Years ago, during the long summer of New Atheism, in a rarely frequented corner of the internet I found an essay which attempted to establish a religious framework that should be followed by a post-religious society. One that would be in line with reason, discovery and science, one that would cultivate the spirit of curiosity and would be free from the perceived barbaric nature of revealed religion.

I was young then, and my mind was easily influenced by new, radical and rebellious ideas. The New Atheists (of the Dawkins and Hitchens variety) were experts at swaying crowds of people by performing a clever bait-and-switch. They claimed to encourage their followers to "think for themselves" while at the same time spouted wise-sounding nonsense that convinced the crowd that this is indeed what they were doing. These snake whispers proliferated from mind to mind, crossing culture and language borders. I believe a large part of this was the advent of popular science blogs and YouTube channels, which rode this train — exalting science and denigrating belief in religion. I must sadly confess that I, too, was one of the victims of New Atheist mind virus.

Even though I searched for this essay again, I found that the site where it had been posted has since been removed from the internet. However, the points raised in it left a lasting impact on my memory, because I have since never seen a more accurate and succint summary of the Modern Secular Religion. It attempted to formulate explicit beliefs which satisfied the requirement of blind adherence to Science, presented in a religious framework, but ended up making moral assumptions with brazen ignorance.

There are four pillars of the Modern Secular Religion, each building on the assumption made by the previous one. The fundamental truth is that each human being desires personal good according to the natural pyramid of needs, at the top of which is the desire to live a curious and interesting life. The means to obtain one's personal good must not interfere with anybody else's and therefore one must tolerate whatever means another chose as long as they do not cause tension and conflict. One should use reason and rational argument in order to find out how these means should be pursued efficiently and with tolerance for others. Finally, the ultimate goal of all humanity is to inspire curiosity and creativity in each other so as to understand and explain the universe by means of scientific inquiry.

The stage is set then, and I believe that this is a set of beliefs that most of my progressive friends would have no issues with accepting. The four pillars of the Modern Secular Religion then are: individualism, tolerance, rationalism and scientism.

We have already picked at rationalism and scientism at length [elsewhere](https://www.intercaetera.com/posts/the-cult-of-science). However, in this particular case, we can once again reduce the problem to the fact that we cannot derive moral values from scientific observations. Science and reason can tell us what is efficiently good (i.e. "a gun is good for killing people"), but cannot tell us what is morally good ("should I shoot the man who's trying to hit me through the head with a skateboard?").

Another heuristic I have found over the years of analysing this kind of thought is that where there is a façade of scientism and rationalism, which cannot produce coherent normative statements, one will usually find utilitarism not further behind. Utilitarian morality, thanks to its famous slogan: "the greatest good for the greatest number of people," sounds simple enough that it cannot possibly be bad. It is almost always taken as a moral default by people with no exposure to metaphysics.

Utilitarianism indeed is not just bad, it's also logically wrong. Every mathematician will tell you, that you cannot optimise a function with two variables. But ignoring the paradox of that for a moment, "good" is not a quantifiable metric. When taken as an end in itself, good tends to mean happiness, which tends to mean pleasure. Perhaps one day, with enough advancement in neuroscience, we might be able to measure how much pleasure or happiness a person is feeling, but that does not exactly mean that an increase in neural activity is an increase in felt happiness. We would have to be able to measure and assign a numerical value to every single individual feeling to determine whether it is contributing to one's "good".

We cannot derive a morality from rationalism and scientism, then. What about the other pillars? Perhaps we might consider some kind of utopian libertarian society that provides maximum freedom to everybody. However, to enforce tolerance between individuals with needs that eventually conflict, there needs to be a certain sovereign group above them which will enforce this non-aggression principle, only kicking the can further down the road. That group must either already have absolute sovereign power (or tend towards it if established recently), or be bound by another power which then is the sovereign. On top of that, there is no actual incentive for individuals not to oppress others, either overtly or covertly, because there is no objective morality.

It is also worth mentioning and dispensing with the myth of scientific progress — the idea that when it comes to science, the only way is up. A common belief, especially among people who haven't had even cursory experience with [philosophy of science](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Method), is that the entire scientific epistemology was constructed from the bottom up, through verifiable and falsifiable theories which eventually lead up to conclusions that we may definitely say are true (this is called "logical positivism"). In fact, if we look at the history of scientific discovery, we will find numerous examples of not even individual theories (relativity, heliocentrism, [continental drift](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Wegener#Continental_drift_theory)) but entire disciplines (chemistry, astronomy) replacing antiquated beliefs which had been considered "true". These days it's mostly seen in pseudoscientific fields like economics and sociology, where we notice various competing models and theories, but this only shows how far we are from a truly "scientific" understanding of the universe.

Finally, let us consider a footnote regarding the afterlife. What most followers of this religion would likely want to believe is that there indeed is no true life after death, that the particles of the body are scattered, the energy is released and the person simply ceases to be — except in the memories of the living. This is also supposed to serve as motivation to do good instead of bad. The problem is, naturally, that biologically humans tend to remember bad things better than good things. This is perhaps why the deceased person that is most commonly mentioned and remembered, even if not fondly, is a certain aspiring painter from Braunau am Inn.


