Truth, and Opinion.

Let me opine, for a moment, on the folly of opinion, with a single caveat, the one the doctor gives you before injecting a needle into your skin: depending on how deep the insanity of your delusions runs, this may sting a bit.

Imagine any opinion that you have; the more strongly held it is the better. Okay? Now imagine that you meet a person who is brilliant—really, truly, absolutely brilliant, a person that knows twenty times what you know about the subject of your opinion. Unless you are a Nobel Prize winner, do not kid yourself: that person exists. That person inquires after your beliefs, patiently allowing you to present and develop your points, taking notes and asking thoughtful questions all the while. Now imagine that when he or she is finished listening, that individual, calmly and without anger, effortlessly tears every one of your arguments to shreds. He or she demolishes your rebuttals without any voice-raising or wild gesticulation, calmly as a computer demonstrating to you that everything you believed was wrong.

You’d be grateful, right? You’d thank that person sincerely, shake hands and be happy that the veil of ignorance had been lifted from your eyes, go forth with the recognition that you no longer have to live in illusion and misguidance. Wouldn’t you?

Bullshit. Chances are, if you are like everyone else, you would be deeply, deeply angry about this. You would be hurt and confused and threatened, awash with despair and embarrassment because someone hurt your feelings by telling you the truth. You would despise that individual, plugging your ears while screaming “La, la, la, I can’t hear you!!”

That’s how attached the crazy monkeys of humanity become to their ideas. We would rather feel good and proud and self-important about being wrong than suffer the humbling experience of correction. We would rather live vain, empty existences of flattering delusion than face the beauty and the terror of truth. Turns out that ignorance really is bliss.


Let me give you a compelling example: for eons, Hebrews, and then later Romans, Europeans, and Americans, were guided by a transcription of centuries of oral Hebrew myth regarding the origins of man. God raised man up from the earth and blew the breath of life into him. That’s a pretty flattering story, that a mighty sky god made us in his image and likeness, instead of the reverse. It’s no wonder that people bought and buy into it so readily and happily, even aside from the trouble of having to find a theory less utterly preposterous.

In 1859, a brilliant naturalist who had spent his entire adult life in careful, detached observation of natural phenomena, proposed a very sane and sensible theory, that man evolved from lower mammals, and that different species all come into existence by the slow-but-sure combination of nature and time. 146 years of subsequent science has affirmed his key contentions, adding volumes of data and an ever-growing fossil record to flesh out the idea that man is just a highly intelligent animal, and not a thing apart from the animal kingdom. While this version of the story is true, it is quite the opposite of the other one: it is decidedly unflattering.

The same 146 years later, we have demented monkeys clinging to the book of nomadic herdsmen, prehistoric savages that knew virtually nothing about the world around them, because the silly, primitive lies of that book make them happy, and the cold, unflattering clinical truths of Origin of the Species make them sad. That’s what this is all about, you know. Science is factual and provable, and Hebrew myth is factually and provably mythical, but very many people are so in love with hearing the lie that the sky god breathed life into clay that they plug their ears and shout out the people telling them that they are just nature’s newest model of primate. As Jack Nicholson once said, they cannot handle the truth.

An opinion is not a means of inquiry, of truth seeking. It is a gesture of arrogance and self-aggrandizement, apes beating on their chests to ward off fistfights that they aren’t sure they can win. You thought you were informing someone? No, you are, through the rhetorical force of your opinion, attempting to gain power over someone, to convince them of the rightness of your ideas so that they will act in accordance with your desires. All this time you thought you were showing others the light through the prettiness of your words, when in fact your tone of voice was telling other men to fear and respect you, women to mate with you. What you thought was an elegant verbal exercise was little more than you trying to control territory, climb the rungs of animal power hierarchies, and get laid.

Now my version of what an opinion is, being itself an opinion, is all of the things that I just told you. So even if you agree, don’t take it too seriously. Don’t ever take anything anyone tells you for granted without holding it aloft like a jeweler, exposing its facets and flaws to the invasive light of rigorous scrutiny. The fact that people don’t do this is how they get talked into so many damned fool ideas about things, without even knowing that they’re being indoctrinated.

Because that's just, I'm afraid, the way we are.