Is Everything We Believe, Wrong?

Is (Almost) Everything We Know, Untrue? 25 2 2011

Condensed from a long book, ‘Principia Humanitas’, 2400 pages, By George Rumens. 2003-2009

-The Frailty of Human Understanding…
An aged astronomer, who did his most creative work in the seventies and early eighties, once reflected that almost everything he had believed-in at that time has proved to be wrong; whole elaborate theories of the universe, usually backed-up by blackboards full of mathematical equations: - all wrong! If not wrong, then his beliefs were based upon duff assumptions; or were part of a greater truth that defied understanding at the time. His busy years were, of course, before knowledge of black-holes, dark energy and dark matter.
And so it is for all other academic subjects. What were once believed to be fundamental foundations to the subject have crumbled-away over the past fifty years; in medicine, psychology, sociology, anthropology, physics, and so forth. The surprising thing is the rate of decay. It seems to be a constant for all academic subjects.

One might observe that all academic knowledge has a half-life of about fifty years.

If we were to draw-up a guestimate of the truth-content for popular academic disciplines, it might look like this…

The Knowledge-Content of Common Academic Subjects...
Mathematics 95%
Physics 50%
Chemistry 50%
Biology 30%
Economics 20%
Medicine 20%
History 5%
English Literature 5%
Media Studies 5%
Political Science 5%
Philosophy 5%
Archaeology 5%
Anthropology 5%
Sociology 2%
Psychology 1%



-Lessons from The History of Ideas…
If we look back at The History of Ideas, the intellectual landscape behind us is even more distressing. The millennia-long beliefs of humankind have been sustained in the past without the smallest foundation of truth. ‘The Four Humours’ Theory of the Human Body, ran from about 350 bc to sixty years before the birth of my father in late Victorian times. In no way could it be called a ‘stepping-stone to modern medical knowledge’. The present-day medical profession, in surveying the sheer lunacy of the past, have resorted to ‘medical revisionism’ to try to distance themselves from past rubbish, picking-out the bright moments in the years of delusion, and thereby constructing a fictional heroic history of medicine, which tricks you into believing in a strong and seamless intellectual narrative of medical discovery and advancement. But human medical history is really a concatenation of dangerous and disastrous beliefs, bringing early death to millions.
And to other ridiculous theories. The theory that the sun was made of coal, which tied-in nicely with the biblical age of the earth. Religious theories, thousands of years old, studied by practically every British university student for the past thousand years. The young Wordsworth at Cambridge was so disturbed by the sight of so many bright people at Cambridge University, believing the literal truth of the bible, that he named them, ‘Great minds, visibly entombed’. Again, no way could theological theories be called a ‘stepping-stone to modern thought’. Religion has now demonstrated to have been just another long, historical delusion.

-The Puzzle of Confirmation of Crap Ideas…
The throbbing question is to ask, « Why did seventy generations of doctors, the most intelligent men of their times, over 2200 years, confirm the crackpot theory of the Four Humours, or of gods in the sky, against all physical evidence? » The first clue is that those who wear funny hats and cloaks, and who gather themselves into closed institutions (religious and academic) where they reconfirm each other’s crackpot theories by way of ‘peer-review’, are not my kind of people. They are the aliens among us, who devote their servile lives endlessly confirming a dodgy distortion of reality, in religion, philosophy and the Social Sciences. Remember that the great advances in human knowledge so often come from outside the professions. There were hundreds of theoretical physicists in the world when a humble patent clerk called Einstein revolutionised the subject. Germ-theory was stumbled-upon by a lowly Hungarian doctor called Semmelweis, but his findings were ridiculed by the medical profession till after his death. And the great Darwin from outside the establishment, draw upon first hand knowledge to produce a theory that knocked down the most steadfast and false foundation of the religious world concerning the variety of living things.

