There is no jamming system that can deny access to the GPS coordinates of a specific target. What is possible is jamming GPS signals for a specific region. In the case of VDL, the aircraft's transponder transmitted good GPS reception from start to finish, which is an undeniable fact :
Source: Flightradar24
"* The flight was scheduled to last 1 hour and 48 minutes. It lasted 1 hour and 57 minutes.
* The aircraft's transponder reported good GPS signal quality from takeoff to landing."
So this is yet another lie to add to the rampant Russophobia that will lead us to conflict.
The issue here is TRUST rather than Truth. There is such a thing as “truth” in the material world. The spiritual world is nothing but a hallucination.
I was a criminal prosecutor in a large jurisdiction for 34 years. I was described by an investigative journalist as “A square-jawed man with an outspoken certainty about the world” because I base my analysis on the idea that there is a discernible objective reality. The examples given from the criminal law are superficial and pat.
Our capacity for subjective discernment of the truth has been suppressed by neoliberalism and the economic precarity that turns most “experts” and “journalists” into Stalinist “yes-men” who hope that public confirmation of the “correct” line will save them from being cast into menial servitude or homelessness.
This reality has undermined TRUST in our institutions and has legitimized charlatans everywhere.
Then Pilate entered the praetorium again, and called Jesus, and said to him, "Are you the King of the Jews?"
Jesus answered, "My kingdom is not of this world; if my kingdom were of this world, My servants would fight for me so that I would not be betrayed to the Jews; but now my kingdom is not from here."
Pilate said to Him, "So you are the King?" Jesus answered: You say that I am a King. That is why I was born and that is why I came into the world, to bear witness to the truth; everyone who is of the truth listens to My voice.
"Imagine a serial commenter on the same blog asking “is my comment really necessary?”"
I do find myself with appreciably more free time and less stress since I began, occasionally, remembering to ask myself this question. So that is one thing anyone who agrees with this post can take away from it. (No snark intended.)
I enjoyed this. Its a 'fact' that Aurelien tends to publish his essays on the same day as David McGrogan who I also enjoy. I will repeat my comment I left on his site today because I think its equally apt here.
'I blame the use to which the internet has been put. Conversation has been replaced by psyops. Nothing is allowed to exist outside the narrative. Nuance is dead. '
Answer to Mark and James: I was questioning James Whelan’s assumption that Aurelian is male. A common assumption by male readers, and perhaps for James the additional flag of the content being politics/sociology of epistemology, traditionally studied by men (the preponderance of male names in research and in these comments illustrate this phenomenon well). I’m a gender nonconforming woman with long held interests in the negotiation of scientific truths, especially interesting to observe in scientific controversies.
There is also a simpler take on this. As Peter Turchin and Jack Goldstone say, there is an elite overproduction in the Western countries, and for that reason too many people who struggle about power.
So the power struggles get more and more nasty, will less and less bearings to reality.
But what is a fact? I am a scientist and an expert witness in UK and USA courts, and have acted in more than 50 radiation and health cases. In USA (juries) I have been successful in the main, in the UK (judges) seldom. I think you would be surprised at the level of confusion, bias, and sheer criminal dishonesty to be found in court proceedings. The idea of Science as truth is a laugh. Actors choose their facts and interpretations. There can be many interpretations of the same wall of facts but over time, preferred ones are black boxed. The idea of rational thought is another. Science, once you get past Newtons laws, is a very muddy place, controller by industry and the military.
I'm not so sure; I think the rulers may find those things quite useful in their day-to-day lives, to whatever extent they grasp them, but as for weaponising truths, facts and logic against the ruled, it's generally more trouble than it is worth. Why bother with all those complexities when you can simply lie? People who already hate you and a few pedants won't believe you, but the former won't believe you even if you say the truth and the latter are negligible.
