The Great Unknowable

I have a difficult relationship with reality. Most of the time I believe (like I think almost everyone does) that I am uniquely good at seeing the truth. I think that I am a misfit precisely because of this, and that most of the criticism people direct at me is because they “can’t handle the truth.” I do this people-watching thing that I think everyone else does, you know the one where you notice a flaw about someone, and not a little one—a giant beam in the eye that they’re swinging around and hitting things on with every single thing they do? And they are utterly unaware of it.

You see these people making up excuses for all of the things they’ve knocked over with that giant beam in their eye. It was someone else who did it. It was because I couldn’t see it because it was hidden. It wasn’t there. That didn’t happen. I couldn’t see it because of science (insert garbled version of science here). I believe I do this a lot less than other people. But this is the problem with being human and not having a very good way of verifying your perception of reality.

Science is supposed to be our savior on this point. I know a whole lot of ex-Mormons and other ex-religionists who call science their new “God.” When I give them funny looks and say that there is no way that I’m going to call science a “God,” they ask me why. They think that I’m an anti-vaxer or something. But it’s just that all of my deconstructing of Mormon truths has also spread to any kinds of truths. I already spent most of my college and grad school days studying “post-modern” philosophy and it came back out when I lost religion. There is no way to see reality if we are human. If there is such a thing as an objective reality, we humans have no way to get access to it because everything is going to be processed through our senses, which is information our brains are going to filter. And there it is, filtered, not clearly anything real. It’s just us, pretending that there is reality.

But does this mean I really don’t believe in science? Well, I’m a science skeptic, and by this I mean that all of the same criticisms that I’ve made of religion, of the myth of America, of capitalism, of any -ism or authority, can be applied equally well to science. Science is an institution that has been just as racist and sexist and blind to the actual information that experiments showed were real. Humans just interpreted it in different ways. They were sure that blue hippos were proven to be blue, even though later scientists saw clearly that they were actually purple.

We are just really bad at this truth thing. And we are worst at it the closer it comes to ourselves and our own prejudices. We can’t see for shit if we’re racist or sexist because we are, and that makes it impossible to see. We can’t see who we are at all, because we are us. I wish there was a good way around this. I sometimes tell myself that at least I can get other people to tell me what they see in me and this is some approximation of an objective truth. But alas, this is just as fraught because people who tell me what I don’t believe about myself just get ignored. I literally will probably not remember anything they said (unless I’ve begun to see myself differently, as they confirm). I only hear people who are telling me what I already know.

Confirmation bias, yes, but it is the most frustrating confirmation bias when it comes to ourselves. What are our actual strengths and weaknesses? We can never know this information. The only thing that helps us to live on in a world in which we are so very lost is that we comfort ourselves with the idea that we know our past selves at least. After all, we were ourselves, so surely the information we lived is verifable, right?

Wrong. So wrong. We can’t know our past selves any better than our present or future selves. But we can go on being deluded about our ability to know truth. And we probably have to continue to be deluded or we’d all go mad and kill ourselves. Or maybe that’s just me.