|
|
|
|
|
|
by cubefox
950 days ago
|
|
|
> Humanity has already paid too steep a price learning why some truths and ideas must be rejected. Honest question: When is it ever advantageous to reject truths? I always remind myself of the Litany of Gendlin: What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.
And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
Anything untrue isn't there to be lived.
People can stand what is true,
for they are already enduring it.
|
|
|
Of course it is. Trump is a living example of how advantageous it can be for someone to reject almost obvious, self evident truths.
That's an egregious example. Consider another example I saw raised by an anthropologist. It was a tribe that had only bows and spears being being overrun another tribe armed with modern weapons. They survived courtesy of their shaman convincing the young men some complicated ritual made them immune to the bullets. This gave them the courage to take the interlopers on, and a lot of them dying in the process. Obviously the young men who died weren't better off, but their relatives got to continue the young mens blood line as a consequence. The ritual was complicated enough to make it plausible the men killed got it wrong.
Sorry no link (it was here on HN). But if you google "origins of religion war immune to bullets" you will find numerous other examples, and of course the search term hints at a popular theory about why it's sometimes advantageous to reject truths.