-Academic Knowledge…
What we see in academia, - the painful elaboration of accumulative falsehoods, - is explained away by a popular belief that all academic disciplines are, somehow, towards great, universal understandings, which they are clearly not. Academic theories follow older theories into the dustbin of time. They are, in fact, products of ‘The Revelatory Syndrome’, whereby institutional minds, ever aware of the authority-structure of which they are a part, draw upon dodgy precepts of the textbook past, to construct clouds of abstractions; ice-palaces of elaborate fantasy, built upon by a quickening sense of excitement that they are close to a universal revelation. The theories dash along, dragging thousands of true-believers with them. And, so very often, the whole rotten edifice, post-justified with complex mathematical models, tumbles. Occasionally, a bear-trap blocks progress, such as Darwin to the clergy, or the realisation that Freud’s work is fabrication. Or that so many medical procedures of the first half of the last century were worthless; operations for ‘Tosis’, for ‘ Tonsillectomy’, and for lobotomy, and many, many more.


How could that chart possibly be true? That almost everything published and believed by historians, for example, has a truth-content of five percent? For an easy starter just consider that most historians, for most of history, have devoted most of their time to rulers, leaders and royalty. A non-historian, studying human history, may have ignored the life of King George Sixth, and written, instead, upon the incredible development of plastic-coated wire and printed circuits at that time, which has given rise to the electronics industry. The King’s Speech, or Transistors? Always, historians have chosen the former, and for a good reason. For historians as a group, the authority-structure of the past is the only history. The important rest is invisible. Because all historians, without exception, are self-selected to the job (no-one ever forces anyone to become an historian!), they all share the compulsion to put ‘authority-structure’, above technology. They see all of history as the history of powerful leaders, who, in fact, have had a negligible impact upon human progress. That is why most of written history and historical exegesis, is plain wrong. Historians are as locked into a phony ideology as theologians before them, who explained, -and continue to explain to this day, -that the mechanisms and systems of the natural world are owed exclusively to the curious and improbable whims of gods and devils, angels and saints, and not to geological, botanical and geographic principles, not requiring capricious supernatural inputs.

-How Bad Theory Blocks the Good…
We come now to a fresh ‘grand theory’ that seems to explain everything. It is called ‘Human Sub-Set Theory’. And it goes like this. We know that social animals and insects, and even cetaceans, seem to have some kind of internal organisation within the group; important forms of social differentiation, which seems to give organisation and structure to the group. It is best seen in social insects; Workers, Drones and the like. But this differentiation in role and purpose can be seen in a flock of sheep, a pod of Orcas, and a pack of wolves. All human societies have similar forms of fundamental social differentiation within the group; the educator, the law-maker, the healer, the inspirational leader, the vocational worker, and so forth. We should have realised the importance to a human culture of permanent social differentiation centuries ago, but bad theories tend to suppress the good. And a bad theory has prevailed.
The History of Ideas has left us with one awful but compelling piece of nonsense called ‘Class-Theory’. It is an assumption universal to all human cultures, and is somewhat supported by spin-off ideas of intelligence, social mobility and behaviour. It assumes homogeneity within all human societies, whereby social differentiation is thought to be by way of intelligence. But class-theory is a clunker. Even worse, Class Theory has blocked the truth; that all human societies contain important sub-sets, differentiated by different forms of reality. We know that computers can have different operating systems: MS-DOS, Apple, and Linux, for example. And so it is for the great groups of sub-sets of humans making-up all human societies. The different groups actually think and believe differently. There is no Class System; there are only human subsets.

-Human Sub-Sets…
Human societies are not homogenous; graded by intelligence. There is no way that the road sweeper could equally have decided to be a television art-critic. His brain doesn’t work that way. His system of consciousness does not allow him to think that way.
A good way to get into the subject of Human Sub-Sets is to consider the tricky problem of consciousness. Consciousness is a reality-handling mechanism. It is a booting-up process of the mind, based upon unshakable pre-conceptions concerning the nature of reality. Those deeply-hidden assumption, give rise to a rapid train of logical thinking, that allows the individual to process and comprehend the world around him. In other words, human consciousness relies upon a solid group of foundational beliefs as a baby, upon which a logical structure is erected, allowing that youngster to interact, and thrive in the social world. Those pre-conceptions, upon which individual consciousness is based, do not have to be true. In fact, they are arbitrary and unlikely to be true. For almost all human beings, the logical construction called ‘reality’ is based upon hurried, shaky and unconvincing assumptions. Those arbitrary fundamental beliefs are the foundation stones to mature belief and behaviours by any individual, anywhere.
Just to recap that difficult idea, human consciousness is a process whereby the human baby assumes a collection of arbitrary and useful beliefs about the world and his part in it. Those beliefs are like foundation stones upon which his whole personality, behaviour and beliefs are erected. But, just a minute. Just to take the idea of foundation-stones a little further. They do not have to be related to other foundation-stones around. One might just as easily, throw stones at random, upon any waste-ground, and proceed to erect a building that seems out of line with all the other buildings around it. To put it another way, the foundation assumptions which allow the raising of an individual Brain Operating System, need not be logical, nor coherent. Those foundational beliefs are usually some kind of traditional nonsense.
Take the case of religious believers, who’s whole consciousness rests upon hidden and fundamental beliefs concerning the nature of reality; that we live in an ‘intentional universe’, that reality is a powerful authority-structure, and that the world is owned and operated by gods who top that authority-structure. Others believe in restricting all knowledge to that which can be proved scientifically, and others have developed psychological theory to explain away human belief and behaviour.