One way to think about this Truth, and I'm probably just repeating what you said, is not so much what's "out there" and empirically verifiable, but a set of allegedly "self evident" (as in having no need of proof) that groups of people believe by virtue of their membership in that group--ie exact opposite of what people think "truth" means. This is necessary not just because of group soludarity, but even to communicate at all within that group--their "truths" serve as a bit of codebook with which they can decipher what they are talking about--people talk about "dog whistles," but the truth is that we are all dogs, just of different tribes, and it's no "whistle."
Acculturation, in this sense, is the process of creating a common "truth" that all members of the society can subscribe to. Empiricism is desirable not because it allows the truth to be "factual" but because what is "empirically true," no one controls it, or at least so we would like to think. But if "empuricism" comes to mean, say, whoever that holds the measuring stick "controls the truth," well, people who don't like that "truth" don't need to respect it as such any more.
Following up on the previous comment: one thing that the Enlightenment in the West distracts us from is that "truth" is community-dependent. Indeed, it is, in the community-dependent form, the core of what maintains communities. It is a form of shibboleth, things you say and even "believe in" as part of being a member of a given community.
One illustration that's worth noting is the series of research on creationism and evolution by Dan Kahan, trained social psychologist (I think) but a professor at the Yale Law School: he has found that "creationists" are in fact more scientifically literate than non-creationists, including, ironically, about evolutionary biology. The overall finding is actually not that surprising: at least in US, creationists tend to be better off in terms of socioeconomic background than those who are not and, for what it is worth, scientific literacy tends to follow the "class." With regards evolutionary biology, however, eliciting the "correct" answers from the creationists required phrasing the questions carefully so that you are not asking about what they "believe" but what they "learned as correct answers" from their studies. So, is this an instance where creationists are committing some form of heresy, either against their own beliefs by knowing the "correct" answers based on biology or against "science" by not "believing" what they "know" from their studies? Doe sit matter? If, per the Enlightenment beliefs, "truth" is independent of what people believe, what does it matter what they actually believe? If what you "believe" is for the reasons of community, as part of the shared communal set of beliefs that undergird the membership in your community, does it really matter what they believe?
The real challenge comes only when the "factual" truths and "communal" truths come in direct conflict with each other, and successful communities usually find ways to avoid such conflicts. A friend of mine, originally from Texas (and absolutely hates everything Southern) scoffs at the creationists in his extended family as they act hypocritically--they find rather convoluted ways of thinking so that they don't find conflict between, say, evolving flu virus and the need for annual vaccines and the fact that they don't really believe in "evolution." But that is exactly the point, isn't it? To find a modus vivendi between "factual truth" and "communal truth." Of course this is going to be conflicted and, sooner or later, the conflicts won't be too easily hidden and the contradictions will accumulate. and I think this is true with EVERY community, with communities defined broadly, although how exactly this conflict will evolve will vary wildly from case to case.
Of course, in socieites with many communities, the problem is compounded by the multiplicity of "communal truths"--it won't be just the "factual truth" that would be in conflict with the "communal truth," but the many "communal truths" that will be in conflict with each other. (This is true, incidentally, even in academic disciplines--a paper based on the same experiment with a fairly straightforward line of argument needs to be, eh, "dressed" dramatically differently for audiences in policial science, economics, sociology, and psychology. Stuff that are not only considered simple and obvious, but downright foundational in some discipline will be considered absurd and untrue off the face in others. In fact, different branches of psychology, apparently, are notorious for this.) Managing thse conflicts, in a sense, is at the heart of "politics," or in other words, the core of politics lies in "truth management." (So much for the Enlightenment faith in unique, singular, and "independent" truth (tm)!)