Modern Secular Religion


"For Thou hast made us for Thyself and our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee." *Confessions* is one of the first known literary autobiographies, written around 397 AD, detailing the life and conversion of St Augustine of Hippo. In the book, Augustine recalls many episodes of his own life, but also does not hesitate to spiral into more philosophical topics. Issues such as the allegory of Genesis, the original sin, or even less theological concepts such as memory or time are examined through the lens of his own life and experience. 

Augustine is a foundational figure to early Catholicism and Christianity as a whole. *Confessions* is a much less technical work than his other theological treatises (*On Christian Doctrine*, *City of God*), it is a moving account of a humble man who did extraordinary spiritual work on himself, and his ability to examine and question the matters of body, mind and soul eventually elevated him to sainthood and he is now counted as one of the thirty six Doctors of the Church.

Augustine is also responsible for bringing neoplatonic thought in line with Christian orthodoxy. Possibly the second largest, after the Bible, source of inspiration and cross-reference is Plotinus and his *Enneads*. Much like St Thomas a few centuries later with Aristotle, Augustine helped place Christian philosophy on solid, philosophical grounds and ensured that we did not dismiss the wisdom of those who came before us.

# Introduction to *Confessions*

Aurelius Augustinus is born in 354 AD in Thagaste, a small town in the Roman province of Numidia in present-day Algeria. His father was called Patricius, and his mother was St Monica. In childhood he studies briefly in the town of Madaura, and then in Carthage, but he returns to his town of birth often. As one of his early literary influences he cites Cicero's *Hortensius*, which he explicitly names as the reason why he became interested in philosophy.

Also in his adolescence he becomes interested in an eastern dualistic religion called [Manichaeism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manichaeism). He  becomes involved in the practices of manicheists and eventually meets one of their bishops, Faustus of Milevis, by whom he is greatly disappointed, recognising him as a good rhetorician but a poor thinker. He later moves to Rome and then Milan with a couple of his friends. His mother later follows him to Milan.

Throughout his time in Carthage and Italy he struggles with sexual immorality — he takes on several mistresses and has an illegitimate child. His sins of this nature later serve as his general exploration for why men sin.

He works in Milan as a professor of rhetoric and meets St Ambrose there, the bishop of Milan. Due to the influence of Ambrose's speeches, his reading of the Platonists (including, presumably, Plotinus) which enabled him to understand immaterial reality, miraculous discovery of relics of saint Gervasius and Protasius, as well as reading some of St Paul's epistles, he converts to Christianity.

On the Easter Vigil of 387 AD, he and two of his friends are baptised by St Ambrose in the Milan cathedral. Shortly after, he leaves Milan.

On the way back to the coast, in Ostia, he and his mother share a mystical vision in a garden. Shortly after, St Monica dies and is buried in Ostia. Augistine returns home to Thagaste and founds a monastic community with his friends. He writes many of his philosophical treatises there.

About fifteen years later he is ordained as a priest by Valerius, bishop of Hippo Regius. He continues to write philosophical and theological treatises, sermons and explanations of biblical stories. On multiple occasions he writes refutations of Manichaeism. Five years later Augustine is ordained a co-bishop of Hippo. A year later, St Ambrose dies, and in the same year, Augustine writes the *Confessions*.

*Confessions* consists of thirteen books. Books one to nine are almost entirely autobiographical, detailing episodes from Augustine's life and some of his reflections on the issues that he faced. Books ten to thirteen, significantly longer than the first nine, venture more into the realm of philosophy and theology and include a lengthy explanation of the first chapter of the Genesis.

# Notes

This post is going to consist of a few notes I took during reading of *Confessions*. I typically put up my book reviews on Instagram, but this one is too long for that. Note, though, that this is just a loose collection of musings on specific fragments rather than a coherent story, and is therefore unlike most things you might read on this blog. The parts recalled below are not necessarily in the same order as they are encountered in the book.

## Religious zeal

> He told her that I was as yet not ripe for teaching because I was all puffed up with the newness of my heresy and had already upset a number of insufficiently skilled people with certain questions.

Once Augustine discovered Manichaeism, his mother, a devout orthodox Christian, became worried and asked a local bishop to do something about his heretical views. The bishop told her that due to Augustine's new-found zeal as a recent convert, there was little that he could do. Instead the bishop hinted that Augustine, thanks to his own cleverness and inquisitiveness, will find questions that the manicheans will not be able to answer. He was later proven correct.

I regret to say that I was caught up with something similar during my adolescence, once I discovered figures such as Dawkins and other such priests of the contemporary secular religion. As a literal fedora-tipping atheist at the time, I thought most people stupid for believing these "Christian superstitions." The reason for this is, of course, not that the people themselves are stupid, but rather they just have more interesting things to do with their lives than discuss religion with someone who had just recently read *The God Delusion*.