-The Sub-Set that Started Civilisation…
All human societies are graded, not by ‘class’, but by sub-sets, having very different characteristics. Two of those sub-sets are very apparent to us; ‘Workers’, and the ‘Lower Middle Class’, who are professionals and administrators. The Americans call it ‘Blue-Collar’ and ‘White-Collar’. It is fitting that we call the second of those, Drones, and it shall become clear. The Lower Middle Class are Drones, having a specialised Brain Operating System, leading them to live and work in like-minded groups. They number about a third of any human population, whereas Workers are something over a half. The differences between Workers and Drones are permanent and profound. This theory may, initially seem distasteful, - until you hear the full story. Those two sub-sets, Worker and Drones have different Brain Operating Systems, - which are very different forms of consciousness. We all now know about Operating Systems, from the competing computer systems of DOS, Linux and Apple. Imagine that huge groups within any culture differ by their Brain Operating Systems. Their brains actually work differently.
For Workers, their Brain Operating System (BOS) is practical and non-reflective; particular and never generalised. But for Drones, their BOS is astonishing. The essence of the Drone Brain Operating System is an acute awareness of authority-structures such as institutions, offices, and other group work places. Drones act as a group. Drones feel that their goal is to find an institution, an Authority-Structure, and to find a lifetime place within that structure. And, for Drones, all knowledge comes from within that Authority-Structure.

Founders of Civilisation?
Drones have a very advanced sensitivity to human social structures. Drones, are, in fact, the founders of all civilisations everywhere. They have developed administrative mechanisms, legal structures, education structures, and structures of authority, government, and social organisation. But the downside of that constructive brilliance is in their inability to process experiential information. That is why The History of Ideas is full of self-perpetuating ideologies. The brilliant founders of civilisation are, inevitably, locked into duff ideologies.
Unknown to them, Drones can only draw upon authority as the source for all knowledge. And that is why generations of academic thinks cannot get away from the crap assumptions of the past, but spend all their working lives in the painful elaboration of logical possibility based upon glaringly false assumptions. At last, we now know why theologians everywhere, insist upon an authority-structure reading of human experience that is shockingly in the face of the facts of the world, and why Creationists can insist that they have seen footprints of man alongside that of dinosaurs. It is because the authority of the holy texts says so. And so Human Sub-Set Theory delivers the reason why historians, over all the centuries, have dedicated themselves to teasing out the facts of past leaders and the royals; it is within their brains to do so. They are Drones. Nobody has ever been appointed an historian, they arrive with that qualification by means of Social Self-Selection. The fact that their study of the royal family or international despots are tangentially irrelevant in understanding the history of ideas, is lost to them.

-Older Believers Go Down Fighting…
And when will the world come to understand Human Sub-Set Theory? Remember the wisest of all observations, that the human race does not seize upon fresh universal truths. It attempts to suppress them. After the revelations contained in Darwin’s ‘Origin of the Species’, the English Church strove to consolidate its power to suppress Darwin’s Theory. What actually happens is that the believers in old and crackpot theories such as Psychology, Sociology and History have first to die-off, so that a new generation, acquainted from birth with new ideas, may come to test, and to understand them. The first of these new understandings is ‘Human Sub-Set Theory’. It’s all in a book called Principia Humanitas, 1400 pages. Impossible to publish, of course. It is a curious thing that Darwin was able to publish his ‘Origins…’ over a hundred years ago with no difficulty, whereas a revolutionary book of today stands no chance of coming to public attention. There is simply too much a conformity of opinion in the world today, and it is owed to our Drone-centred universities.
Fresh and revolutionary ideas are owed to the one in a million who are able to get into print, amid a world of traditional thinking. Those who oppose new ideas, are, by definition, Drones. There are, of course, many Drones for whom fresh information is unwelcome within their life of intellectual conformity. And it would not be a stretch to suppose that the Drones of Britain who fill our Social Science blocks of our universities are the very same people who would have penned those billions of words of worthless biblical exegeses, or spent their lives ‘proving’ the Four Humours Theory of the human body if they had lived a century and a half ago.

