I have found that Asshole-ism is an equal opportunity *man* made fodder for the masses.

Good insight.

Peter Guillam: So Karla’s fireproof. He can’t be bought, and he can’t be beaten.

George Smiley: NOT fireproof! Because’s he’s a fanatic! I may have acted like a soft dolt, the very archetype of a flabby Western liberal but I’d rather be my kind of fool than his. One day that lack of moderation will be Karla’s downfall.

He’s a fanatic. And the fanatic is always concealing a secret doubt.

John Le Carre

When Newtonian mechanics ran into more accurate measurements and became deficient, relativity came along. And then quantum mechanics.

The flat earth is true. Your house lot is measured as a plane, and that works. The rounder earth is true, and space ships can find their way out and back. And so on.

Absolute truth? No need for it, even if one could find it. Do we need to know pi to the 40 billionth? Nope. So while no estimate of pi is right, they aren’t wrong, either.

My world view is that there is a reality, its what the physicist studies, a world of quarks and subatomic particles, fields and waves. We are limited in our understanding of it because our means of perceiving and understanding it (our senses and our reason) are inadequate to the task. Our consciousness was designed to allow us to survive in the savanna long enough to transmit our DNA, we were never meant to be able to determine the truth of reality, whatever that means. Still, we are pretty good at dealing with the physical world, we build particle accelerators and orbiting telescopes, and we have developed some very unnatural conceptual tools, like mathematics, to deal with that universe.

But unless you are a physicist doing his work, none of us lives in that world. Our naked ape lives in a totally different reality, whether it be trying to avoid that leopard that’s stalking him, or trying to locate shelter, water, food or a mate. Even our physicist lives in the universe of his career, his family problems, his biological, social, cultural, historical, political, economic realities. These all exist simultaneously, and on top of each other, all intimately related, yet not obviously so.

We live in subjective universes that differ for all of us, and differ for each of us over time, sometimes many of them simultaneously. And they mean a great deal to us. This doesn’t mean we get to invent our own physics, its just that for most of us, most of the time, physics isn’t really all that important. Our personal universe may be centered around the fact that our child is flunking out of school, or our home insurance costs have tripled, or that there’s a man at your door delivering a subpoena because you’re being sued. These things matter, they are important. They are reality.

If you’re in combat, or in prison, or in a burning building, or in an automobile accident, the laws of physics just don’t matter.

What reality is isn’t always obvious, and it is very easy to get it confused with perception. Regardless of what the real world is, the only world you can see, the one you have to deal with now, is the one that’s rolling around in your head.

Maybe that’s what the guy who wrote Asimov was really trying to communicate, but didn’t have the ability to articulate. Scientific method and training may not be very good or useful for the universe you happen to be dealing with RIGHT NOW. When someone you love is in surgery, and you’re in the parking lot chain-smoking cigarettes your own knowledge of medicine may not be very helpful at all.

I know people who have confused perception with reality (I’m not suggesting anyone here has done so). For them, truth is divorced from reality and happens to be whatever’s rolling around in their head at the time.

The angry man who wrote Asimov is a very common archetype in these turbulent times. He’s the one that goes over all the facts with a very fine tooth comb until he finds one little thing that doesn’t quite match up, and then he feels justified in rejecting everything outright.

“Aha! Gotcha! There’s all the proof I needed to prove you’re wrong, and if you’re wrong about this, you’re wrong about everything, and you’re wrong forever. Wrong, wrong, wrong. So I must be right. Perfectly right. All the time and forever and ever.”

This kind of personality is becoming more and more common, now that the Internet is giving them the means to quickly accumulate all the factoids they need to justify their preconceptions, and cloak them in a veil of scholarship and legitimacy.