The Infinite Regress of Illusions

I wrote in a previous post (Does Truth Exist?) that we assume that truth exists in all our speech and thoughts, and that it would be impossible to truly speak or think otherwise: if I think, “truth does not exist,” I really mean, “truly, truth does not exist”—a logical contradiction. No functioning human—or sentient being for that matter—can reasonably live on the opposite assumption.

There is also this: it is impossible to believe that everything is an illusion.  “Everything” here means all that you think you know. In that case, the thought “everything is an illusion” is an illusion, and that thought is an illusion, and so on ad infinitum. An infinite regress of illusions is impossible. A similar problem arises with truth. If everything is true, then the thought “everything is an illusion” is also true. And, as Democritus says of Protagoras’ “man is the measure of all things”, if everything is true, then among truths is the thought that not everything is true. So neither “everything is true” nor “everything is an illusion” are correct.

But it may be objected that saying “everything is an illusion” is not quite the same as saying “nothing is true”. However, presumably the thought “nothing is true” is meant to be true, therefore negating itself. Maybe it depends on what exactly is meant by “nothing is true”. If it is taken to mean that “nothing that I know, apart from this thought, is true” then that seems to be perfectly acceptable; but it is logically impossible to make a generalisation out of it, because that would mean that “it is true that nothing can be known which is true”—again a logical contradiction.

The only weakness I can see in the above is that a distinction needs to be drawn between two kinds of thought: that is, thoughts about the nature and truth of things, and thoughts about the nature and truth of truth. The former might be said to be an epistemic judgement, and the latter a metaepistemic judgement. But is a metaepistemic judgement internal or external? That is, does it concern doubt, or does it concern truth as a thing utterly independent of any observers? If this is a useful distinction to make, it would certainly merit further exploration.

McCain, Obama, and the Experience Battle

Obama’s choice of Joe Biden as his running mate seems, at least in part, to be a concession to McCain. The most immediate justifications for this choice appear to be the most pertinent: Biden was chosen for his extensive foreign policy experience as the three time chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and, on a broader scale, simply for his experience. But on a deeper level, the concession is to the enduring idea of “experience” itself.

This idea has been the overriding theme of the presidential race so far. Hillary Clinton insisted that she had more of it than Obama, though how she would have changed her tack when facing McCain, had she claimed the Democratic presidential nomination, is anybody’s guess. She clearly favours Obama over McCain: assuming this is genuine (and, despite the nature of party politics there is no reason not to think so), this is a tacit acknowledgement that experience is not the be all and end all, and that intellect and ideas are important after all.

McCain insists that he has more experience than Obama, but the question is, how important is experience in and of itself? Obama must have reflected on this pickle himself, and concluded that it wasn’t very much, except as a useful disarming tool; but it would be impolitic of him to express this publicly as he would draw jeers of “elitism” from the hungry media crowds. To take a hypothetical example: imagine an unintelligent person who is born into a privileged family with political connections, which he uses to embark upon a mildly successful political career. During the course of this career, he meets many politicians, engages in many debates, sees what goes on behind the scenes, becomes suitably cynical, and is able to put on a good political mask. By any standard, he would have had a lot of experience. But would this mean anything? He is unintelligent, and therefore gleans very little of substance from all these things. Of course, in this extreme example, experience would be meaningless.

McCain is not this hypothetical example. But he claims to be a man of experience, and a man of substance. It seems to me, that if one truly is a man of substance, one should not keep reminding others that one is a man of experience. It is little more than an insecurity smokescreen. A true man of substance would not have to consciously describe himself as anything, but would let his policies and his actions be the true narrator. It is also a cynical tactic that, far from showing his sincerity, tends actually to show his falsity, and his desperation. Knowing that his experience is a selling point to many Americans, it is a mere word he has to use, an advertising jingle. Therefore it is also an insult to the electorate. Can they not judge for themselves the extent, nature, and importance of his experience without constant reminders?

What’s So Good About Optimism?

Why is it good to be an optimist and bad to be a pessimist? An incurable optimist, as has been observed, really is just insecure about his pessimism. A pessimist, on the other hand, might be said to be a true optimist, since she at least doesn’t cower from the truth, and, accepting it as it is, endeavours to go on strongly despite it. These, no doubt, are sweeping statements, but the point that underlies them is that it is very difficult to tell objectively just how optimistic or pessimistic someone truly is; we have to take them at their word—but the very definitions of the words are so slippery that any self-professing of one’s stance is prone more to self-sophistry than anything approaching truth. To give an example: what makes a suicidal person pessimistic? Are they not in fact optimistic, given that they think suicide is a solution—that is, they actually seek a solution? Surely, if we define the optimist as someone who strives for and expects the best, then the suicidal person must be the most irrational optimist of all. More pessimistic is the one who considers suicide, but decides that it is worthless.