Of course, the key role of politicians in this context is to obfuscate, equivocate, and muddy the waters. You don't want to advance and champion the "truth." To those who grew up on a version of Plato's dictum, that the craft of politics is somehow to advance the truth (well, Plato said "justice", but many people confuse truth (or, rationality) for justice and vice versa--as Alasdair MacIntyre's book title says, "Whose justice, which rationality?") (NB: I actually think this is how the West was born--it came out of a particularly "intellectual" and fanatical variant of monotheism, not only that there is but one God, but that that God is truth and that the Church holds that truth," in a manner of speaking. States of the East, the great Empires in China, India, and Persia, became quite good and smoothing the relationship between the various communities in their midst by fudging what this "truth" is, but in so doing, it became a bit dull in pursuit of the factual truth, which, I think is a useful background for advances in science: fans of Joseph Needham and others will need to be reminded that the Medieval Chinese developed wonderful "technologies" well ahead of the Europeans, but their "sciences" remained as backward as their contemporaries in Europe.) It was no doubt made necessary by the internal diversity of these Empires--many tribes, with their own truths. You can't force a singular and well-developed Truth(tm) on them all without too much bloodshed--so if they burn incense for the semi-divine (whatever that means) emperor once a year or something, everything is fine (I'm making it up--although it's worth remembering that this was exactly what the Romans did before 3rd Century AD). No doubt this was a factor in how Europe fragmented into many communities with more or less self-contained truths to themselves.
So the West, both in modern Europe and in North America, have come to the "imperial" moment again, in the sense of having to juggle many communities and many truths in their midst. And the path seems to be heading down the Chinese path--of all the Eastern Empires, China managed to handle the many truths the best, I think--and set itself up for its eventual century of humiliation, after centuries of decline. I suspect that it will probably be a few centuries of decline, like the Chinese experience, before the West's century of humiliation, if it only lasts just a century, will commence....
Wow, nice comment about the nature of communication, truth and social cohesion. Also it has sense the intelectuality of Western that produced sciences and also strong monotheism (the God was a mixture of traditional religions and the "ontoteology" of greek philosophy, introducing, for example, the "creation ex nihilo")
But, I always thought that the Imperial China was one of the more cohesionated and "mono-ethnical" societies, specially in its core or center area, away of borders. I saw its decadence more for demographic and power struggle factors, not also for those "common truth" facing each other (of course: this can be viewed as a fight of communities: I remember, without remembering the name, one eclectical chinese rebel on that century that achieve a juge number of followers).
I think that's one of myths about China--the notion of homogeneous societies applies to China's neighbors, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan, but that emerged out of defining themselves as explicitly "anti-China," ie not a diverse empire of many tribes, but "one nation for one tribe.".
The funny thing is that eclectical rebels who sold odd mixture of quasi religious views that built huge following can describe practically any major rebel movement in Chinese history: so-called Yellow Turbans in 2nd century, the Red Turbans in the 14th, the Nien and the Taiping kingdom in the 19th, the Boxers at the turn of 20th century, and the Falun Gong today.
Thanks, I am a fully ignorant about almost everything (and China is a huge portion of that everything in human affairs). I agree in that the "West" face a similar pattern of decline, at least for what I can read in the bowels of certain facts (I will point more to geographic and demographical issues, combined with techonology and production; but you always point very good the finger on how the information "moves" and "work" in connection with other features of societies).
In order to understand we need the simplification and imagination. We can't work without it. Simplify and Imagine (that is: distorsion reality adding and substracting) is good. Said this:
The main problem of "truth" and "moral" are imagination andsimplification. The exemple of the five values of the Ukranian War is a good one of how to act. One action can produce something good and bad in the same moment, and also more effects with different valencies and effects on long term for different persons. When we talk about facts, usually we go further facts and talk about "categorys of facts". Like in good and bad effects in actions, a fact has a lot of properties. Generally we select ones and deny an others, and the problem that we face is the difficult of being conscient about this. Obviously, we have to focus on x properties and not in y properties; but the issue is to focus on the important properties, and those depends on what property matters on the context or which property is more "defining" of the thing or process.