Indeed, my own story in this regard progressed very much along the lines of St Augustine's — I found some questions which the rationalist secularism could not answer, I turned to the wisdom of the ancients. I started reading the Ancient Greeks, the Church Fathers, the apologetics, and eventually discovered the answers to what I looked for.

## Popular orator

> And I know now and with sure confidence confess to You that I loved the man more for the love of those who praised him than for the qualities for which he was praised.

In Carthage Augustine meets an orator called Hiereus, a Greek-educated Syriac who made a career in Rome. He was someone who we might these days call a celebrity. Augustine admired Hiereus not really for his ability or virtue, but rather "went with the crowd," and considered him to be at the apex of worldly honour and glory. It was something that Augustine desired for himself early on.

This is a trap that we ourselves fall into every day. We follow the crowd instead of seeing the world for what it is. We make our decisions based on popularity instead of any serious objective metrics.

His experience with Hiereus put first significant dents into his understanding of Manichaeism and its materialist view of the world.

## Foretelling eclipses

> And men who do not know this art marvel and are amazed, and those that know it boast and are made much of, in their evil pride turning from You and losing Your light: an eclipse of the sun they see so long before it happens, yet they fail to see their own eclipse actually present.

Having met the bishop of the Manichees, Faustus, Augustine becomes sorely disappointed because it turned out that they were proud "snares of the devil," and their teaching held no substance. Manichaean hierarchy was also such that parts of their philosophy were restricted to those not initiated beyond a certain level. Augustine compares this to astrologers, who can predict eclipses and exploit the people who do not know how eclipses work.

This is also a caution against those who dictate actions of others from within an opaque circle that cannot be seen or understood from the outside. We should be careful when taking advice or acting upon orders of people whose motivations are unclear or fake.

## Arena

> His curiosity got the better of him, and thinking that he would be able to treat the sight with scorn — whatever the sight might be — he opened his eyes and was stricken with a deeper would in the soul than the man whom he had opened his eyes to see got in his body.

Augustine recounts a story of a friend of his, Alypius, who struggled with the sin of concupiscence. Alypius very much enjoyed watching gladiatorial battles in the arena, a barbaric pastime which was forbidden to Christians. He wanted to stop, but was encouraged by his friends to go. So he went, but decided to keep his eyes shut so as to avoid seeing the brutality of the games. At some point, though, he heard a loud noise and, ovecrome by curiosity, he opened his eyes "just for a glance," but having seen the scene, he could not close them again.

This is related to Augustine's later attempt to explain his trouble with sexual immorality. His conclusion is that all it takes is a first step to become sinful and therefore we should avoid as much as possible taking that first step. That first step is the moment where we choose to defy the Christian morality and we become like Eve in the Garden.

Also, listen to your parents and don't do stupid things just because your friends want you to.

## Pear tree

> But what delight did I find in that, which I would not equally have found if I had done it alone?

Almost half of book two is devoted to an incident of robbing a pear tree — a memory Augustine admits that he remembers very well, even though it was something as a matter of fact insignificant. He and a group of friends stole pears from a tree in a neighbour's garden. As he notes, they did not want to eat the pears, they weren't poor or hungry, and in the end the just threw the pears to the pigs. He wonders why he chose to do what he did, which was of course immoral.

Robbing the pear tree lays the foundation for what will later become his examination of original sin. Due to the fallen nature of man, there are sometimes inclinations in us to do things which are forbidden merely because they are forbidden. There was no practical reason for stealing, but he and his friends did it anyway.

This seems to contradict the common idea we hear these days that people commit crimes merely because they are in need. People steal because they need food, they excessively drink or do drugs at the behest of "friends", they commit sexual transgressions for want of love. This is all true, and there certainly are many people whose crimes like this might be excused — but there also is in us a perverse proclivity towards sin which is inexcusable in itself, and it needs to be fought on a personal level. All of us have a tendency to do wrong if circumstances present themselves, even if we do not stand to gain or lose anything, and for that we should also avoid finding ourselves in such circumstances.

## Enemy insults

> Just as the flattery of a friend can pervert, so the insult of an enemy can sometimes correct.

Augustine recounts an incident from his mother's life, where, while in service in a local lord's household, whenever she would be sent to the basement to draw wine from a barrel, she'd take a little sip. Eventually the habit worsened so much that she would drink full cups before returning. One day she had an argument with one of the maids who, in a fit of rage, called Monica a drunkard. Realising the fault in her behaviour, she stopped drinking immediately.

We should sometimes pay attention to our enemies, because even if their criticisms are entirely malicious, there might be a grain of truth in them that we might learn from. Likewise, we should not only listen to those who flatter us, because flattery is often insincere.

## Measure

> For the passage is itself a pleasure, yet there is no other way to achieve sufficiency than that which necessity forces us to travel.

Now in the theological/philosophical second part of *Confessions*, we find Augustine musing over the right measure of things that fulfil our bodily functions. We need to eat, but we also derive enjoyment from eating. When do we know that we have gone past the health threshold and are now eating merely for pleasure?

