The Man who Saw Tomorrow
A Theory of Everything
Tl;dr of the ‘The Man who Saw Tomorrow’
“Above all, be kind.” - Aldous Huxley
“Examine what is said, not who is speaking.” - African proverb
“I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.” - Oliver Wendell Holmes
A businessman was on holiday with his family in a tiny, coastal village in the middle of nowhere. After yet another quarrel with his wife, he wanted to clear his mind so set off in a random direction, enjoying the slight breeze that tussled his hair.
After walking for a few miles, he found himself standing at the edge of a dock when a tiny boat with a fisherman pulled up to moor. Laid out in elegant rows were a few shining mackerel that he had caught just moments before, twitching under the searing sun. Impressed by the haul, the businessman whistled in admiration and asked how long it took to catch them all.
“Only a little while,” admitted the fisherman.
“So why not stay out longer to catch more fish?” asked the businessman.
“I catch what I need for me and my family, nothing more,” he responded.
“What do you do with the rest of your time?”
“I wake up with the rising sun, I fish a little, I spend time with my family, I visit my relatives, and then just before the day draws to a close, I make my way to the center of town to sip wine and play guitar with my friends.”
The businessman laughed. “Well, I’m a business major and I think I could help you. You see, you’re not organizing your time in the most cost-effective manner. Firstly, you should fish for longer hours, thereby maximizing your profit margin and saving up the money you earn in order to buy a bigger boat. The bigger boat will allow you to increase your catch size, driving up profits even more, allowing you to buy even more boats. Once you’re able to, cut out the middleman and sell directly to the processor, that way you’ll be able to control the product, the processing, and the distribution. As your business grows and grows, you’ll have to leave this little village and travel to the city, where you can hire more personnel to staff your expanding empire.”
“How long will this all take?”
“If you hustle and struggle daily, I reckon 20 years should see to it that your business becomes successful.”
“And then what?”
“If you manage to build up a successful brand, you’ll be able to sell your company stock to the public and retire to some quiet corner of the world and live out the rest of your days in peace.”
“But what would I do?”
“What does anyone do when they retire?! You’d wake up with the rising sun, fish a little, spend time with your family, visit your relatives, and just before the day draws to a close, make your way to the center of town to sip wine and play guitar with your friends.”
The fisherman smiled in quiet contemplation.
Chapter 1
The Ship
Imagine waking up one fine morning, letting out a sigh of contentment, and leaving your little cabin to walk up to the deck of a massive ocean liner. You look out at the ocean to see the horizon stretching out in a hazy line, and up to a cloudless sky on a golden day. People are milling about on the boat, chatting and laughing, swimming and gazing out at the sunrise, much as you are presently doing. But there’s something the matter, an unease gnawing at the back of your mind. You don’t seem to be in any current danger on this gorgeous day surrounded by smiling, happy people; so what’s wrong?
You have no idea where you are, how you got there, who you are, what to do. You have absolutely no idea what is going on.
Assume you are the person in this scenario; what would you do?
Would you try to figure out the answers to these basic questions? Or would you follow what everyone else is doing, joining their activities mindlessly?
This isn’t mere analogy, by the way.
This is the story of how we all start out in life. We’re all born on an ocean liner in an infinite ocean that stretches out in all directions around us, without knowing who we are and what we’re doing.
And yet, instead of trying to figure out the answers to the fundamental questions that would help to orient us in our lives, most people just ignore the gnawing and start talking to random people, about random subjects. Or, worse, they just accept the first few answers that people offer them without thinking deeply about where the knowledge that they were given comes from and who the ones offering the knowledge are.
Most people ignore the fundamentals because they fail to ask one simple question: why?
Why?
“There’s something happening here,
What it is ain’t exactly clear.” - Buffalo Springfield
“Open Hearts, feel about it,
Open Minds, think about it,
Everyone, read about it,
Everyone, speak about it.” - Tears for Fears
I think the greatest superpower that we have as humans is the ability to ask why. A great answer to a genuine question is the difference between obsequious submission and legitimate deference, or the difference between a just leader and an unjust tyrant.