Adapted from the book ‘Principia Humanitas’ 2400 pages.

The Tory Plays with Poverty!

It's ludicrous to say that rightwingers don't care about inequality - (By John Redwood M.P.)

(And it’s ludicrous to think that they do! .... G. R.)

We all want to cut poverty and improve life chances – we just differ on how to do it (- Says Redwood!!)



John Redwood (M.P. for Wokingham, UK.)
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 17 August 2011 18.59 BST



"John Harris, in his column on the Conservatives' response to the riots, misrepresents my (John Redwood's) views (For a progressive, Cameron is sounding very Thatcherite, 16 August). He asserts: "There is no point in people like me having a pop at, say, John Redwood, for his failure to recognise the importance of inequality." Had he talked to me, or read some of what I have written, he would know that I do think inequality is a vital topic in political discussion.

(‘Vital’, is a key word; a delicate prevarication. It is an overused word, signifying something that should be important, but clearly isn’t; as in ‘vital repairs’, or ‘vital omissions’. The delicate hidden subtext of the word ‘vital’, it that the user of the word is pumping-up something that he knows to be important to others, but not to himself!)

I have spent much of my life in politics working with colleagues, writing and thinking about how more people in our country can get good jobs, receive good education, and enjoy a better quality of life"



(This is a piece of trickery. To claim to be ‘thinking’ or ‘discussing’ or ‘writing’ about inequality really signifies a phoney posture, because Redwood knows full well that the present system of Private School and Oxbridge Entrance through nepotism is the British system of self-advancement. Redwood was at my old college, Magdalen, Oxford. He is an old-fashioned social climber, and seller of grandmothers. And so he is trying to disguise the real heart and core of all Conservative thinking, that ‘Conservatism promises to the many that which is reserved for the few! There is really no possibility that the great bulk of British people can get good jobs, receive good education and enjoy a better quality of life. All good jobs are reserved for the children of about seven percent of the population. Every new face on television is related to somebody who works there. Many of those blaggers hide their names and their family connections. If Redwood were to think seriously about inequality he would campaign for an end to inheritance, nepotism, Private Schools, unadvertised jobs in the city, royalty, House of Lords, honours system, and many more blocks to universal meritocracy, and the abandonment of advancement by family connection. The dark question to the heart of social and financial advancement, is that for poorer people to get better jobs, then the lame-brained children of the rich should be filtered out, and be required to take jobs in keeping with their lack of talent. We should be seeing more and more Private Schoolboys mowing the playing fields and hauling boxes of cauli at the market)



"Like all members of the main political parties I support taxing the rich more to help pay for the lifestyles of the worse off. I am a softy when it comes to more public money and facilities for the disabled"

(A cunning statement! It hinges upon the misleading idea of ‘taxing the rich more’. Clearly, he doesn’t mean ‘taxing the rich a lot more!’ And so he appears to be in support of raising the taxes of the rich a lot more, when, in fact, he means reducing the taxes of the rich so that their taxes are just a little bit more than those of poorer people!
He slips-in the troubling phrase, ‘pay for the life-styles of the worse-off’, -a statement that has a nasty edge to it, suggesting that the poor have lifestyles that they do not deserve. It implies that the rich have earned their lifestyles. It also implies that the poor have deliberately adopted a lifestyle of poverty and welfare, rather that face-up the truth that poverty is a deliberate Conservative goal, because the rich cannot remain rich unless the poor are secretly taxed upon their efforts by the dividends paid to the rich holders of stocks and shares and bonds. The stock market is a private right to tax the efforts of working people. And he ignores the fact that the poor are deliberately priced-out of houses, which are owned in clusters by the rich as investment vehicles.
Just look at that nasty little piece of trickery where hard-man Redwood, pretends to be a softy, but confines his softness to the deserving poor, such as the disabled, rather than the non-deserving poor, such as the forty million children, workers and pensioners)