We are evolutionarily predisposed to derive pleasure from things which are good for us. We enjoy the taste of foods that we, at least historically, needed to be able to function properly, hunt, and so on. However, in the modern world of omnipresent abundance, we must take care to only derive pleasure from things which are rightly ordered and not overindulge. Gluttony, pride and lust are not only sins, they are also unhealthy.

## Bible

> I know no books so destructive of pride, so destructive of the enemy who stands up in the justification of his sins, resisting reconciliation with You. I know, Lord, no writings so pure, none that have so powerfully persuaded me to confession, and bent my neck to Your yoke, and invited me to worship You for worship's sake alone.

The Bible is the best book. It is a source not only of wisdom, but spiritual joy. And, what's more important, it's the foundation of our civilization, the most important text in the history of mankind. Read it often, lest you become consumed by sin.


On Augustine's "Confessions"

Spoiler alert: it's not love.

To educate and pass on knowledge we need to explain things. An explanation, in Aristotelian terms, is a sequence of premises and conclusions that lead us from one point to another. Aristotle, having many firsts under his belt, described these basics of logical and analytical discourse in *Posterior Analytics*, which is probably the first treatise on philosophy of science and tackles the subject of "what does it actually mean to know something".

# The four causes

In Aristotelian terms, the way one acquires knowledge is by discovering and demonstrating a "middle term" between two different things, preferably starting from first principles (that is, propositions that are self-evident and do not need to be demonstrated). Aristotle, to this effect, identified four types of explanations why and/or how anything exists:

- The **material**: what is it made of — wood.
- The **formal**: the form or blueprint that defines it — desk.
- The **efficient**: what created it — a carpenter.
- The **final**: the purpose for which it was made — so that I can write comfortably.

According to Aristotle, any middle term falls into one or more of these four types. This allows us to create complex explanations and stories which make explanations rigorous and true, but also memorable. It might be a remnant of the oral tradition of our past that we remember things better if they form a coherent story.

For example, a familiar story: on your car, on which side is the fuel cap? It should be very simple to remember, because it is either "left" or "right." Yet I would always forget this when approaching a petrol station until I learned that the placement of the fuel pump symbol on the gauge indicates on which side the fuel cap is. Quantitatively speaking, that entire story is more information to remember than just simply "left" or "right", but it is easier to remember than just the side itself because it has a logical cause and effect.

Approaching this example from a different direction, we can see that it is an example of the final cause at work. Why is the fuel pump symbol on the right? Because the fuel cap is on the right. The missing middle term is: "the fuel pump and cap being on the same side". So the full demonstration is: "Why is the pump symbol on the right? Because the pump and cap are on the same side, and the cap is on the right."

Aristotle posits that everything in the universe has a final cause and this is one of the most contentious points of his metaphysics. Denying it means that it is possible that the universe does not have an end in itself and everything might actually just be pointless. Indeed, if one asks someone in the street whether he or she believes that everything in the universe has a purpose, I would be surprised if the answer were anything other than "no."

# Survival of the fittest

I suppose one might at this point smile indulgently and say that while this concept of everything having a final cause (we also call this *teleology* from Greek *telos* meaning "end") could have certainly made sense in Aristotle's day, surely Darwin's theory of evolution proves it wrong. After all, we know now that all creatures were not intelligently designed with a specific final cause in mind, but evolved over time in order to have certain traits.

Theory of evolution by natural selection is used widely as a hammer on metaphysics (especially of Aristotelian and, later, Christian variety) and on intelligent design. One could argue, though, that it does do only one of these things well, namely, offering an answer as to why certain traits in humans or different species are as they are without involvement of God, demiurge or any other kind of intelligent designer. 

Even if we argue within the context of materialism that rejects any sort of metaphysics, we still are stuck with a question why certain traits evolved as they did. Evolution optimises for *something*. "*This* evolved to do *that*."

We tend to just throw the phrase "survival of the fittest" around and move on, but actually every trait that is a result of natural selection has some final cause. Otherwise, the extent of our discussion on natural selection would have to be factual statements of what happened and not why it happened.

And on one hand, we want to avoid the "why" (because that's metaphysics, which thanks to the "Enlightenment" we really want to consider illegitimate), but on the other we want to have a narrative explanation for certain traits in humans or animals. (Why do giraffes have long necks? Why do we speak? Metaphysics.)

Was Darwin wrong? Probably not. He cleverly smuggled in a metaphysical final cause into a philosophical framework. That's a significant achievement, although it puts him along with [Galileo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Method) into the hall of fame of successfully subverting scientific principles and being lauded for it by cultists of Science.

# Chance is teleological

To be honest, it appears that Aristotle himself was not exactly convinced about how bulletproof the idea of the final cause is. He seemed ready to concede that events caused by chance are not always subject to the final cause.

However, this is later convincingly refuted by Boethius (in *[De consolatione philosophiae](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Consolation_of_Philosophy)*), who claims that it is not possible for an event not to have a cause at all. Actually, we might consider events random because we do not have prior knowledge of their cause, or because they occur at the intersection of two strands of fate. In either case, perhaps a more appropriate word would be "unforeseen."