You talk about emotion, group approval, status and simple hedonism of not questioning your beliefs. It is hard to be curious, really curious, if you don't have or had reinforcers; and more hard even if you hace punishments and reinforcers for not being curious. That's why is difficult if you are engaged in some group to have this curosity, specially on the more emotive, prescriptive and root issues of the group.
One possible solution, expressed metaphorical, consists in see ideas (or propositions) in a platonic heaven, without having an author and disconnected one to other. This allows to sepparate the sentences refered to A to the others refered to B, with the perfect skill to disagree of the first and agree on the seconds. I think that is the kind of approach need it for being curious: be able to discconnect aspects and not contaminate one with the residue of the previous one (like cleaning a dish for not mix flavours).
Usually I read things and I find most interesting scattering reflections that the main argument, and also the opposite. I can find mistaken one paragraph of Aurelien (even stupid or crazy) and agree 100% (or find it wonderful and lucid) to the next one.
As an example, it has always fascinated me the "blin spot" of those so-called "scientif skeptics and chritic thinkers" about pseudo-science. I've seen detailed refutations of homeopaty, saying even a good logical argument: "if keep memory, as they said, also keep memory of damge substances that were in contact with the water". However, they are unable to aknowledge that most of people who goes to homeopaty goes for "small problems" that a bit of placebo could fix it.
"Rather than changing our minds, we search and search until we find someone who will tell us that what we believe is still true, in return for money."
I would never consciously spend money on that. I'm too much of a miser. Luckily, that sort of thing is readily available for free now, you just need to know where to look...
I take issue with what you are saying in this essay. For one thing the entire essay is an example of what you are complaining about in the essay: a series of claims, purporting to be true about a subject - in your case, of how people make truth and facts subject to their own prejudices. And, I believe you miss the whole point of truth, that it is an ideal point of view that we can all agree on. An ideal is an ideal because you aspire to it but you cannot reach it. We should be able to agree that certain investigative procedures tend towards accuracy, such as rigorous scientific procedures, or procedures in a court of law that require the inadmissability of hearsay, the presence of physical evidence, a logical explanation that rules out alternatives, etc. These don't guarantee the truth, but they are more reliable than "doing your own research". The problem today is that certain politicians and political parties use lying as their modus operandi. Trump, Putin, and Farage come to mind. These politicians lie so often and so profoundly that they help to create alternate realities, that we can imagine as a kind of bubble that their supporters can live in, confirming everything they believe and protecting them from having to deal with contrary evidence. In the case of the U.S., Trump's alternate reality has bifurcated American society, into two societies with two mutually opposing realities, uncannily similar to the pre-civil war situation between the Union and the Confederacy. The Confederates believed that enslaving Africans was their moral right, whereas the Union saw it as a gross immorality. It seems obvious to me that slavery is wrong, period. As for today's world, it seems equally obvious that basing your politics on lies is wrong and it leads to the wholesale destruction of everything that is good about our civilization. Just look at what has happened to Russian and American society, for instance.
True or not? A large number of American voters are swimming daily in a polluted sea of disinformation and, like fish, don't realize that they are wet and ill-informed. The weaponization of the First Amendment for fun and profit was primarily launched by Rush Limbaugh, copied by AM broadcasters across the country, bolstered by Murdoch's red meat business model and supercharged by the internet. Without this weaponization there would be no Trump 1.0 or Trump 2.0. James Madison makes it simple to grasp, "A democratic republic requires a well-informed electorate". Please, if your response to this comment is some version of "Well, the legacy media is just as bad", save the keystrokes because I'll know where you swim.
Bonjour Aurélien,
There is no jamming system that can deny access to the GPS coordinates of a specific target. What is possible is jamming GPS signals for a specific region. In the case of VDL, the aircraft's transponder transmitted good GPS reception from start to finish, which is an undeniable fact :
Source: Flightradar24
"* The flight was scheduled to last 1 hour and 48 minutes. It lasted 1 hour and 57 minutes.
