There is No Longer a Doomsday Gap: Facts Are Frauds, Because Truth is Wholeness
The words facts, truth, and reality are the three most abused words in human history, because facts can be worse than useless when taken out of context. They can be used to intentionally distort reality. If we consider reality to be everything that exists, that includes all possible contexts as well. Gandhi understood this when he tried to point out to the British rulers of India that it was unfair to deprive Indians of water because they won't work for you free so that you can finance a private hunting expedition. His point was that although from the context of the landlord it made good business sense, from the context of his tenants it is unreasonable.
These days people are more enamored with facts than ever. Of course facts require analysis, but even the best analysis often conceals a hidden agenda that even the analyst might be unaware of. Only analysis that comes as close as possible to including all contexts can be considered to have any relation to reality. And since that's seldom completely possible, all analysis involves some degree of distortion of reality, even if it's only through overlooking various aspects of reality.
This is why wit and humor are often more accurate than facts and analysis. It's because they often give the kind of big picture view that cannot be gained from mere facts and analysis. Of course wit and humor requires facts and analysis for food and thus depend to varying degrees on an understanding of the subject. Some understandings can come in a flash, without the need for facts and analysis. If a tourist in a taxicab in India is mobbed by children and throws a penny out the window and the children all scramble for it, the gist of that situation can be grasped in a flash.
What I'm leading up to is that even the best facts and analysis and the broadest possible context loses impact if unaccompanied by either humor, wit, or wisdom, because the condense the essence of complex realities into something that can be gotten in a flash. Otherwise it just becomes a long and wearisome list. And humorists and wise men and women have been predicting most of the problems that phi beta iota concerns itself with for decades, centuries, and even millennia. A good example comes from the film “Doctor Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”
Here's the screenplay.
The Russian Ambassador is in the War Room when it is discovered that the Russians have built a Doomsday device that will wipe out the entire planet should America ever attack it with nuclear weapons. The the argument is made that such a weapon has no value unless one's opponent is aware that it exists, for which the Russian ambassador apologizes and explains that they were planning to reveal it's existence soon. Of course now it's too late because an American plane is on the way to bomb Russia and it cannot be recalled.
The Russian Ambassador says:
“There were those of us who fought against this [developing a doomsday device]. But in the end, we could not keep up with the expense involved in the arms race, the space race, and the peace race. And at the same time, our people grumbled for more nylons and washing machines. Our Doomsday scheme cost us just a small fraction of what we'd been spending on defense in a single year. But the deciding factor was when we learned that your country was working along similar lines, and we were afraid of a Doomsday gap.”
But all of humanity has been working toward doomsday for a long time. What too few humans throughout human history have realized is that taking an extreme adversarial approach to one's opponents only escalates conflict and eventually leads to chaos. The cost/benefit ratio may seem good in the beginning, but the external costs are always higher than estimated. And all those external costs—-many of which have been building for millennia—-now loom over us like a giant tsunami about to crash down on us. And all of those costs are the result of the mentality that insists in seeing everything from the perspective of warfare.
The mindset is perfectly illustrated in a book called Market Warfare: Leadership and Domination Over Competitors by Edmond Hennessy.
It's a very slim book and an excellent metaphor for the describing the fatal flaw in the predominant philosophy contemporary humanity. But it's clear that Hennessy didn't invent the rules. He's just playing by them. In fact he lays out a pretty good argument that any businessman who doesn't play by them will soon be devoured by those who do. It's the corporate model, which is running amok in a big way as one conglomerate cannibalizes the other, leaving human wreckage in their wake. It's a zero sum game that actually reaches zero when all the banks that support it go bankrupt.
So there is no longer a doomsday gap. Humanity is rapidly approaching a final end that will not discriminate based on race, religion, ethnicity, culture, nationality, economic class, gender, generation, or age level. Doomsday is nothing if not an equal opportunity employer.
But the main thing I hope people will take away from this article is that if they are not using humor, with, and wisdom to condense these ideas so that they can be grasped in a flash, then they're wasting precious time and they're wasting people's attention. People are overwhelmed by all the things they need to pay attention to these days. You don't have their attention for very long. If you can't grab it in a hurry, then you've lost them, maybe for good. So it's time for all the experts to stop talking to each other and start talking to the masses. And to do that well you need to know how to get across wholeness in a flash.
The second thing I hope people will take away from this article is that the book “Market Warfare” can also be used to reverse engineer what went wrong with humanity by using it as a guide for disassembling the systems that can only lead to doomssay and replacing them with different kinds of systems that encourage cooperation rather than all out warfare.
