(11-13-2020, 06:17 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I’ve been hanging around this site, it’s predecessors, it’s variants for some time now. In that time I’ve crossed swords with a number of infallible people, who were ever so sure their perspective on things was correct.
One was a fundamentalist. The Bible was held to be literally true. Now, I see the Bible as an historical document. The Hebrews and early Christians who put together the book were wise enough, but came from different eras, representing a constantly evolving culture. This guy would cherry pick bits and pieces of the many divergent cultures. Behold. The land of milk and honey. Slay the men. Enslave the women and children. That was state of the art tribal thinking at the time, but hardly represents the later thoughts of Jesus. By picking and choosing among the various Agricultural Age cultures, he came to justify a perverse world view. God hates homosexuals. If you would quote the parts about loving everybody, that would make him dwell more on the hate.
Eric of course is into astrology. We had grand debates once upon a time, he pushing forward Bishop Berkley’s way of looking at the world, my pushing Newton’s. You think I got anywhere? Astrology was a perfectly good tool for learning objective truth. Ugh.
So am I surprised or dismayed by bumping into Generational Dynamics? A perfect system that produces absolute truth? It is just another perspective among many, proposing to lead one to absolute truth. Most people in this site have political world views. They mostly tweak the red and blue perspectives. The above examples include the more unique religious and spiritual ones.
But I assume everybody develops a worldview and set of values. Everyone has a way of looking at the world and set of goals which they strive towards. It is too hard to go through life thinking through each problem from objective first principles. It is better to develop a set of guidelines, shortcuts, systems which guide you to quick and easy solutions. It is part of growing up as a human. As people grow up in different environments, you get different results. One problem is people who grow up in one environment trying to compel others to adapt their shortcuts on people who grew up somewhere else.
Generational Dynamics does confuse one red perspective as uniquely true. It is hardly unique. Xenakis declaring that other views don’t exist, his replacing other world views and values with easy to shoot down straw men and parodies isn’t either. It is typical par for the course. Everybody develops a worldview and values. A culture is just a bunch of people with similar worldviews and values. Assuming that one’s own perspective is somehow unique and special is sloppy thinking.
I remember reading a freshman physics text in college. It stated that the inverse-square law applying to gravitation is correct to a level of certainty to roughly one in a billion for the exponent. That was in the 1970's. That was extremely convincing. Something similar was said of electrical charge and magnetism.
Absolute truth is possible only with ideals such as geometric and physical constructs. Once one enters the real world of physical objects and especially sentient creatures, things start to diverge.
Historical predictions are not science. People are not unthinking automata. People who know that they are being watched will change their behavior. Even a mouse does. (There was a mouse that became an unwelcome guest, and we have a cat in the house. The mouse could smell the cat and avoid it. It couldn't resist the lure of peanut butter within a mouse trap, and it died in the mouse trap. Mice are more instinctive than we are.
A couple weeks ago I was at the US Air Force Museum, and I saw some weapons (ICBM-bearing rockets) that I am glad exist -- if disarmed -- only because they weren't used. With a nuclear warhead one of these could have easily caused as much death as COVID-19 has caused in America, in seconds instead of months. Those weapons were never used. All that I could think was that it was a good thing that our leaders and Soviet leaders alike valued life more than they hated the ideology of the other. Marxism-Leninism has obvious faults to American plutocrats who have disproportionate power in American politics... but there was no sneak attack.
I saw the World War II section, but before I got there I saw a reminder of what America was fighting in Europe: the dehumanizing ideology of National Socialism and, indirectly, the Holocaust. If anyone had any question that the Army Air Corps wasn't doing the Lord's Work against a demonic cause (if you are prone at all to see things in such terms), that doubt could evaporate as fast as a blob of liquid helium in a blast furnace. To be sure, the Army Air Corps was unable to do much about the Holocaust because the range of American fighter and bomber aircraft fell just short of pre-WWII Poland. Maybe the Nazis thought that they could get away with mass murder... and they did until they were defeated. Then they became like mice in a house full of cats.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