* The aircraft's transponder reported good GPS signal quality from takeoff to landing."
So this is yet another lie to add to the rampant Russophobia that will lead us to conflict.
This is truth( ;-)
yeah, it's pretty hard to be able to watch the flight from your computer but said flight not have gps access in the same time...
but, hey, physics is hard ;)
The issue here is TRUST rather than Truth. There is such a thing as “truth” in the material world. The spiritual world is nothing but a hallucination.
I was a criminal prosecutor in a large jurisdiction for 34 years. I was described by an investigative journalist as “A square-jawed man with an outspoken certainty about the world” because I base my analysis on the idea that there is a discernible objective reality. The examples given from the criminal law are superficial and pat.
Our capacity for subjective discernment of the truth has been suppressed by neoliberalism and the economic precarity that turns most “experts” and “journalists” into Stalinist “yes-men” who hope that public confirmation of the “correct” line will save them from being cast into menial servitude or homelessness.
This reality has undermined TRUST in our institutions and has legitimized charlatans everywhere.
Sorry )
Then Pilate entered the praetorium again, and called Jesus, and said to him, "Are you the King of the Jews?"
Jesus answered, "My kingdom is not of this world; if my kingdom were of this world, My servants would fight for me so that I would not be betrayed to the Jews; but now my kingdom is not from here."
Pilate said to Him, "So you are the King?" Jesus answered: You say that I am a King. That is why I was born and that is why I came into the world, to bear witness to the truth; everyone who is of the truth listens to My voice.
Pilate said to Him: What is truth?
"Imagine a serial commenter on the same blog asking “is my comment really necessary?”"
I do find myself with appreciably more free time and less stress since I began, occasionally, remembering to ask myself this question. So that is one thing anyone who agrees with this post can take away from it. (No snark intended.)
I enjoyed this. Its a 'fact' that Aurelien tends to publish his essays on the same day as David McGrogan who I also enjoy. I will repeat my comment I left on his site today because I think its equally apt here.
'I blame the use to which the internet has been put. Conversation has been replaced by psyops. Nothing is allowed to exist outside the narrative. Nuance is dead. '
Why have you assumed Aurelian is male?
No idea about AureliAn, but Aurelien is most definitely a French male name.
what do you think? Does "he" SOUND female?
Answer to Mark and James: I was questioning James Whelan’s assumption that Aurelian is male. A common assumption by male readers, and perhaps for James the additional flag of the content being politics/sociology of epistemology, traditionally studied by men (the preponderance of male names in research and in these comments illustrate this phenomenon well). I’m a gender nonconforming woman with long held interests in the negotiation of scientific truths, especially interesting to observe in scientific controversies.
Try Brave browser - Youtube free and ad-free.
Thank you very much jl. Very useful suggestion - just downloaded!
There is also a simpler take on this. As Peter Turchin and Jack Goldstone say, there is an elite overproduction in the Western countries, and for that reason too many people who struggle about power.
So the power struggles get more and more nasty, will less and less bearings to reality.
But what is a fact? I am a scientist and an expert witness in UK and USA courts, and have acted in more than 50 radiation and health cases. In USA (juries) I have been successful in the main, in the UK (judges) seldom. I think you would be surprised at the level of confusion, bias, and sheer criminal dishonesty to be found in court proceedings. The idea of Science as truth is a laugh. Actors choose their facts and interpretations. There can be many interpretations of the same wall of facts but over time, preferred ones are black boxed. The idea of rational thought is another. Science, once you get past Newtons laws, is a very muddy place, controller by industry and the military.
To the sociopaths who rule over us, truth, facts, logic, etc. are of interest, solely to the extent to which they can be weaponized.
I'm not so sure; I think the rulers may find those things quite useful in their day-to-day lives, to whatever extent they grasp them, but as for weaponising truths, facts and logic against the ruled, it's generally more trouble than it is worth. Why bother with all those complexities when you can simply lie? People who already hate you and a few pedants won't believe you, but the former won't believe you even if you say the truth and the latter are negligible.