Think about it; if you ask someone a question and they can’t provide a satisfactory answer, what will your reaction be? You’ll certainly be disappointed but, more importantly, your trust in the ability of that person will have eroded ever so slightly and your connection will have weakened too. It’s why people lie when asked a question they don’t know the answer to; they know, if only intuitively, that knowing the answer is worth knowing, otherwise they wouldn’t go to great lengths to invent an answer. Therefore it’s important to ask why and it’s equally important to know why; the very foundations of our lives are built on the ability to find the answers that we’re looking for and, even more crucially, to find the right questions to ask in the first place.
Here’s the thing; anything can be given as an answer to a specific question as long as its accepted as one by the person who’s given the answer. For example, if someone asks you why you’re late and you point to the weather and say: “It was raining and it caused a lot of traffic,” then as long as the person receiving this answer accepts it, it’s a valid answer.
Answers are thus like gifts, offered to the questioner in the hopes of causing her to see the bigger picture and make her understand how new, partial information fits into the whole, like a puzzle piece slotted into a puzzle. If we keep on asking why, as children are frequently wont to do, it means that we’re looking for larger and larger puzzles to plug our previous answers into.
A good reason is one that succeeds more often than not in genuinely enlightening its questioner.
Any answer is therefore as multilayered as any gift can be, with all manner of context and intention setting us up for understanding how to truly understand it. It stands to reason that the gift, in this case the answer, is only ever as good as the gift-bearer and there will never be an answer that satisfies everyone, because some people cannot be satisfied no matter how much you try to answer their questions. They are perpetual doubters, doubting even their own existence. And some people are so dumb that they’ll accept anything as an answer, so it doesn’t make sense to try to reason with them either.
Within the bounds of these extreme cases, however, lie most people, who aren’t so skeptical that they’ll question everything, but neither are they so trusting that they’ll accept anything.
Għal Fejn?
There’s another way of looking at what we’re doing when we ask ‘why’. In Maltese, which is one of my mother tongues, the word for why, ‘għalfejn’ can be (literally) translated into English as ‘where to’. I take this to be an essential part of the search for any answers.
In essence, when you ask someone ‘why’, you’re asking them where they intend on going with their train of thought, similar to how we ask, with squinty eyes: “where are you going with this?” in English when we’re slightly suspicious of someone’s intentions.
But what question am I trying answer in this book? What’s the gift that I’m offering to you, the reader, that I feel is worthy of a gift? The question is simply the biggest ‘why’ anyone can possibly ask: why is there something rather than nothing?
In answering this question, I intend to go somewhere and, I hope, this is also a destination you would like to travel towards: the purpose of this book is to help you travel to, and reach, paradise. Just what ‘traveling to and reaching paradise’ actually entails will make more sense as the book unfolds.
Everything is Broken
“If you think about it, all problems are caused by lack of awareness. Solve that, and you solve poverty, inequality, racism…” - Scott Alexander
But before getting ahead of myself, there’s an important point that I ought to mention. What got me started on this journey in the first place? Why do I care about figuring out the big question at all? And the answer, you’ll be happy to learn, is rather simple.
I woke up one day and realised that everything around me was broken.
Every person I met, even those working with a veneer of cheeriness, harboured some dark secrets, some terrible wound, or some combination of the two. Every organisation I worked for used some sub-optimal system for organising and using its information, to the point where a large majority of the time, I was fighting the system itself, rather than fixing problems that were part and parcel of the job description. Every person I spoke to despaired at the inhumanity of the systems that they were a part of, so I know for a fact that my friends were facing the same problems as myself. Every news story I saw was largely a tragic sequence of events that heaped more misery and desperation onto an already-pitiful world.
