Or, you're an ignorant idiot. Just like me.
We don't know. We don't even know what we think we know.
That wasn't always the case. There was an era in human history when we knew what we knew, and we knew that we knew it. But that knowing was anchored in the unquestioned certainty that the gods were real, and like us. In contrast, our own era has the motto 'God is Dead'. Each statement is perfectly true at the same instant that it's perfectly false: what counts is not the 'truth' or 'falsity' of each statement but the consequences of the existence of each as a psychological reality shared by millions. That's a thought for another essay at another time. I'm not interested in it right now.
What interests me is the fact that we don't know.
Why we don't know is easily stated. And utterly obvious, once understood. In order to say that we know something the thing we know has to be objectively real. If it isn't objectively real then even its existence becomes a matter of opinion. For philosophers of all ages, nothing in our experienced reality has ever been objectively real. For the philosophers of the ancient world, reality existed in the world of the Spirit, and its reality was anchored in and guaranteed by the existence of God. Though God is conceived in a variety of different ways, depending on which school of ancient philosophy you examine, God is always there in some form as the Foundation.
This is just as true of the philosophers of the Enlightenment - only their God was reason and its Incarnation was Science, revealed to man through its Divine Child, the Scientific Method. They still had a God, and they still worshipped it - through reason, and scientific method. What was revealed was true - and false. Just as every other description of reality is true, and false. Because of the degree to which science and its method are true, they have shaped our world and our understanding of it at fundamental levels. We are, our society is, the creature of our technologies. We discovered them. They shaped us. And we can't escape them. To precisely the same degree they liberate us from the past, they bind us to themselves and to the future they will enable.
And we love them for it. Scientific reality is a myth that has had profound consequences in the world. But it's still a myth, a description of what we don't know, meant to assuage the grief of not knowing.
Every totaltarian explanation of reality is fundamentally beautiful precisely because it assuages and feeds the deepest hunger of our nature for reality, for order, for truth. If you can convince people you know the truth they'll follow you into the mouth of Hell, and they'll go there gladly. The truth redeems us all, no matter what we've done. Redeems us, and justifies us. And if you look closely enough, you can always identify the god a man believes in by whatever it is he thinks justifies him.
The only thing I know is that I don't know anything. I know this is true because God told me so - in 1984 at the largest gathering of Charismatic Christians in Europe, as a matter of fact. And the fact that, at the time, I identified what spoke to me as the god of the Christians is neither here nor there. Despite any Name I might care to give It, or that you might care to give It, It spoke to me. And It said "you don't know anything."
And as a response I felt a sense of complete and absolute liberation. I laughed till I cried - because I saw how funny was the idea that I might actually know something. God knows. The rest of us have opinions.
I can hear the people who think they know something crying 'But what about Revelation?' To which my reply is "Yah. What about that?' I have in my time seen visions. I have spoken prophecy, and seen it realised in the real world. I have performed, in the real world, acts that might be described as 'magical', or 'spiritual', or 'prophetic'. So I account myself someone who knows the reality of his God in ways that most do not. In other words, I know more than you do, motherfucker, so shut the fuck up.
And I still can't account for Revelation: neither the Book, nor the experience. I wish that I could say that I could, but I can't, and I freely admit that God exceeds me when it comes to the confabulation of truth with delusion. Always supposing there's something beside delusion, of course.
Whatever God is, It is more than I am. And that's the basis of my reality. My reality is as provisional and circumscribed by circumstance as is anyone else's reality. And nonetheless, it remains mine. Just because it isn't true doesn't make it false. Neither for me, nor for you.
And notwithstanding any of that, not withstanding my perfect certainty that there is no true truth, I am equally convinced in the same instant that my God is. In my own case, this is one of the fundamental structures of how I am in the world that is immune to passion, discourse, reason, argument or any kind of debate. I believe it to be true in the same way that I prefer vanilla ice cream to chocolate. I just do. And you can't tell me otherwise.
But because this particular example of double-think is fundamental to my nature doesn't make it true. It isn't true. It's simply fundamental to my nature. We all believe what we want to believe - or we wouldn't believe it. We all have our proofs, our reasons, our certainties. We all have our witnesses and testimonies. And none of us knows anything. Because there is no third place; no place between what we know, and what those who disagree with us know, wherein we can stand and say "OK. You know that and you know that, but this is what's actually true".
We are all of us, equally, ignorant idiots, and it's only pride and vanity that keeps us from admitting that this is true.Any reality that can be opposed by another reality which, taken on its own terms, is just as true as the reality which opposes it is a partial reality.
What's partial is less than the whole. But those dogmas and doctrines which claim to be the truth, despite their partiality, make a claim on the whole soul of those they hope to win as believers. It's in this sense that all religion is a fraud, and all priests are thieves. The part cannot comprehend or speak for the whole, and those that claim it can are liars.
If they make the claim at all it can only be because they are seekers after power who understand the appeal of a claim to possess the truth that can be made to appear justified. Truth doesn't just redeem us; its monopolization grants us power. Power, first and foremost, over the bodies of others - power to compel those bodies to do what we wish them to do - and then power over the minds of others, to compel them to think what we wish them to think.
That's what ideology is. And ideology is only possible because we don't know anything and believe that we know everything. Ideology is the structure of the idea that we understand what's going on - whether what's going on is the October Revolution or the Boston Tea Party - it's the imposition of an idea on top of a series of events. It's utterly false, and its deepest proponents know it's utterly false, but that doesn't stop it being utterly seductive.
We know only what we want to know, and truth is only ever what we want it to be. And once again, I'm confronted by the phenomenon of Revelation. Revelation is the unveiling of something apart from, different from, our habitual self-delusion. No Revelation is ever whole (or it wouldn't be mysterious) but every Revelation is complete - in the sense that the mind that articulates it does so to the fullest limits of its apperception, filtered through the most extreme form of its comprehension.
Revelation is always demanding. To the point where it will kill you, sometimes.
But it's never true, which is what the Believers of every Revelation fail to grasp. Revelation is a demonstration of the limitations of the mind that receives it, not an illustration of the degree to which the understanding of that mind accords with the truth.
There is no truth.
There is opinion, and conviction, and belief. But there is no truth. And at the same time there is certainty, faith, comprehension. And all of them are true and all of them are lies and the mind that holds to any of them is deceived. We fabricate our lives from day to day and the lies we tell ourselves are necessary - or we wouldn't bother. But that doesn't stop them being lies. The art in living is found in the degree of integrity with which we maintain our own preferred deception.
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