re: "How to Reach People Who Are Wrong" (The New York Times, March 3, 2021)
As the philosopher Bertrand Russell, another modern great, once said, “The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”
The intelligent should be full of doubt, no matter how right we may be in one or two cases.
We can be absolutely certain that 2+2=4, whatever the Ministry of Truth or proposed Reality Czar might dictate to the contrary, but beyond the truths of mathematics and logic, there exists not a single absolutely certain belief about the material world we inhabit. Not even the great Isaac Newton could get reality that right.
Our moral beliefs, more to the point, are never objectively true, so can never be worth dying for, even less worth killing for. That would be as silly as dying or killing for money, another amazingly non-objective thing that exists only in and between human minds, whether gold, Bitcoin, US $, or Philippine pesos.
Perhaps we need to calm down, take a step or several back, and stop treating our every fleeting brain wobble as an eternal verity direct from the gods we manufactured afresh last week, last year or last century.
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The above comment was submitted by Felix Qui to The New York Times article.
It is published there at https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/03/opinion/progressives-conservatives-think-again.html#commentsContainer&permid=111849835:111849835
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