That's sort of my point - facts are great if they happen to be convenient at the moment.
One way to think about this Truth, and I'm probably just repeating what you said, is not so much what's "out there" and empirically verifiable, but a set of allegedly "self evident" (as in having no need of proof) that groups of people believe by virtue of their membership in that group--ie exact opposite of what people think "truth" means. This is necessary not just because of group soludarity, but even to communicate at all within that group--their "truths" serve as a bit of codebook with which they can decipher what they are talking about--people talk about "dog whistles," but the truth is that we are all dogs, just of different tribes, and it's no "whistle."
Acculturation, in this sense, is the process of creating a common "truth" that all members of the society can subscribe to. Empiricism is desirable not because it allows the truth to be "factual" but because what is "empirically true," no one controls it, or at least so we would like to think. But if "empuricism" comes to mean, say, whoever that holds the measuring stick "controls the truth," well, people who don't like that "truth" don't need to respect it as such any more.
Following up on the previous comment: one thing that the Enlightenment in the West distracts us from is that "truth" is community-dependent. Indeed, it is, in the community-dependent form, the core of what maintains communities. It is a form of shibboleth, things you say and even "believe in" as part of being a member of a given community.
One illustration that's worth noting is the series of research on creationism and evolution by Dan Kahan, trained social psychologist (I think) but a professor at the Yale Law School: he has found that "creationists" are in fact more scientifically literate than non-creationists, including, ironically, about evolutionary biology. The overall finding is actually not that surprising: at least in US, creationists tend to be better off in terms of socioeconomic background than those who are not and, for what it is worth, scientific literacy tends to follow the "class." With regards evolutionary biology, however, eliciting the "correct" answers from the creationists required phrasing the questions carefully so that you are not asking about what they "believe" but what they "learned as correct answers" from their studies. So, is this an instance where creationists are committing some form of heresy, either against their own beliefs by knowing the "correct" answers based on biology or against "science" by not "believing" what they "know" from their studies? Doe sit matter? If, per the Enlightenment beliefs, "truth" is independent of what people believe, what does it matter what they actually believe? If what you "believe" is for the reasons of community, as part of the shared communal set of beliefs that undergird the membership in your community, does it really matter what they believe?
The real challenge comes only when the "factual" truths and "communal" truths come in direct conflict with each other, and successful communities usually find ways to avoid such conflicts. A friend of mine, originally from Texas (and absolutely hates everything Southern) scoffs at the creationists in his extended family as they act hypocritically--they find rather convoluted ways of thinking so that they don't find conflict between, say, evolving flu virus and the need for annual vaccines and the fact that they don't really believe in "evolution." But that is exactly the point, isn't it? To find a modus vivendi between "factual truth" and "communal truth." Of course this is going to be conflicted and, sooner or later, the conflicts won't be too easily hidden and the contradictions will accumulate. and I think this is true with EVERY community, with communities defined broadly, although how exactly this conflict will evolve will vary wildly from case to case.
Of course, in socieites with many communities, the problem is compounded by the multiplicity of "communal truths"--it won't be just the "factual truth" that would be in conflict with the "communal truth," but the many "communal truths" that will be in conflict with each other. (This is true, incidentally, even in academic disciplines--a paper based on the same experiment with a fairly straightforward line of argument needs to be, eh, "dressed" dramatically differently for audiences in policial science, economics, sociology, and psychology. Stuff that are not only considered simple and obvious, but downright foundational in some discipline will be considered absurd and untrue off the face in others. In fact, different branches of psychology, apparently, are notorious for this.) Managing thse conflicts, in a sense, is at the heart of "politics," or in other words, the core of politics lies in "truth management." (So much for the Enlightenment faith in unique, singular, and "independent" truth (tm)!)