(And, yes, I’m aware of the negativity bias that inherently exists within the media-sphere. Articles that elicit more extreme emotions have a higher click-through rate, thereby incentivizing the production of articles that elicit ever more extreme emotions in a negative downward spiral. But the awareness of this fact just kicks the can down the road; why do articles that elicit more negative emotions have a higher click-through rate?)
Now, you might be thinking that these problems had to do with me as an individual, that the problem, in other words, lay within me and my vision of the world; and that’s partially true! Too much negativity in the news? Look the other way!
The power of attention is powerful indeed, a point I will be returning to at some later stage. I think that, even now as I write these words, my attention has some essential role to play in the grand cosmic theatre that I find myself a part of, so I’m not trying to shirk my responsibility in that regard. As Rumi said: “yesterday I was clever so I tried to change the world. Today I am wise so I try to change myself.” In other words, I know that I need to change my perspective since you always have to start with yourself.
But these were just the problems that I personally experienced. Everywhere else I looked, it seemed that everything and everyone was broken or breaking too.
I’m fond of quoting a particular article that I believe beautifully illustrates the point I’m trying to raise. It’s written by Alana Newhouse and called, quite simply, ‘Everything is broken’. She recalls how following the delivery of her baby boy and subsequent fortuitous discovery of an illness that he had, she asked a doctor, Norman Doidge, why it had taken her and her husband, well-qualified parents by all accounts and who were doing as they were told, years to receive a diagnosis for their son. I will quote Doidge in full:
“Norman looked at us sympathetically. “I don’t know how else to tell you this but bluntly,” he said. “There are still many good individuals involved in medicine, but the American medical system is profoundly broken. When you look at the rate of medical error—it’s now the third leading cause of death in the U.S.—the overmedication, creation of addiction, the quick-fix mentality, not funding the poor, quotas to admit from ERs, needless operations, the monetization of illness vs. health, the monetization of side effects, a peer review system run by journals paid for by Big Pharma, the destruction of the health of doctors and nurses themselves by administrators, who demand that they rush through 10-minute patient visits, when so often an hour or more is required, and which means that in order to be ‘successful,’ doctors must overlook complexity rather than search for it ... Alana, the unique thing here isn’t that you fell down so many rabbit holes. What’s unique is that you found your way out at all.”
And this sentiment echoes throughout the world. Wherever you look, things aren’t looking too good. Anthony Fieldman provides us with a brilliant summary of the global problems that we are currently facing as a planet:
“The climate is broken (insofar as how hospitable it is for us) because we have relentlessly focused on short-term economic gain (via resource extraction and use) rather than long-term sustainability.
Housing is broken, because we’ve made the fundamental need for shelter the single most unattainable (i.e.: expensive) asset in human societies.
Food is broken, because we’ve decided that bolstering quarterly returns was worth turning food into the biggest killer on Earth, while simultaneously destroying 38% of our global landmass to achieve it.
Education is broken, because we’ve declassed and honed people into specialized mechanisms for profit generation, robbing us of our inherent capacity for creative polymathy.
Work, too, is broken for much the same reason, as graduates become cogs in a globally splintered workforce of specialists without a unifying framework for human thriving.
Public safety is broken insofar as we weaponize our superficial differences (encoded in fictions like nationhood, race, socio-economics and religion) rather than unite under the true banner of our common humanity.
And Politics is broken because it is led by a legion of lawmakers whose modus operandi is encoding rigid governing structures based on fixed ideologies that protect their personal interests, rather than the hard work of continually engaging, listening, synthesizing and then championing the will of the people they have sworn to protect (or at least should). See: bribery, lobbying, extortion, cronyism, nepotism, parochialism, patronage, influence peddling, graft, and embezzlement. Moreover, politicians adhere to the fiction of nationhood, waging life-ending war on those outside our militarized boundaries, just as we did to the Lenape.”