"Harris says: "Too much of what [David Cameron] said sounded like a rehashed version of the kind of stuff the blessed Margaret uttered back in the 1980s, tangled up with the modern small-statism that runs from the shrill aspects of the press into the rightwing blogosphere." It is irritating beyond measure that some on the left automatically assume many of us that they brand as rightwing have no wish to see the poor prosper or to see equality narrow by raising the living standards of those worst off"


(Pull the other leg! Equality is about equal opportunity, not about the rich claiming that they have a natural right to their wealth, upon the deception that the rich have earned their wealth. And then to propose the economic nonsense that it is up to the many, many poor to drag themselves up by the bootstraps, when everybody knows that poverty is the result of deliberate manipulation of the Free Market by those in power. But there is more. It has been a question of history to ask why someone like Redwood, believed to have been raised in a Council House, should use all his intelligence and articulacy to become a lapdog to the trust fund trash of our nation? We have seen it within the Royal Courts of old, where a few cunning poor make themselves into toadies and flatterers, seeking preferment and reward)



"They should recognise that in many cases in UK mainstream political debate we do not disagree about the aim – we disagree about the means"



(Not true! It is dangerous for Conservatives to admit of the truth, that Conservatives know very well that the greatest fiction in politics is that the poor, without inheritance and family connections, can, somehow join the rich. Conservatives are like the owners of the fast horses, promising everybody else that they have a real chance in the race or life with their donkeys. Say it again, ‘Conservatives promise to the many that which is reserved for the few!)




"I know of no MP who likes poverty or thinks poverty does not matter. I know of no MP who thinks government should stand idly by and do nothing about poverty. I know of many who, after years of pushing public money at the problem, are asking how can we spend it better?"

(This statement is one of the great historical political pieces of deception. One must appear to be concerned about the poor, forgetting to mention that the poor not a troubled minority, but are the great majority, who work and suffer under a system that allows monumental tax-evasion; rampant wealth concealment, trust-funds outside taxing, trivial taxation on non-earned income, -
by making tax-avoidance a criminal offence, by preventing high-paid jobs being open only to family connections, and so forth. There are easy ways to relieve poverty; by taxing second and subsequent homes at 10% of their value annually; and by making nepotism a criminal offence. Redwood uses loaded language in suggesting that it is a waste of money to push money towards the problems of poverty. It is a matter of loose definition. All programs to alleviate poverty can usefully be described as ‘pushing-money’, and all withholding of programs can be described as ‘spending money more wisely’)

"Why are most of the new jobs going to recent arrivals in our country and not to those already here who are unemployed? Why do so many young people in well-financed, inner-city state schools fail to achieve much by way of qualifications?"


(The whole world knows the answer to these question, except John Redwood, who uses these questions as the rhetoric of blame of the poor. Eastern Europeans work in the UK because they are earning so much money compared to the old country, that they can go back and buy a house after a year. It is a matter of comparative income. While a student, I found I could work in California each long vacation and earn ten times the British salary. After three years, and upon coming down from Uni, I bought a thatched cottage, for cash! How come this blindingly obvious truth has escaped Redwood for so long? Wake-up, Redders! And so to the second question. British education is taught in received pronunciation, and is based upon a collection of Middle Class myths concerning knowledge and experience. The problem is not with the youngsters, is with the unrealistic, and pseudo-religious beliefs of teachers. It is a complex subject. Human Sub-Set Theory is discussed in my 1400-page book, Principia Humanitas.
The true debate lies not over the need to conquer poverty or to narrow extremes of income, but over a couple of important propositions.
(Yes it does! Here comes the flim-flam, justifying our nation, in which half a million rich,and their families, amounting to two million people, live a life of hereditary privilege)




"I do not believe you can make the poor rich by making the rich poor. The problem is the rich do not have to hang around if you seek to make them too poor. They have the best lawyers and accountants. They can go on strike when it comes to investing and developing businesses"


