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EGALITE COMMUNITY FOUNDATION
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Why Not Utopia?So that in the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrel.
First competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory.
Thomas Hobbes
The Problem of PerceptionBecause we perceive an external world internally, David Hume said human senses are inherently unreliable. A few years later Immanuel Kant refuted Hume with collective perceptions. If twenty observers agree on the shape and size of a tree, the tree exists as all see it. For my money they're both right. Human sensory perceptions are accurate in a fairly narrow band. It is one thing to describe a tree, another to conclude from observations that black holes exist. We once believed the sun circled a flat earth.The Power of Collective ThinkingPhilosophical problems aside, I believe I exist and I believe you exist though we never meet. What's more, the external world, stars, trees, people, you name it, is so miraculous, nothing we imagine beats it. Time machines, intergalactic travel, heaven, hell, reincarnation, God, unidentified flying objects are reasonable because they are no more miraculous than the reality we experience daily.We deal in two realities. One, the external world, is quantifiable and more or less objective. We cannot measure what I call "subjective reality", God, heaven, hell, or angels, beauty, truth, good or evil. Disliking uncertainty, we use collective thinking to validate subjective beliefs. We kill heretics who question the majority view. We believe God would not permit murder if the murderers were not fulfilling his (her?) wishes. Two observations can be made about subjective realities. Since they are not verifiable, one is as good as another. Music is a case in point. The Judeo-Christian ethic permits music. Since orthodox Islam bans music, we have no way of knowing which version is superior. We go at each other with the victors assuming their way is correct because God, being reasonable, (another assumption) bestows victory on those who support his teachings. Human nature is a subjective reality in the sense that we can't know what it is. We reflect on a history of bloodshed and assume inhumanity is genetic, but perception may be the culprit. As with any subjective perception, we choose the one that suits us and keep our fingers crossed.
No one can forbid us the future.
Leon Gambetta
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