First consider an example of a dice roll. We think this is a random act that has no definite end, that is the dice are not necessarily going to end up with snake eyes or two sixes or any other combination. However, if we had divine knowledge of the precise state of the universe at the time of the throw, the weight of the dice, their angle and position, we might be able to predict the way they will fall.

Another type of event is what Boethius poetically describes as two strands of fate — two different causal chains — intersecting in an unexpected way. For example, if I dig in my garden and find a crate full of gold nuggets, I might consider this a random event. However, there is a different causal chain of why that crate was placed there. Perhaps someone was on the run and hid it there for ease of escape long ago.

(Boethius then goes deeper into this as an argument for reconciling teleology and divine omniscience with free will. The argument, abridged, goes like this: if one were able to look at time, space, and the entire universe from "outside the system," one would see that everything is deterministic, including the actions of humans. However, since we possess reason and live "in the system," we have the ability to make free decisions within it.)

# Narrative fallacy

The issue of "why" is dreaded metaphysics, but understanding the final cause is actually essential to understanding the thing itself. Knowing something's purpose is key to knowing how it fits into the world. As such, the chains of demonstrations which show the final cause as the middle term are the most informative of all four options.

This is both a blessing and a curse, because while correct demonstrations are thus appealing and easy to remember, bad demonstrations that show false causes that compile into a nice narrative are very tempting to believe. Even if there is no causality between events (or the link is not known, or even unnknowable, to us), we seem to be more likely to believe the person who presents us with a nice story of their relationship, even if it is fake, than the person who says that they are truly unrelated.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb devoted an entire chapter (six) in *The Black Swan* to this phenomenon, which he calls "the narrative fallacy:"

> "We like stories, we like to summarize, and we like to simplify. (...) Explanations bind facts together. They make them more easily remembered; they help them make more sense. Where this propensity can go wrong is when it increases our impression of understanding."

Interestingly, Taleb considers this a bug in the Platonic understanding of the world. I suppose this shows a certain difference between the Platonic and Aristotelian views on phenomenology.

Plato thought that the patterns (the Forms) are the phenomenological causes of what they signify (i.e. that we perceive something as beautiful is because the Form of Beauty causes it), whereas Aristotle thought the opposite (i. e. in the absence of beautiful things there would be no Beauty).

> "We fool ourselves with stories that cater to our Platonic thirst for distinct patterns: the narrative fallacy."

It is very useful for believers in scientism to get everyone to ignore final causes because it makes it a lot easier to fall into narrative fallacy if everyone is not used to identifying them all the time. Likewise, when we lament that as we grow older we lose the childlike curiosity, perhaps the reason is not inherent in the process of growing up but in being exposed to more materialism.

We all long for stories, and the ability to truthfully and narratively explain the final causes of things is a superpower that cannot be rivaled. It is the ultimate tool of rhethoric and the magic spell to convince the masses. Storytelling and careful exploitation of the narrative fallacy is the strongest force in the universe.


The Strongest Force in the Universe

Digital minimalism seems to be the hip trend *du jour*. Whereas the consideration of how to engage with technology so as not to lose one's soul is definitely interesting and important, perhaps we should ask what do we get, tangibly, by refusing to submit ourselves to technology.

After all, technology is pretty cool. It feeds us, heals us, makes our lives more comfortable, allows us to move around and make new friends as well as retain old relationships, it lets us survive in difficult conditions and conquer our enemies. Indeed, the privilege of sloth is something that only few societies and peoples in history enjoyed and never before has it been enjoyed on such a global scale. Many of us have only recently started realising that it perhaps might not be a good idea.

There are many a reason why senseless engagement with technology is bad for you and many books of both digital and physical ink have been spilled over many its characteristics. The fact that social media applications are demonically designed to distract you from doing productive work and milk your endorphins and dopamine like a mangle is already very well known.

What we started to lose that is most important due to proliferation of technology is *trust*. Outside the internet, every productive and positive thing you do builds trust and integrity. In the  world of modern, fleeting relationships, this is rarely the case.

# Broker economy

I grew up in a world where trust was no longer a given. The rise of the internet, and especially the rise of peer to peer applications that connected people needing various goods and services, effectively killed all need for trust in communities. This, coupled with the pseudonymity of early internet that by its very nature prevented creating trust meant that you could get by without it, just on your own.

We still see this now, with residue of the peer to peer services like eBay (the middleman for commerce), Airbnb (for accommodation), Uber (for transportation). This sort of thing has been given the moniker of "sharing economy," a laughably inappropriate name because they serve more of an escrow role. Perhaps "broker economy" would be a more appropriate term.

A common issue when buying things over the internet in the early 00s over here was the issue of not getting what you paid for — you might have ordered a smartphone and got a potato. (This was far before anyone used his real name online, let alone the websites had any kind of [KYC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer) policy.) This issue was solved on various peer-to-peer marketplace portals by the introduction of a review system. This is a very simple method of creating trust: someone has a lot of positive comments, that means he is honest and you should buy from him. Someone has even a couple negatives, well, tough luck, he's probably out of the market.

