee boats arriving by setting up the Coast Guard to set up a discount ferry service for refugees - cheaper, more effective, more humane. Want to increase public transport use? Bulldoze key arterial roads, or else hire male and female models to be "railway hosts", serving beverages and offering headphones to passengers. Their mere presence will make people feel safe (hey, it worked for air travel....). Want to eliminate homelessness? Provide extensive shelters for short-term homeless and buy houses for long-term homeless. I am being glib, of course, but even glib options are options.
Here is the risk. Sweeping revolutionary changes have poor track record when executed as government or high-level organisational policy (Mao's GLF and Cultural Revolution are classic examples). Outside options have quite a good track record when developed and refined in small areas in context, by people who know the terrain. Examples include Bromley-By-Bow community entrepreneurship, or women holding sex strikes over a particularly important local issue, or even the September 11 2002 attack on the World Trade Centre.
Maybe we all have much broader degrees of freedom than we see when it comes to "other options".
But don't ever tell me that anything is my "only option". I might start singing opera at you.
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