Of course, the key role of politicians in this context is to obfuscate, equivocate, and muddy the waters. You don't want to advance and champion the "truth." To those who grew up on a version of Plato's dictum, that the craft of politics is somehow to advance the truth (well, Plato said "justice", but many people confuse truth (or, rationality) for justice and vice versa--as Alasdair MacIntyre's book title says, "Whose justice, which rationality?") (NB: I actually think this is how the West was born--it came out of a particularly "intellectual" and fanatical variant of monotheism, not only that there is but one God, but that that God is truth and that the Church holds that truth," in a manner of speaking. States of the East, the great Empires in China, India, and Persia, became quite good and smoothing the relationship between the various communities in their midst by fudging what this "truth" is, but in so doing, it became a bit dull in pursuit of the factual truth, which, I think is a useful background for advances in science: fans of Joseph Needham and others will need to be reminded that the Medieval Chinese developed wonderful "technologies" well ahead of the Europeans, but their "sciences" remained as backward as their contemporaries in Europe.) It was no doubt made necessary by the internal diversity of these Empires--many tribes, with their own truths. You can't force a singular and well-developed Truth(tm) on them all without too much bloodshed--so if they burn incense for the semi-divine (whatever that means) emperor once a year or something, everything is fine (I'm making it up--although it's worth remembering that this was exactly what the Romans did before 3rd Century AD). No doubt this was a factor in how Europe fragmented into many communities with more or less self-contained truths to themselves.
So the West, both in modern Europe and in North America, have come to the "imperial" moment again, in the sense of having to juggle many communities and many truths in their midst. And the path seems to be heading down the Chinese path--of all the Eastern Empires, China managed to handle the many truths the best, I think--and set itself up for its eventual century of humiliation, after centuries of decline. I suspect that it will probably be a few centuries of decline, like the Chinese experience, before the West's century of humiliation, if it only lasts just a century, will commence....
Wow, nice comment about the nature of communication, truth and social cohesion. Also it has sense the intelectuality of Western that produced sciences and also strong monotheism (the God was a mixture of traditional religions and the "ontoteology" of greek philosophy, introducing, for example, the "creation ex nihilo")
But, I always thought that the Imperial China was one of the more cohesionated and "mono-ethnical" societies, specially in its core or center area, away of borders. I saw its decadence more for demographic and power struggle factors, not also for those "common truth" facing each other (of course: this can be viewed as a fight of communities: I remember, without remembering the name, one eclectical chinese rebel on that century that achieve a juge number of followers).
I think that's one of myths about China--the notion of homogeneous societies applies to China's neighbors, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan, but that emerged out of defining themselves as explicitly "anti-China," ie not a diverse empire of many tribes, but "one nation for one tribe.".
The funny thing is that eclectical rebels who sold odd mixture of quasi religious views that built huge following can describe practically any major rebel movement in Chinese history: so-called Yellow Turbans in 2nd century, the Red Turbans in the 14th, the Nien and the Taiping kingdom in the 19th, the Boxers at the turn of 20th century, and the Falun Gong today.
Thanks, I am a fully ignorant about almost everything (and China is a huge portion of that everything in human affairs). I agree in that the "West" face a similar pattern of decline, at least for what I can read in the bowels of certain facts (I will point more to geographic and demographical issues, combined with techonology and production; but you always point very good the finger on how the information "moves" and "work" in connection with other features of societies).
In order to understand we need the simplification and imagination. We can't work without it. Simplify and Imagine (that is: distorsion reality adding and substracting) is good. Said this:
The main problem of "truth" and "moral" are imagination andsimplification. The exemple of the five values of the Ukranian War is a good one of how to act. One action can produce something good and bad in the same moment, and also more effects with different valencies and effects on long term for different persons. When we talk about facts, usually we go further facts and talk about "categorys of facts". Like in good and bad effects in actions, a fact has a lot of properties. Generally we select ones and deny an others, and the problem that we face is the difficult of being conscient about this. Obviously, we have to focus on x properties and not in y properties; but the issue is to focus on the important properties, and those depends on what property matters on the context or which property is more "defining" of the thing or process.