Nafeez Ahmad also provides us with another seemingly-unending list of interconnected problems:
“Expert projections suggest that the following problems – climate change, hydrocarbon energy depletion, water and resource scarcity relative to exponential population growth, declining, food production, inter- and intrastate conflict, escalating impoverishment and inequalities, growing instabilities in the global economy, social malaise and declines in well-being, the legitimization of far-right politics, and normalization of political violence – do not only follow their own individual developmental trajectories, but are inherently interconnected. This means they feed back into each other in ways that are little understood and increasingly difficult to predict on the basis of conventional modelling techniques in the social and physical sciences. So there is an urgent need not simply to view global crises as individual stressors on the global system with their own dynamics, but as interdependent stressors each of whose dynamics will continuously and mutually influence the others.”
And I’ll quote Bobby Azarian to truly drive my point home:
“World War III is not only possible, it is starting to look unavoidable unless a conscious collective effort is made to prevent it. Artificial intelligence is improving at dizzying speeds, making it an existential risk potentially as dangerous as any other. Pandemics have become part of the new normal. Climate change is causing unpredictable weather patterns that are destroying entire ecosystems. Political extremism is at an all-time high, and the different sides live in completely different realities. To top it off, we’re experiencing what has been called a “meaning crisis”—in other words, no one knows what to believe or what is real, and this creates a sense of despair and meaninglessness.”
When I realised that everything was broken, and I mean literally everything, I asked myself why and followed the rabbit down the rabbit-hole.
Essentially I had first-hand experience of the second law of thermodynamics which states, simply, that everything eventually falls apart. And I was annoyed because I wanted to put everything back together again. I tried to talk to those around me, thinking, naively, that others harboured similar desires.
“Hey, if everything is falling apart,” I thought, “then surely others would notice and want to do something about this state of affairs, right?”
I quickly discovered that no one in my immediate vicinity would listen to me, no one was paying attention to the same things as myself, and even those individuals who already cared for and listened to me weren’t understanding these problems the same way I was.
I felt trapped and alone. I felt like I had no choice but to start writing down my thoughts to keep the insanity at bay - unfortunately I still feel this way most of the time with occasional moments of respite.
I care about understanding ‘why’ because I want to trace this problem (of everything being broken) down to its root, because I want to be able to put everything back together again. I’m personally invested in understanding ‘why’ because I feel that understanding this point will help in some fundamental sense, both in my immediate physical experience but also more generally, for the world and ultimately the universe.
Stew of Questions
Having prefaced what I want to write about, and where I intend to go, here are some of the specific questions stewing in my mind that will enable me to reach my destination:
Why was I born?
Why are the rich, rich?
Why is there existence?
Why are the poor, poor?
Why are people so nice?
Why is everyone in pain?
Why are people so mean?
Why isn’t everything free?
Why is the world so unfair?
Why do we even use money?
Why is modern art so rubbish?
Why does history repeat itself?
Why is the rent too damn high?
Why does nothing make sense?
Why are most people so dumb?
Why are puzzles so interesting?
Why is the universe expanding?
Why do I need to make money?
Why is the government corrupt?
Why are some people so clever?
Why do I need to pay attention?
Why can’t we talk to one another?
Why do people not change things?
Why do people try to change things?
Why do things usually come in pairs?
Why do so many people hate their jobs?
Why do people not mean what they say?
Why do people take advantage of others?
Why do some people laugh at everything?
Why don’t people talk about their problems?
Why do I always stub my toe on the coffee table?
Why am I running around like a headless chicken?
Why does the media broadcast such negative stories?
Why do people go their whole lives without asking why?
Why are people disagreeing after thousands of years asking the same questions?
Why am I even asking why?
Why, why, why?!
I suppose, now that I write out my thoughts clearly, what I’m looking for is some ultimate perspective, some all-seeing vantage point, some critical insight that will allow me to make sense of everything that I come across in my life. Essentially, in this book, I’m trying to understand everything by suggesting plausible answers to life’s perpetual ‘why’ questions and I’m offering what I’ve found so far as a gift to you, the reader.
