Consider this post a direct follow-up to Gods & Aliens.
Here are the questions:
Have intelligence agencies and private contractors been secretly reverse engineering alien technology and concealing evidence, perhaps even (gulp) bodies, from the public for the past 80+ years?
Are there non-human being (extraterrestrial or otherwise) among us?
Can I talk to them?
I want to know.
So does everyone, we assume. But I think we might be wrong. I think some people, maybe a lot of people -- especially the really smart ones -- prefer the feeling of superiority to the discovery of truth.
That's an abstract claim, so allow me to unpack it a little bit.
Let's start with "I don't know"
While the acceptance or acknowledgment of not-knowing may be a virtue, it can easily phase shift into a vice. "I don't know" is a humble admission of limitation. However, when that admission becomes an assertion -- "I don't know, and neither do you" -- we have leapt from humility to hubris. It's one thing to admit we don't know something. It's quite another to deny the potential knowledge of others.
But it's easy to see how this happens.
Consider the cacophony of claims with which we are constantly bombarded. When we look around and see people professing knowledge they clearly do not have, for whatever reason -- ignorance or madness or grift -- it feels good to admit we actually don't know. It feels virtuous. It is virtuous. And that makes us feel superior.
For instance, God hasn't appeared to me in any kind of vision, or extended his almighty hand to work some fantastic and peer reviewed miracle. I've also never seen a UFO, don't have access to classified documents, haven't been privy to covert reverse engineering programs, and certainly haven't been abducted. In other words, I can make no claims about the existence or nature of God or aliens with any certainty, and so the path of virtue (and superiority) is to claim ignorance. "I don't know.”
When does ignorance stop feeling good?
Unfortunately, ignorance only feels virtuous so long as nobody else knows either. Which means the feeling of superiority via admission of ignorance can only last as long as all extraordinary truth claims really are absurd and unfounded. If someone else does know something we don't, we are suddenly at risk of feeling (or appearing) ignorant, which undermines our warm sense of superiority.
Thus, those who embrace ignorance on some topics may be incentivized to deny the very possibility of certainty on those same topics. This is especially evident when it comes to topics like God and aliens. When people make extraordinary truth claims on these topics, the easiest thing to do is to ignore them.
Ah, if only everyone didn't seem to care so much! People care about God and aliens. They care a lot. So much so that anyone claiming special knowledge of either (or both!) will pull a lot of attention onto themselves. And folks, we live in an attention economy.
Whenever someone winds up with a lot of the valuable currency of attention by making one of these claims, most people (including myself) turn to experts, scholars, and even online personalities for validation.
But the thing about these claims, is that few, if any, of those thought-leaders share the special knowledge of the person making the claim. This leaves them (and you, and me) with three choices:
I could lie! I could fabricate my own narrative in an effort to seize the opportunity to get my little slice of this tasty new attention pie. The moral alignment of this choice, by the way, is chaotic evil. People who do this are burning the world down.
OK, option two (and the most popular one among our trusted experts): maintain the cultural status quo, the one that preserves their sense of superiority, and dismiss these claims. Default to epistemological posture of "I don't know, and neither do you, and neither does anybody."
Or there's the third way: Go find out.
Unsurprisingly, the third option is the road least travelled.
Calling All Truth-Seekers
Everyone wants to think of themselves as a truth-seeker, but hardly anyone actually is.
Why? Because it's hard! It’s a lot of work, and there is no guarantee of success.
If I want to be a genuine seeker of truth, I not only have to keep admitting that I (virtuously) don't know (yet), I also have to admit that maybe other people do know. Worse, those other people might seem stupid, or gullible, or crazy, and by associating more closely with them, I myself might begin to appear stupid, or gullible, or crazy.
So I have to stop caring what anyone thinks of me. I have to stop caring what certain parts of my own (sus af) brain think of me.
At the end of the short day of my life, knowing the truth of these things matters so much more than feeling smart and virtuous.
Anyway, the smartest and most virtuous people have always been more than willing to look stupid, or gullible, or crazy.
So, what next?
If I really want to know (and I do), then I need to hold myself open to everything. I need to be willing to talk to and listen to anyone. I need to read a lot of books, and take a lot of notes.
Perhaps most importantly, I have to be willing to experiment with methods of truth-seeking that fall far outside of the venerated halls of material science.
And perhaps most challengingly, I have to put away the things that will distract me away from the pursuit of my quarry.
Truth shared
What good is truth found if not shared? Perhaps some day in the not too distant future, I will join the ranks of those making extraordinary claims. If so, bet that this is where I'll go first.
In the meantime, perhaps you have some claims of your own. If so, I'd love for you to share them with me.
Because from now on and forever, I'm listening.
This reminded me of the quote from Claude Bernard - "True science teaches us to doubt and, in ignorance, to refrain"
“If I really want to know (and I do), then I need to hold myself open to everything. I need to be willing to talk to and listen to anyone. I need to read a lot of books, and take a lot of notes.”
This resonates with me a lot, especially in this era of so much information (most of it incomplete or untrue) and limited media literacy or even credible ways to distinguish real from fake, to discern the motives and affiliations of the people making the claims, and to find primary information without being an expert in literally everything.
I have no answers. It’s hard, and it’s why when dealing in real life things I deal primarily in primary sources. Lol say that 3x fast. Thanks for this reflection, J!!