You talk about emotion, group approval, status and simple hedonism of not questioning your beliefs. It is hard to be curious, really curious, if you don't have or had reinforcers; and more hard even if you hace punishments and reinforcers for not being curious. That's why is difficult if you are engaged in some group to have this curosity, specially on the more emotive, prescriptive and root issues of the group.
One possible solution, expressed metaphorical, consists in see ideas (or propositions) in a platonic heaven, without having an author and disconnected one to other. This allows to sepparate the sentences refered to A to the others refered to B, with the perfect skill to disagree of the first and agree on the seconds. I think that is the kind of approach need it for being curious: be able to discconnect aspects and not contaminate one with the residue of the previous one (like cleaning a dish for not mix flavours).
Usually I read things and I find most interesting scattering reflections that the main argument, and also the opposite. I can find mistaken one paragraph of Aurelien (even stupid or crazy) and agree 100% (or find it wonderful and lucid) to the next one.
As an example, it has always fascinated me the "blin spot" of those so-called "scientif skeptics and chritic thinkers" about pseudo-science. I've seen detailed refutations of homeopaty, saying even a good logical argument: "if keep memory, as they said, also keep memory of damge substances that were in contact with the water". However, they are unable to aknowledge that most of people who goes to homeopaty goes for "small problems" that a bit of placebo could fix it.
"Rather than changing our minds, we search and search until we find someone who will tell us that what we believe is still true, in return for money."
I would never consciously spend money on that. I'm too much of a miser. Luckily, that sort of thing is readily available for free now, you just need to know where to look...
What is the appropriate course of action for those of us who agree with your analysis?
Perhaps the "trick" to uncovering truth lies in the search for reasonable evidence in support of the assertion.
I take issue with what you are saying in this essay. For one thing the entire essay is an example of what you are complaining about in the essay: a series of claims, purporting to be true about a subject - in your case, of how people make truth and facts subject to their own prejudices. And, I believe you miss the whole point of truth, that it is an ideal point of view that we can all agree on. An ideal is an ideal because you aspire to it but you cannot reach it. We should be able to agree that certain investigative procedures tend towards accuracy, such as rigorous scientific procedures, or procedures in a court of law that require the inadmissability of hearsay, the presence of physical evidence, a logical explanation that rules out alternatives, etc. These don't guarantee the truth, but they are more reliable than "doing your own research". The problem today is that certain politicians and political parties use lying as their modus operandi. Trump, Putin, and Farage come to mind. These politicians lie so often and so profoundly that they help to create alternate realities, that we can imagine as a kind of bubble that their supporters can live in, confirming everything they believe and protecting them from having to deal with contrary evidence. In the case of the U.S., Trump's alternate reality has bifurcated American society, into two societies with two mutually opposing realities, uncannily similar to the pre-civil war situation between the Union and the Confederacy. The Confederates believed that enslaving Africans was their moral right, whereas the Union saw it as a gross immorality. It seems obvious to me that slavery is wrong, period. As for today's world, it seems equally obvious that basing your politics on lies is wrong and it leads to the wholesale destruction of everything that is good about our civilization. Just look at what has happened to Russian and American society, for instance.
True or not? A large number of American voters are swimming daily in a polluted sea of disinformation and, like fish, don't realize that they are wet and ill-informed. The weaponization of the First Amendment for fun and profit was primarily launched by Rush Limbaugh, copied by AM broadcasters across the country, bolstered by Murdoch's red meat business model and supercharged by the internet. Without this weaponization there would be no Trump 1.0 or Trump 2.0. James Madison makes it simple to grasp, "A democratic republic requires a well-informed electorate". Please, if your response to this comment is some version of "Well, the legacy media is just as bad", save the keystrokes because I'll know where you swim.