Whether you choose to accept the answers I provide for you is yet to be seen.
But hang on, you may be thinking, “didn’t you just say that the purpose of this book is to travel to paradise? How are you now claiming that the purpose of the book is to try to understand everything?” Well, I’m claiming that they’re the same thing! Traveling to paradise and understanding are one and the same; there’s something divine about understanding that cannot be replicated by any other feeling and, so my train of thought goes, when you understand, you are entering the gates of heaven. Of course, you can’t stay there forever, but you can understand more and more, thereby prolonging your stay…
When I first started my journey, I knew I would have to search far and wide for the questions and answers I was looking for but, right out the starting gates, I noticed a problem with the explosion of information at my disposal; nobody seemed to be paying it much attention and therefore nobody seemed to be doing anything about it. Some people wrote books about the justice system, while others tackled climate change, fundamental problems in physics, philosophy, politics, mathematics, and entomology. But very few actually tackled everything at once. Why?
Truncated Humans
“A society is a system in which all parts are interrelated, and you can’t permanently change any important part without changing all other parts as well.” - Ted Kaczynski
“The whole cannot be optimized by separately optimizing the parts.” - David Sloan Wilson
“Systems are symbiotically interconnected in such a way that changes in one system entail changes across all the other systems. So the way we harness energy is intimately and mutually entwined with how we see the world, how we regulate our politics, and how our economy works – and vice versa.” - Nafeez Ahmed
“The Anglo-Indian activist Satish Kumar once gave a lecture to the economics faculty at the London of School of Economics. He asked the professors present if they offered students a chance to study ecology. They do not, and so he asked them if they knew what economics meant. To his astonishment, most of them didn’t know, and so he told them it means management (nomics=rules) of the home (eco) which can also mean country, habitat, planet etc. And since ecology means the study of (ology) the home and therefore acquiring knowledge of the home, he asked them: How can you teach management of the home without knoweldge of the home?” - Jonathan Rowson
“When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything, you are being violent because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.” - Jiddu Krishnamurti
“The second achievement to admire is the unprecedented expansion of our understanding of both the physical world and all forms of life. Our knowledge extends from grand generalizations about complex systems on the universal (galaxies, stars) and planetary (atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere) scale to processes at the level of atoms and genes: lines etched into the surface of the most powerful microprocessor are only about twice the diameter of human DNA. We have translated this understanding into a still-expanding array of machines, devices, procedures, protocols, and interventions that sustain modern civilization, and the enormity of our aggregate knowledge—and the ways we have deployed it in our service—is far beyond the comprehension of any individual mind.” - Vaclav Smil
I want to zero in on one specific part of the above quote: “beyond the comprehension of any individual mind.” The stubborn persistence of the idea that one person can’t know it all, ensures that people will keep on writing, and reading, what I will call ‘limited’ books. I want to point out that, of course, in some sense, it’s true that any individual mind cannot grasp everything in the deepest sense of the word grasp. In other words, no matter how intelligent or wise, no one can become an accomplished plumber, soldier, banker, mechanic, doctor, writer, and academic simultaneously, if only for the fact that they don’t have the time. But there’s another, I would say more interesting, way in which the statement is patently false.
Let’s start by defining what a ‘limited book’ is in the first place. A limited book is one that addresses the part rather than the whole, a few things rather than everything. “Obviously!” you may huff indignantly. “How do you expect the part to comprehend the whole?! It’s an exercise in hubris, a fool’s errand. Better give up before you manage to dig yourself a hole which you can’t climb out of.” Well, hopefully over the course of the book I’ll manage to show you how this perspective hides some important points. I maintain that it’s possible to be a part and understand the whole; but before trying to understand why people write ‘limited’ books in the first place, let’s answer another, slightly easier, question first; why is this a problem at all?
