Coming home

Instead of going directly home I stayed overnight at a friend's house, won a game of Arkham Horror, and went to my second cousin's wedding. I got to see my great-aunt and meet for the first time my cousin once removed. Then I went to the wedding itself, an Episcopal ceremony. I had never taken Communion before and was surprised to learn that the body of Christ has the taste and texture of cardboard. The pastor gave a speech about the sancticity of marriage between one man and one woman, and all that. I then went to the reception where loud music was played. This latter event exhausted me and I wanted to go home around 10PM; we ended up staying at the party for another hour and a half. At some point I said to my dad:

"I know about another place where they blast loud music at people who are trying to sleep."

"Where's that?"

"Guantanamo Bay."

I finally slept around midnight. The next day I rode the train home to a new house. Now it is time to begin preparing for the second leg of my journey.

I'd like to say a few words about objective reality. Perhaps one specific person in all human history was objectively correct about everything. Let's say on a whim that it was Caspar Isenkrahe. Every single word Caspar wrote about the nature of reality and the human mind, and the meaning of life, might have been spot on. However, it's impossible that anybody will ever realize this is true because people have limited perception. His writing can be misinterpreted; we perhaps have seemingly variant experience and we are blind to its concordance with Caspar's theories. Even Caspar could not have recognized his inerrance himself, unless if he was also God.

You might claim to be able to perceive objective truth. But the amount of external input you take in is limited by a number of factors, namely, your senses, your awareness, your openmindedness, and your ability to draw a conclusion. None of these things are in operation all the time, and none of them work correctly all the time. Furthermore, your ability to communicate your own personal reality is limited by language and medium, and the gap between knowledge and information can be great.

Most of the time we operate on the assumption that we are directly experiencing objective reality and respond to it without forethought, and we thus avoid banana peels and carry on physical activity in a satisfactory way. But when you communicate ideas to other people, it is important to keep in mind that neither you nor anyone else has a monopoly on the truth. In order to resolve an ideological difference, you should not attach yourself to your overarching belief, but contribute your own raw observations and look for the convergence of your shared common sense (if you have any; it can seem hopeless sometimes). Sometimes it's fun to pretend that you can divide everything into right and wrong on sight, as I did in my art museum article last week. But when people seriously convince others that their decision making is inerrant, cults and tyrannies arise, and experience shows that these are frequently errant.