(What special pleading! Nobody is suggesting that you make the rich, poor! It is a straw-dog argument. We are suggesting that the rich should be stripped of their privileges of institutional tax evasion; untapped inheritance; nepotism; and so forth. And to suggest that the rich are untouchable owing to their lawyers and accountants is ridiculous.If they go on strike or leave the country, they should lose their nationality. The American way is to tax income from foreign earnings as if it were domestic earnings. The rich are hardly concerned with developing businesses. The sole business of the rich is to manage their wealth and to ignore society as a whole. You cannot say that royalty, or footballers, or celebs launching perfumes or a range of pricey kids clothing is a business! It is capitalising upon their names for unearned income)



"The second source of disagreement is the trickle-down theory. I believe that having more rich people and successful companies here in the UK does allow some of the income and wealth to circulate to the rest of us"

(Ridiculous! Posh Spice’s £800 handbag, or half-million pound watches, or Cartier presents have no part in trickle-down! The rich are consumers of luxury, not household goods; Ronald Reagan, in his simplicity, fell for this bogus trickle-down rubbish. It is a non-starter)



"We succeed in taking some tax off them; they employ armies of professional advisers, set up businesses and create jobs"



(Piffle! Redwood would have a better case if he had advocated more widespread burglary as a means of helping the poor through the trickle-down of stolen goods! Stolen wealth is stolen wealth, no matter how many benefit by it!)



"Mr Harris, do not peddle untruths. I care very much about poverty and life chances. That is why I like grammar schools, academies and other means of lifting educational standards"



(Scrapping Private Schools would do far more for equality of opportunity than spreading crumbs of Grammar School places)



"That is why I want to lower tax rates on effort and work. And that is why I urge people not to be jealous of the Premier League footballer, the pop star or the media personality who hits the big time and earns mega-bucks. It gives others something to aim for"



( Astonishing nonsense. It is like praising cancer because it reminds people to eat healthily! How, for example, can ordinary people become royalty, and have the molten wealth of the country poured down their throats? Obscene incomes have no justification. The activities of celebs and the super-rich act as a profound disincentive to working people. Why bother working, when the wealth of the country is handed-out on such spurious grounds. But the spectre of clever people becoming wealthy through sport, music or the media is a delicious red herring.

There is a cunning deception at the heart of Redwood’s plea to respect those made rich by their own talents? Did you spot the cracked logic behind it all?
Those who become wealthy by their own rare brilliance are a tiny minority in a country where the great wealth in terms of property and investments slide into the pockets of the younger generation according to family connection. Real ‘self-made men’ are a tiny minority in a nation of inheritors. Redwood hopes to bedazzle you by trailing the image of the footballer Beckham, or the brilliant singer, Adele, so that you forget to see that the nation’s wealth is really all about inheritance, from wealthy parents to worthless and useless offspring who make it their life’s work to manage and increase their wealth with the aid of a tribe of clever accountants.

Redwood’s piece is a masterpiece of political rhetoric; a tissue of half-truths and deceptive prevarication. And all the time a discerning reader can glimpse the utter greed and moral bankruptcy of those in power.

Those of us who are ashamed of our nation, whereby posh politicians pretend that wealthy people create wealth, or that deserving people become rich, or that the many poor benefit from the extravagant spending patterns of the rich, - those of us with a conscience, should attack the ‘wealth-creator’ lies with more vigour. The last word to a religious man, Niebuhr…… )

« Since inequalities of privilege are greater than could possibly be defended rationally, the intelligence of privileged groups is usually applied to the task of inventing specious proofs for the theory that universal values spring from, and that general interests are served by, the special privileges which they hold.
....
If psychological and social scientists overestimate the possibilities of improving social relations by the development of intelligence, that may be regarded as an understandable naiveté of rationalists, who naturally incline to attribute too much power to reason and to recognise its limits too grudgingly. Men will not cease to be dishonest, merely because their dishonesties have been revealed or because they have discovered their own deceptions. Whenever men hold unequal power in society, they will strive to maintain it. They will use whatever means are most convenient to that end and will seek to justify them by the most plausible arguments they are able to devise.
....
The men of power in modern industry would not, of course, capitulate simply because the social philosophy by which they justify their policies had been discredited. When power is robbed of the shining armour of political, moral and philosophical theories, by which it defends itself, it will fight on without armour; but it will be more vulnerable, and the strength of its enemies is increased. »
Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man & Immoral Society