Policing reviews so that they are honest and accurately reflect reality is not a trivial thing, so of course a service which provides this will charge a fee, usually as part of the value of the transaction. It is also not completely foolproof: one can think of a situation where a trusted seller loses access to an account and a malicious actor can start scamming based on good reputation of the victim. This already shows a certain cost associated with this model.

The services providing this kind of review systems eventually ended up being populated only by the biggest of merchants, capable of generating the largest amount of positive comments, whereas the smaller sellers were relegated to sites like Craigslist or OLX (which removed the necessity of trust because they are local), or required to pay more for "promoted" or "sponsored" listings.

Not just that, but the large merchants started to resort to dubiously honest marketing practices. I recall a situation where I had to buy a specific toy for my niece's birthday. I went online, picked the first thing, paid for it, promptly forgot. A few minutes later I got a phone call from the seller asking if it's okay if the product arrives in a few weeks because they had shortages. I said not really, asked him to cancel and then ordered from a different seller on the same site. Only after I had received the second invoice and a second phone call did I realise that it was the same company operating under different names, and listing dozens of the same product. All of the listings on the first couple of pages led me in the end to the same person.

# Solve tech with tech

This is but one instance of how technology eradicates trust. Another instance of this can be seen in the way we conduct interpersonal relationships these days. We text a lot. A decade ago, a text message's primary function was to set up a meeting in meatspace. This was, in part, due to the cost and space limitations of text messages. In 2003 the price of 160 characters of text was about 15¢, sending pictures was prohibitively expensive and there was basically no way to send any other kind of media. If you needed to have a longer conversation and it was impossible to meet in person, you'd call, both for prudence but also because people weren't as comfortable with texting as they are now.

This shows a slow and steady degradation of the quality of communication that we are accustomed to. Of course, the pandemic years did not help this one bit. They did however show that people will attempt to use technology to combat problems caused by technology. Video calls became a lot more prevalent in an effort to give isolating people a semblance of human contact.

There are benefits to asynchronous communication, the kind that does not require immediate response — such as the post or email. However, texting occupies an interesting, superposed niche, in that it can be synchronous and asynchronous at the same time, depending on the expectations and intentions of the people involved in the conversation. I have friends who reply to text up to once a day, I have other friends who get worried if I hadn't replied for twenty minutes.

In any case, the degradation of the quality of communication due to technology also caused many other, sometimes invisible at first blush, issues. We lost the ability to do small talk, at least many of us did. Very often the first thought when someone texts us or calls us is "what does he want?". Small talk fulfils a very important role of discovery, when we don't know what we want, but through the feedback loop of conversation we can reach something interesting that might fascinate us, something that maybe neither of us knew about when we had started talking. 

Friendships are great because they are a self-perpetuating feedback loop of ideas. Good friendships are the ones where you wish you didn't have to stop talking at three at night because you have to get up for work the next day. And because of their inherent worth, they are also a great vehicle for tangible, economic value.

Networks of social relationships predate "marketing" in the modern understanding of the word and it is unlikely that we will ever devise something as effective at discovering and fulfilling one's needs as a good, friendly conversation. Advertising is evil and eats away your soul and your wallet. Do you ever wonder why first class airport lounges never have any advertising in them instead opting for plants and flowers, whereas the plebeian waiting rooms are filled with garish posters for things you don't need?

It takes about two cents to make a can of Coke. The rest of its price is branding. People are spending copious amounts of money to drink garishly painted cans of well-tasting poison. Branding and advertising made us trust the wrong things.

Advertising might produce value for the company, but it has no value to you. It operates on the basis of psychological gimmicks to create a need and fulfil it, or better yet, pretend to fulfil it so that people can repeatedly pay for something that doesn't work. Every single valuable thing that I own and cherish, both material and not, has come to me through word of mouth with people I trust, not through advertising campaigns. 

# Anti-trust incentives

The incentive of the players in the broker economy is to eradicate trust as much as possible, so that they can step in and act as trust brokers.

It's better for Airbnb to foster the culture of novelty addiction and frequent travels to different places because once one finds a town one likes and makes friends with a landlord there, they no longer get your service fees. Strangers not trusting each other enough to hitchhike short distances is more profitable for Uber.

The disappearance of trust also fractured our interpersonal relationships and contributed to proliferation of people in many dubious professions such as therapists and psychologists. Most people don't need therapy per se, they need friends they can trust. Unfortunately, in the trust-less era of technology the only way to approximate a trustworthy friend is to pay a therapist.

The news rely on us not trusting our friends. The internet rationalists say that the information one gets from a friend is "anecdotal" and "unreliable". However, the news one gets from pundits on the internet are "fact-checked" and "trustworthy". We read them, we suffer from [Gell-Mann amnesia](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gell-mann-amnesia-effect-is-as-follows-you), and then we trust them.

We throw away damaged things and buy replacements on eBay at overinflated prices from strangers because we don't trust anyone to fix them. We rely on real estate agents to buy or rent property. We don't listen to our elders. We don't trust the right people.

