Unreliable Narrators

Now that we all live in a culture where most (if not many) objective truths have been reduced to subjective feelings, we navigate a globalized environment where we are all a species of unreliable narrators.

Sure, we can “know” people relationally and determine the reliability of their closely-held narratives, but increasingly even that is becoming a problem at the localized level, which is the level most of us still live at.

Another, simpler way of putting this is, we are all liars. And in a world full of liars, the most dangerous and courageous person is the one who insists, despite the conditions surrounding them, that 1). there is objective truth, 2). humans, no matter their background, education, or temperament, can know what that truth is, and 3). that subjective feelings about objective truths represent the beginnings of rebellion against the order of reality itself.

It’s no wonder that unreliable narrators–what we used to call liars–are proliferating faster than we can address their lies. The problem, dear Horatio, lies in us, not in the stars.

Cringe

The era we live in requires us to separate sincerity from what is commonly referred to as “cringe.”

“Cringe” is the emotional reaction of people whose temperament is oriented toward epistemic cynicism, nihilism, and the despair of the typically, perpetually Very Online doomer.

Sincerity is hard to find when the words people write, the videos they consume, and the images and memes they create become substitutes for emotional engagement with other real people.

Warfare, Terror, Murder & Bloodshed

“…in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock…” - Orson Welles, The Third Man

Category Errors and Their Discontents

If we are going to rebuild the American project, we all need to do some hard work on thinking about how we think. We’ve got the other categories of thinking pretty well covered (the 4Ws). But how we think always slips past us as humans, revealing our biases, our emotions, and even our deep (or shallow) understanding of human nature. Any social or cultural rebuilding project must start with reconstructing how we think.