This is The Nooner, a short daily (Monday - Saturday) newsletter slash podcast that has its very own section within Dispatches from Inner Space.
Every Sunday, I publish the Dispatches Weekly Digest (DWD), which lets you binge all the Nooners from the previous week. It also includes a meaningful song recommendation, and a short segment I call TMI, where I go off script to bring you backstage, so to speak.
Two more things about the DWD:
It goes on on the main Dispatches channel, so if you’re looking to spare your inbox from the daily emails without missing out on anything, you can specifically unsubscribe from The Nooner section, and still get the Digest on Sunday.
It’s only available to paid subscribers.
The Dispatches Weekly Digest is a labor of love, and I’m really proud of it, and if you want to hear it, I want you to hear it. So, if you can afford it…
And if you can’t, but you still think of yourself as one of my true fans, let me know and we’ll work something out.
Good riddance to the arbiters of truth
In one of my recent podcast binges, I heard someone claim that one of the ailments of modern culture is an “epidemic of uncertainty.”
This phrasing suggests that, as a society, we’ve somehow lost our grasp on truth. That the chaos of competing narratives and dis/misinformation have eroded our precious fabric of consensus.
But I think that idea is a fiction. What the current cyclone of confusion and uncertainty should be helping us realize is that we never had a firm and reliable grip on the truth to begin with.
We only thought we did.
People used to be a lot more certain about a lot more things, but were they right about all of those things? Or any of them? It really should be obvious to us by now that most of what we used to be so certain about…was bullshit.
Awakening from our stupor is a sharp and painful process. We discover that truth-seeking is confusing, and difficult. So much so that we are constantly tempted to instead seek comfort in the story that it used to be easier, and long for the bliss of our former certainties.
But we must not fool ourselves into thinking that the way ahead looks anything like what we’ve left behind. Gone are the days when powerful arbiters of “truth” dictated the consensus reality, and frankly good riddance!
Bring on the difficulty, the confusion, the pain — for they are, and ever have been, the non-negotiable costs of true knowledge.
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