We don't have to live like this.

The key to successful, stable and fulfilled life is a high trust environment. No one can rely only on himself, we have to work with others, this is how our brains work. The "lone wolf" is a popular trope, but lone wolves in nature most often die or have to adapt. In a hyper-connected, technological world, in which as long as you have a digital skill that can make you money, you can outsource the entire Maslow's pyramid. What you get isn't meaningful fulfilment, but a commercially optimised proxy packaged as a product.

This is what is meaningful. Building a friendship, a house, a family, a clan, a community, a parish, a town. This is what is real, true and valuable. This is what you lose when you get enslaved by the screen.


High Trust Society

I've been attempting to read *Atlas Shrugged* for the past couple of weeks. The volume itself is quite daunting, but I've heard praise about Ayn Rand from many directions so it only seems proper to give it a chance. I should try not to level any substantial criticisms against the book before I am done with it, however so far I am very underwhelmed.

In any case, in preparation for reading such a hefty brick (the edition I've got has 1'174 pages, the title on the spine is printed horizontally and it could no doubt kill an unfortunate passer-by should I accidentally drop it out of the window) I acquainted myself with the rather controversial and original philosophy of Objectivism thought up by Rand. But to understand that, I had to figure out where it came from.

It's quite tough to find a proper summary of Rand's philosophy in the terms a know-nothing apprentice of the subject such as myself can understand because it's very original. In fact, if there is one thing that one should praise Rand for, is that Objectivism is a truly original construction, although whether that is good or bad remains to be seen.

> Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.

The originality of Objectivism is not necessarily due to the focus on the value of the individual, because that has been apparent, known and accepted in western philosophy since Jesus and probably earlier, as evidenced by the quote from the Gospel of Matthew, although in a sort of inverse way from Rand. The value of an individual is not a recent discovery. What makes Objectivism unique is that it considers any form of altruism evil.

Put another way, the common way to understand "individuals matter" is that we should help those less fortunate than us. Rand says that they should instead be left alone.

I should definitely not consider myself well-read as far as Objectivism is concerned, I have not even finished her novel. However, from what I've read in secondary sources, the "read between the lines" summary is: "prevent whatever caused Soviet Union to happen by any means necessary". Rand certainly had her reasons to hate the Soviet regime, as does any half-educated person these days, but in doing this, I fear, there is a large amount of dishonesty.

The source of that dishonesty is the train of thought that might have started with something like: "since communism is bad, and communism is essentially the archetypical implementation of collectivism, we should pick whatever is the polar opposite of collectivism and construct a moral framework around that". Thus, what we ended up with is an unfettered praise of the individual, of laissez-faire capitalism and of reason. And from that flows a quiet, implicit and paradoxically coercive assertion that every reasonable individual should agree with Rand's philosophy, otherwise he would be unreasonable.

Thankfully I should never consider myself reasonable, so I am under no obligation to agree with Objectivism.

# Highway orthodoxy

Due to *Atlas Shrugged* being an overwhelmingly boring book, and in the spirit of trying something new, I downloaded a recording of G. K. Chesterton's *[Orthodoxy](https://librivox.org/orthodoxy-by-g-k-chesterton/)* from LibriVox to listen to on a long drive. I typically listen to music while driving instead of doing something "more productive" because the material I usually read is too dense for me to listen to (I typically re-read a page multiple times), but since I had already known Chesterton's writing style from an earlier collection of Father Brown stories, I figured it might be fine to listen to.

Two asides: first, there's nothing wrong with books being boring in itself. *[Nicomachean Ethics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicomachean_Ethics)* is extremely boring, but it's also an extremely good book. Second, I would suggest against listening to Chesterton and actually [reading his work](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/130), it's much more enjoyable in that form, and much like another beloved classic of Christian apologetics *[Mere Christianity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_Christianity)*, *Orthodoxy* can be finished in two afternoons.

It appears that Chesterton is not a fan of Rand either, or at least he wouldn't be if he had any opportunity to engage with her and her ideas. I will skip over the concerns of heroism, individualism and politics for now (perhaps until I am done with *Atlas Shrugged*), only focusing now on Rand's idea that reason should be the only absolute.

My fundamental problem that leads to rejection of whatever Rand has to say is her assertion that everyone should pursue his self-interest by means of reason and reason alone. That would discard 66% of human experience and [means of gaining knowledge](https://intercaetera.com/2020-03-14-three-ways-of-gaining-knowledge/). Not only that, it fails to account for the fact that most people aren't capable of reasoning correctly. In fact, [*nobody* is capable of reasoning](https://intercaetera.com/2020-02-11-rationalism-is-the-modern-flat-earth/) correctly in every given situation, because we are never in possession of perfect information and infinite "computing power" in our brain that would lead to objectively correct conclusions. In fact, *every* time you come to a good conclusion as a result of an apparently rational process, you probably took a shortcut along the way, used a heuristic or referred to a tradition that is not strictly reasonable.

