Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

nonrandomstring

Happy ideas for sale. Mediums and palm readers have always known what western politicians only recently grasped - that people don't care about truth, they care about feeling good about what they believe.

"Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail, blue skies from pain" [1]

Did you exchange cold comfort for change? You can believe anything you like for a price.

Williams proffers that bullshit, and believing crazy things is a mutual stroking behaviour of a mass huddled together in the comfort of collective ignorance, and that within that group there are rewards for dreaming up the most soothing stories. He extends this beyond Harry Frankfurt's position to say that an entire "economy of bullshit" exists. and that its trade could be "an economic good".

This is why in Plato, Shakespeare, Cicero and so many luminaries, it is always the _mad_ (the fool) who deliver the truth. Only despised outsiders who have no skin in the collective self-delusion game are able to break the norms and deliver the unwelcome message. Further, (Foucault, Cassandra etc) there's a market in silencing truth speakers who rock the boat of profitable rationalisation.

[1] Pink Floyd [2] On Bullshit: Harry Frankfurt

> that people don't care about truth

I care, it allows me to build on ideas. One of the cooler truths I've seen is the law of large numbers (and similar ideas, like positive and negative expected value) and how it has shaped my life in taking chances. That idea alone improved my quality of life by a lot.

Ideas that are true are like building blocks that can lead to a better life (or at least do damage control on the current one). And that makes me feel good and reinforces my belief system.

> they care about feeling good about what they believe.

Oh wait...

:-)

Regardless of how you feel about the objective truth, it exists. Naturally, it follows that people who engage with what exists ought to have better outcomes than those who engage in fantasy. Admittedly, when the majority of people engage in fantasy and even the mere mention of truth is seen as an existential threat, it takes on the opposite dimension. In particular, as mentioned above, the truth-tellers are reviled, feared, mocked, and made to suffer. It should be obvious that a value system that prioritizes fantasy over truth is unsustainable. As more people shift from truth to fantasy, whatever functional or pragmatic underpinnings civilization has erode until nothing fundamentally true remains. Civilization is subordinate to the truth and without it there is no civilization.

“This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.” ― T.S. Eliot

"To recognize untruth as a condition of life--that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil." - Nietzsche, the mad fool of the West.

Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur.

>>Mediums and palm readers have always known what western politicians only recently grasped - that people don't care about truth, they care about feeling good about what they believe.

Maybe in the west-- Indian astrologers delight in horror stories-- certain death and or complete financial ruin, unless you can pay for expensive prayers and/or jewels.

Although it does help strengthen peoples belief, as they can blame their misery on that evil Saturn, rather than the corrupt system or their own poor choices.

I've also seen-- people stuck in extreme situations, doing anything, even if they know it is stupid, helps them a little , as it gives a feeling on control in an otherwise helpless situation

That's still an example of a feel-good story being sold: your family didn't die in a car crash because of bad luck, it was because you didn't pay the astrologer/priest/whatever to appease the gods. For many people, the idea of that they can't control what happens at all is way worse than the idea that something is in control of the universe but they simply have not yet found the way to influence that something.

Coincidentally, this blog post[0] on Chomsky's propaganda model is related.

[0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2022/03/chomskys-propaganda...

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