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.