To reiterate: reason in itself is not bad, just as knives in themselves are not bad. It's a part of human experience, the same as knives are a part of human experience.

# Chesterton v. Rand

My critique of Rand's rationalism is fairly mild: I respectfully disagree that reason is or should be the only absolute. Chesterton goes a little further. Rand tells you that to be a proper functioning individual you have to believe in yourself, take heroic action, and use reason to guide you. Chesterton tells you that Rand is a *lunatic*.

> "Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums."

"Let us begin," after Chesterton, "with the mad-house." I suppose reading about Dagny Taggart's exploits in a world defiantly turned against her is amusing for us, because to us it seems like the world is mad and she is sane. But, if the world of *Atlas Shrugged* was true, with each country short of the United States being a "People's Republic", surely it would be the other way around. After all, if reason is the only moral absolute, would it not be reasonable to join the unreasonable and, if egoism is the only value, attempt to subvert the system from within towards one's personal gain? If history teaches us anything, it's that [no revolution is permanent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon). I suppose history is unreasonable, too.

But let us take a step back. I said I should hesitate to venture into the plot details of the book, so let's stick to philosophy. I suppose it logically follows that if every person should be reasonable, he should have a reason for each of his actions. Not just a reason, perhaps, but a good reason. In a perfect world of Randian heroes everyone would always do everything for a reason, and nothing for no reason. Chesterton tells you that this is a *mental disorder*.

> "The last thing that can be said of a lunatic is that his actions are causeless. If any human acts may loosely be called causeless, they are the minor acts of a healthy man; whistling as he walks; slashing the grass with a stick; kicking his heels or rubbing his hands. It is the happy man who does the useless things; the sick man is not strong enough to be idle."

For one reason or another, there aren't many active and functioning lunatic asylums anymore, and those that still exist try to avoid the connotation. (I suspect the movie *One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest* is to blame for that.) So perhaps, many of those people ended up not in [Hanwell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Bernard%27s_Hospital,_Hanwell) or [Narrenturm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrenturm_(asylum)) but they are still among us.

> "If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours. Or if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad; for if he were King of England that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do. Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ's."

This is why a world in which reason is the highest and only absolute requires that every one be a *psychopath*. Because it is not normal and not sustainable to always be reasonable and to always be kicked into gear. It is normal to expect that there will be people who would want to do that (and they should be incentivised and not obstructed, of course!), but those are exceptions and not rules. Most people are not crazy, much like most people are not geniuses.

That is precisely the reason why I find Rand's book so boring. The positive characters are one-dimensional psychopaths, the negative ones are negative because they grew tired of playing a losing game, and the case against altruism is aimed at a strawman. It might be inspirational to identify with these heroic go-getters and hustlers when you are eighteen and full of vigour. It is exhausting if you are forty — it's difficult to pursue your self interest if you have children.

# Zen and the art of shrugging

There is one quite rational author on the list of books I have already read, he was a hero of many posts on this blog. Indeed, the man was so rational that he reasoned himself out of rationalism, for which he has my deepest respect. Chesterton wrote of him (or, more accurately, of people like him, because he was unfortunately not a contemporary of his):

> "Every one who has had the misfortune to talk with people in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder, knows that their most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail; a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze."

This is of course a description of Robert Pirsig, the author of *Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance*. Pirsig himself (spoilers for *Zen*) ended up in a psychiatric institution, was diagnosed with schizophrenia and treated with electric shocks. Yet his rational faculties seemed to work well, very well in fact, connecting the dots that would be very difficult to notice for ordinary people, at the most general level, close to the fundamentals of the human existence and close to the foundation of western philosophy. Pirsig wrote:

> "If all of human knowledge, everything that’s known, is believed to be an enormous hierarchic structure, then the high country of the mind is found at the uppermost reaches of this structure in the most general, the most abstract considerations of all."

To ordinary people this "high country of the mind" is accessible only for short periods of time, in brief periods of clarity, as it should be. Those who claim to inhabit it permanently are actually one of three things. They are either only beginning their journey and mistake the road ahead for the destination, falsely thinking they have reached it and actually just circling the central issues; they are on the verge of madness because these central issues are impossible for a sane rationalist to grasp; or they are lying and think they are rational while only deriving their group identity from reading some contemporary guru such as Dawkins.

I was, at some point in my life in all three of these groups, until I realised that one can live his life completely happily without visiting the "high country of the mind" or even thinking about it. The solution is to accept that if you allow a little bit of mysticism in the centre of your world-view, everything else can become straightforward. A rationalist has to continually circle the drain, so to speak, because the centre of it is where reason fails him. A Christian allows himself to have the centre of his faith be in darkness, so that everything else can be illuminated.

Chesterton puts it like this:

> "As we have taken the circle as the symbol of reason and madness, we may very well take the cross as the symbol at once of mystery and of health. (...) For the circle is perfect and infinite in its nature; but it is fixed for ever in its size; it can never be larger or smaller. But the cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms for ever without altering its shape. Because it has a paradox in its centre it can grow without changing. The circle returns upon itself and is bound. The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travellers."


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