Wednesday, October 16, 2013

I am making a public resolution

Unless I state this publicly, I probably will lapse.  Therefore, here goes: I will not engage with the blather on CIP's blog any more, like this recent example from an online course from an Israeli historian, Harari, who is CIP's latest guru:
"Ultimate power belongs to a supremely disinterested entity, called ....the Atman by the Hindus. Nobody makes temples to these ultimate powers because they don't care."
Perhaps the world has an irreducible amount of ignorance cloaked with authority.   We see Krugman battling with it daily in his blog in the area of macroeconomics. In that case we suspect the source to be the paymasters or the ideological commitments of the players.   But perhaps it is just macroeconomics' quota of this irreducible amount of ignorance cloaked with authority.

It is simply a fact of life to be lived with that people don't even know that they don't even know.  It is not an attitude of resignation any more than one is resigned to the tiger having stripes.  And yes, to avoid having to engage in any further arguments, I'll concede upfront despite having no evidence for it, that this fact of life likely has some evolutionary origin and is genetic in nature.

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Just FYI, if we used the generally approved mapping of Hindu teachings into Christianity, the above sentence would read:

"Ultimate power belongs to a supremely disinterested entity called the Soul by Hindus.  Nobody makes temples to these ultimate powers because they don't care."