Let’s say you’re an ecologist and want to understand all the marine life that exists in the lake by your house in order to be able to protect it, say. In order to know what there is, you need to be able to identify all the different sorts of creatures that exist, meaning that you need a sufficiently robust net to first catch and then analyse everything you find. But, to draw my analogy, while I was staring at the immensity of the whole lake, the helpers who I had recruited to do my job with me were staying by the shallows without even looking up. Not only were their nets not sufficiently robust to be able to catch all the fish, but they weren’t even moving from their desired shallow spots! Analogously, while I was trying to find out what on earth was going on in the whole lake, trying to understand the big picture of everything, most people were sticking to the shallows, talking about their tiny subsection of reality without understanding anything else. And they were relying on other thinkers who were also staying near the coast, relying on others who were also staying near the coast…
Nobody was addressing the totality, the whole, and consequently nobody was making a whole argument; it’s like they were spewing their limited opinion (which happened to be extremely informed within their specified domain) unaware that reality extended far beyond their particular patch of reality. The more I read, the more this thought kept creeping up on me.
Let’s say there are three pieces of valuable information that we need to consider. Now let’s further imagine that you, the reader, need to know what these pieces are because they will help you out in life by, say, enabling you to build a successful business. Who will you trust to tell you about this information more; someone who knows about piece 1 only, piece 1 and 2 only, or all 3 pieces together? This is our most basic societal problem at the moment; we tend to listen to those people who have one piece because their voices tend to be the loudest.
For example, how can you talk about the economy without necessarily understanding human values? And how can you understand human values without necessarily understanding how cultural evolution shapes those values in a holarchical fashion? And how can you understand holarchies without also necessarily understanding how different levels of reality interact and how to correct them when things go wrong? And how can you understand levels without necessarily understanding the relationship between the geosphere, the biosphere, and the noosphere?
Everything leads to everything else and if you want to understand (truly understand) one thing, you have to attempt to understand everything and how everything ‘hangs together’ in the broadest sense.
Remember that I wanted to put everything back together again because it had all fallen apart. In order to make lasting changes to the whole of society, you need to understand the whole of society first, and then address it second. But the vast majority of people just weren’t doing that, most likely because they weren’t aware of the fact that they had to, and were trying to change it without first understanding it; they were meddling with the parts and wondering why their actions weren’t leading to any lasting changes.
When I started on my quest for knowledge, I didn’t know what was up and what was down, what was real and what was fake, what was true and what was false. The rug had been pulled out from underneath me. How do you possibly begin to make sense of all this confusion when the very method for determining what is true and just, your moral, epistemic, sociological, and philosophical compass, doesn’t work? In short, who do you listen to when person A says one thing and person B says another? If the experts themselves cannot agree on anything, why should I listen to anyone’s opinion at all? And this is an intractably recursive sort of problem because I need to listen to others to know who to even begin listening to!
I grew despondent. I’m far from the smartest person I know, let alone the smartest person for the job, so I was sure that what I was attempting to do was simply much bigger than I was capable of handling.
But just as I was getting ready to give up, (if you’ll excuse the clichéd death and rebirth moment) I stumbled across an author whose book resonated with me to such a degree that I felt like reading him was an act of enlightenment in itself. Of course, I knew there was a lot left to learn anyway, but I had found a way out! I had finally found someone who pointed in a direction towards salvation! (And I truly mean to include any and all otherworldly connotations that come bundled with this word into the narrative, because it truly felt mind-shattering.)
You know that ‘aha’ feeling you get when things just click into place, and you feel like you see something you didn’t before? Reading his work was like a breath of fresh air. He was talking about all the important things that I felt were impossible to ignore but which were being inexplicably ignored anyway.
The author’s name is Ken Wilber and the book was ‘A Brief History of Everything’. (Incidentally that book is much better than this one, so I would suggest putting this one down and picking that one up instead.) I owe a lot to that man and his books, because I was lost and now I am (slightly) less loster. To finally understand high-level concepts with ease was such a joy! It made me realise that to talk about complicated, heavy stuff didn’t need to be laborious and difficult. As Henry David Thoreau said: “Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.”