All this implies that the suicidal person gives a certain amount of reasonably logical thought to their decision. This is not always true, but if the act itself occurs in a moment of utter despair, or pure irrationality, then surely we can have neither optimism nor pessimism. In that case, even though we can say that the action itself is not one or the other, the person overall is more likely to be an optimist, since an optimist is more likely to be an idealist, and an idealist is less likely to be able to handle eventualities turning out far from ideal.

On another note, it has occurred to me that if to be an optimist is to believe that this is the best of all possible worlds, then a theist, assuming that he believes in heaven and that heaven is a possible world, must be a pessimist, despite his apparent optimism about going to heaven.

Is it Possible to Improve Democracy?

Surely nobody would say that democracy is the best system imaginable. Assuming a utopian system impossible, quite a few would suppose that it is the best possible system in practice. However, there is hardly a consensus on what constitutes democracy; it lists representative and liberal, Islamic and Christian, constitutional, grassroots, and even totalitarian democracies among its congregation. So newer, better kinds of democracy are certainly imaginable, if not necessarily practicable.

Most adherents and propagators of democracy would surely agree that a fundamental principle on which it always must be based is that the people are to be trusted to choose the best candidate, and thus make the best decision for the country. We know that this is rarely guaranteed, partly because there is no sure way to make everyone make the right decision. This is an innate, and unavoidable, aspect of democracy. But if the system could lean towards replicating the free market economy—that is, grow an Invisible Hand that caused people, even when voting selfishly, to unintentionally benefit the country—then we may have a better form of democracy. There may be an innate difficulty in the idea: in economics, there is at least one principle universally agreed upon, which is that more money is better than less money. If each person succeeds in making more money for himself, everyone succeeds in improving the economy as a whole. However, there is no such universally accepted principle in politics, and perhaps then the analogy must fail.

Capitalism naturally provides incentive for people and businesses to perform well, but democracy provides no such incentive with regard to voting. For every voter who marks his ballot paper with the best of intentions for the country, there will be another who votes for purely personal reasons. That whole category should not be vilified (it consists of the majority of people), but among their ranks are likely to be those who vote for racist reasons, for reasons of misplaced party loyalty, or generally with unsavoury or ignorant intentions. And of those who vote for the country’s well-being with sincerity, there is no guarantee that they are truly able to judge that correctly. No one can reasonably expect that all voters should or could be gifted political and economic analysts, but it surely is within reason to expect them to have a good understanding of the subject, generally speaking and regarding current events, otherwise they are not even able to make a merely honest decision.

To achieve a genuine Invisible Hand democracy, a sort of cosmic process of a system that by its nature produces the best results, may be an ideal, and it may be an impossible one. Therefore the following idea is not a blueprint for the thing itself, but rather a possible stepping stone towards it.

Meritocratic Democracy

The idea behind this system is simply that some votes have more value than others. The value of your vote can be judged in one of these ways:

1. You have to take a test to show how much you know about the political climate. Obviously you don’t have to be an expert, but you have to know enough to justify giving you such a responsibility.

2. You have to justify your vote. Justification doesn’t have to be in-depth, it simply has to be a proper reason. So, if someone votes for the BNP and justifies it by saying “I hate immigrants”, their vote would have less value because it’s not a real reason. Voters will also have to show some knowledge of the policies of the parties they’re not voting for, as otherwise there would be no reason to suspect that their chosen party is any better than the others.

Now of course, there are likely to be many who will rebel against the idea of a test, and it goes without saying that the logistics of such an enterprise are difficult at the very least. However, the benefits might outweigh the costs as follows: there will be some who won’t be averse to taking the test when told that it is a short and painless thing, and that the value of their vote will increase; though there will be less voters, each vote will be worth more for the country, since it is more likely to be well-considered. The seemingly simpler idea of asking for justification for one’s vote has the advantage that it becomes less likely that people will be able to justify voting for plainly bad parties, such as the BNP. But a complication arises in the question of how justifications can be objectively judged. This would seem to entail the creation (or amendment) of a constitution, with legislation designed specifically with the system in mind, and this is not a simple, short term solution.

The value of the vote in this system can be thought of as the political equivalent of capital in the free market. People should, if the system is to work, desire a higher value vote for its own ends. Presently, many people think voting is useless because their vote doesn’t make a difference. And despite the protestations of the well-intentioned that that is true only if everyone thought like that, their individual vote actually is negligible (which is part of the point of democracy). If they could change the value of their vote, it is more likely to make a difference. This may have the effect of weeding out the indifferent and apathetic, and encouraging the truly enthusiastic to make better decisions.

One difficulty with the economic-political analogy here is that, if we are to take it to its logical extreme within the context of the Invisible Hand idea, it should then be possible for someone resourceful enough to accrue vastly more vote-power than the majority of others. Only then would the idea of voting-power be a true incentive in the sense analogous to capital in capitalism. But this would be absurd, not to mention impossible within the system, because the only way someone could become “vote-rich” would be to take thousands of tests. Given that that obviously wouldn’t be allowed, and that there must be imposed a reasonable limit on the value of each vote, the Hand is not quite invisible yet, though it is gradually becoming a little more translucent.