4-How we know

Definition: How we know anything about anything Note - This essay first appeared in the book, Fixing America.

DAN

The question I want to explore in this essay is this - How do we know anything about anything? This is not a new question. While philosophers have asked and answered it in various ways from antiquity through the Middle Ages, let me concentrate in this essay on the period I define as Modernity. Someone said - but I can't remember who - that Modernity began with René Descartes (1596 – 1650 ) who famously said cogito ergo sum often translated as I think therefore I am. This commentator whose name escapes me proposed that Descartes' focus on his own act of thinking as the original source of his knowledge - his starting point, in other words - has today - 500 years later - blossomed into widespread narcissism and relativism, which in turn has lead - I say - to increasing Social Fragmentation. I contend that we cannot develop - much less sustain - Social Cohesion when we are focused so much on ourselves. When I think of the cogito, as it is often called by philosophers, I imagine Descartes' mother saying, "Oh, René, you think too much. Sweetheart, you exist because I gave birth to you. I nursed you. Your entire body sings of your existence, not just your brain and its thinking." (Descartes mother died when he was __ years old. That fact may be the source of his problem.) I agree with my imaginary Mrs. Descartes. We need a better starting point beyond our personal thinking. We should begin, I say, with our Bodies - our living Bodies - the whole of them - to whom our mothers gave birth and then ponder their opposite - namely, the deaths of our Bodies. Having clarified my Judgment about these historical happenings at the dawn of Modernity, let me continue in the present - A fundamental fact of our human existence - if not the fundamental fact - is that we adults Know the Truth with absolute certainty - which was the kind of starting point Descartes was looking for - certainty - that we will lose all Control when our Bodies die and we do not Know when that will be. Death is inevitable. Death is a Condition. Death is objectively True in the sense that it typically happens independently of our Actions. In reaction to this Knowledge of death - We Desire Control. Our fear of death and Desire for Control is a better starting point that I propose we use going forward. For one thing, instead of ourselves, it gets us focused on everything out there that we Desire to Control lest we in here die prematurely. So, not liking deprivation generally, not to mention death, what we do - as a general statement - is seek to turn Undesirable Conditions into Problems if at all possible, add them to our existing list of known Problems, and then go about the business of Solving them. That - I say - has been the pattern of human progress from the beginning. We Desire Control in the sense of Problem-Solving. The Act of thinking is merely a part of the Problem-Solving process given my premise that we Desire Control, to begin with, and so are compelled to think, among many other Actions. Consider the obvious - None of us likes losing Control. None of us likes being out of Control. We work hard to avoid losing or being out of Control. In the face of it, many if not most of us will duck and weave into Denial as a last resort. Now, keep in mind that Denial is not necessarily a conscious or voluntary process. It may be in a given case, but not necessarily. When our backs are up against the wall, Denial happens. It is as if at that moment we whisper to ourselves that maybe later we will be able to handle the Situation better, turn it into a Problem and Solve it. Meanwhile, we Deny the Situation we are in and refocus our Attention on something else relatively more pleasant that we can Control. The commonplace fact of Denial helps prove how important to us our Desire for Control is. Having asserted our Desire for Control as my starting point, let me jump to the present moment - What are you doing now? Specifically, what are you doing now when you read and think about this essay and later the contents of the Cohesion Compendium-Glossary more generally? You are engaged in a process of gathering and synthesizing information from the written page - That is, gathering information into your Body so that your Understanding of the CG subject matter, i.e., Social Fragmentation, Social Cohesion, and so on, will be built on firmer ground thus preparing you to take Action in the real world better. This information-gathering and synthesizing process is what I want to talk with you about next - Like a news reporter tracking down the facts of a story, when you proceed to gather information about something to synthesize it, you probably should ask the six usual questions of who, what, when, where, why and how. Three of these questions are easy to answer in this case. When it comes to Cohesion [Nation], the who is you and the people immediately around you and the people generally in [Nation], all of whom live under the same national constitution. That last point is important, by the way. When thinking about Social Fragmentation/Cohesion and other things along those lines, confining one's considerations to people living under the same national constitution greatly simplifies matters compared to having some sort of vague globalist posture where a firm legal structure that you can appeal to, reform or rebel against does not exist. In any event, once you are focused on the people of a given country and constitution, the where is wherever people live under that constitution and the when is now under that constitution. The three tough questions out of the six are the how, what and why questions. Let me ask and answer them briefly - Q1. How do we know anything about anything? A. We know by Degrees of Certitude. Q2. What is it that we know once we exercise our Degrees of Certitude? A. We know something within the range of our Degrees of Certitude. Q3. Why do we arrive at that particular something? A. The why is caused by how our Degrees of Certitude work. In other words, it is really, really important that you Understand what I mean when I say - We come to know something about anything By Degrees of Certitude. Before I send you off to another webpage to learn about your Degrees of Certitude, let me comment on something that has become obvious to me personally, given my lived-experiences. You will learn about this point when you study and reflect on your Sensorium which is one step, so to speak, in your Degrees of Certitude. Okay, so, it has become obvious to me that - You either deliberately make other people A routine part of Your Problem-Solving process Or You leave yourself open to Endless manipulation by forces that, by definition, You do not Adequately Understand or of which you are not even aware.

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