So, let’s return to the question I made earlier; what’s the problem with ‘limited’ books? The answer that Wilber provided hit the nail on the head: “[I]f you have a partial, truncated, fragmented map of the human being, you will have a partial, truncated approach to business, medicine, spirituality, and so on. In garbage, out garbage.” In other words, limited books, by neglecting to give you an overview of everything, by focusing excessively on the detail of a particular part, prevent you from having the largest possible understanding which therefore makes anything that you produce limited too. Limitation restricts your physical, mental, and spiritual freedom of movement, thereby hindering any progress you may seek to make in terms of successfully changing anything for the better. Limited books cannot put everything back together again!
Unless you truly understand the nature and the original source of a problem, you’ll never be able to solve it. You can’t do a good job, whatever that job may be, because you’ll miss something essential without knowing that you’ll have missed it.
And we can now also answer the question as to why people were writing these books to begin with; they were writing ‘limited’ books because they were taking a ‘limited’ perspective! But what’s wrong with ‘limited’ perspectives to begin with? They end up producing a ‘limited’ society. Imagine those who draft legislation, teach your children, run your bureaucracies, fix your car, preach to your congregations, heal your sick; all these individuals would be unaware of when they’re doing any wrong simply because they lack the awareness of the whole, of how things ought to be.
In due course I began to read more ‘whole’ authors, such as David Sloan Wilson, Iain McGilchrist, David Chapman, Jordan Peterson, Hanzi Freinacht, Martin Schmalzried, and Jeremy Lent to name a few, (all mind-shattering in their own right) who were providing me with a truly integrative picture of the world and a sense in which I could experience the world anew. I owe a lot to their works and this book could only have come about through theirs.
Why Listen to Me?
“Time makes more converts than reason.” - Thomas Paine
“True words aren’t eloquent,
Eloquent words aren’t true.” - Tao Te Ching
“The problem is, if you don’t have any mechanism by which people who are consistently right get recognized, and people who are consistently wrong get shown up for being wrong, then you will get shit analysis.” - Gary Stevenson
So why should you bother with this book at all? You could be doing a whole vast array of things right now; you could be reading Harry Potter, browsing your social media, cleaning your damn room, counting pebbles on the beach, running a Ponzi scheme, or doing anything at all basically. Why bother reading this?
If you’re able to perceive the metapatterns that govern the universe, then you’ll be able to take advantage of those patterns for everyone’s advantage which is, ultimately, your own advantage too. (This will become clearer later on.) And because I’m trying to understand everything, I think you can come along for the journey too. I’m trying to offer you a reasonably comprehensive map of reality that will be able to help you whatever you choose to do in life. And even if you don’t yet care for understanding it all, perhaps you’ll be sufficiently piqued that you’ll read on anyways. If I fall far short of this lofty goal of mine (which I probably will), I might spark something in you that will eventually bear a lot more fruit than these humble beginnings here; if my product is lacking, my spirit is not.
But there’s a problem, as the Tao Te Ching’s and Gary’s quotes at the beginning illustrate. Let’s say I write in beautiful prose, make all sorts of superficially persuasive arguments in favour of positions that I believe to be true, and I manage to dot all my i’s and cross all my t’s, how would you know that what I’m saying is true? Couldn’t I be making it all up? Why should you trust what I’m saying?
Well, that’s the wrong question to ask because I’m not asking for your trust. Actually, I’m hoping that you don’t trust me; I’m merely asking that you trust yourself to come to the right conclusions, once these have been spelled out for you. I’m merely helping you along a path that you can find for yourself, just as I was helped along this path by others who were willing to lend a helping hand.
Cunningham’s Law states that the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer. In other words, we can wait and wait and wait for the perfect answer to appear, but we’d be waiting for Godot.
Without further ado, welcome to my wrong answer.
Chapter Summary: Nothing makes sense to me and I want to understand it all.