Philosophy | The limits of knowing about humans

Tom X Hart
Sep 4, 2018 · 2 min read

It is hard to know about humans for the following reasons:

  1. People lie, especially regarding sex and money.
  2. All humans are intensely interested in acquiring sex and money.
  3. The means to access sex and money is power. Power is not reducible to secrecy, but no power exists without secrecy.
  4. Secrecy involves deception and lies.
  5. In order to attain our desires, we must lie – worse, sometimes we must even lie to ourselves.
  6. People forget that they have lied to themselves and end up having no idea why they are doing what they are doing.
  7. Human beings are capable of believing anything in the cause of seeking power, even if their beliefs are patently ridiculous. In extreme cases, people will even believe ideas that are actively hurting their immediate self interests and the interests of their children.
  8. People are rewarded with money, self-satisfaction, and praise for believing popular lies.
  9. It is possible to generalise about people in terms of probability, but it is always possible to find an exception to the statistical average. The proposition “not all women are like that” should not be met with the reply “all women are like that” but rather “almost all women for practical purposes are like that.” In practice, people try to make their statistical generalisations into iron laws and their statistical exceptions into the statistical norm.
  10. Nobody will ever admit a truth they don’t like, even if in practice they act against this truth.
  11. A surprising number of people do not think.
  12. There are social and scientific facts that are true but contradict existing morality, and it would, in fact, be better if nobody knew them.
  13. People will, on finding one truth, assume falsehoods associated with that. For example, a neo-Nazi may promote the idea that women are hypergamous – since it accords with their ideology – but that does not make anything else they say true. A person who finds this one element of truth will often then swallow associated lies about the desirability of neo-Nazism – or reject a true statement because a neo –Nazi said it.
  14. It is probably useful to our survival not to understand the world too well, because a complete understanding of the world is so disillusioning and disenchanting that it makes it hard to go on.
  15. People need leaders and believe whatever is required to have one.

Tom X Hart

Written by

West Midlands, UK

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