Doubt Will Set You Free

I KNOW that I don't know more than I do know. In fact, it is one of the few things that I am certain of.

I KNOW that I don't know most of what has transpired with respect to any event that I did not witness myself. What I don't know outweighs what I do know in virtually everything. That is the nature of reality as constructed by humans. None of us are omniscient; our minds take morsels of information and fill in the rest, constructing the reality that we live in.



I KNOW from my work as a scientist that certainty is the absolute enemy of truth. One can remove uncertainty and test hypotheses with new evidence, thereby removing more uncertainty, but what one can never do is eliminate all the uncertainty. I believe this to about a 9.5 on a scale of 10. Certainty scares the shit out of me because it is a mental trap. One may be able to know something beyond a reasonable doubt or one may be able to know something to where it's more likely than not, but knowing anything beyond things that have gone on solely in one's own mind to certainty is very, very questionable. In other words, some doubt will linger in my mind in virtually all instances. But is this undesirable?


AT ONE POINT in my life, I was well beyond just contemplating suicide: I was planning it. A friend gave me The Cosmic Trigger by Robert Anton Wilson as a Solstice gift and luckily I read it. Over the course of reading it, I realized that life was worth living, or at least I was reasonably certain that it was. Before I read this remarkable book, I had the time of my suicide planned to within a few days and was working on the method. When I finished The Cosmic Trigger I wanted nothing more than life. While I am sure that there were other factors, that book was the catalyst a huge personal change. As I further delved into Robert Anton Wilson's work, I took away a profound, sublime yet simple message: embrace uncertainty rather than shun it; it's evil twin, certainty. is for fundamentalist religionists, Neocons and other cultists. Certainty makes most of these individuals comfortable and uncertainty makes them extremely angry.

ROBERT ANTON WILSON summed things up nicely when he said, "I don't have beliefs, but I have many suspicions".

I WAS FURTHER CHANGED by William Reich in Hell, Robert Anton Wilson's excellent play, which delves deeply into the nature of uncertainty. The play itself makes the audience think about the nature of reality; Mr. Wilson's introduction spells things out. The essence of his thought is this:

• He rates all his suspicions on a scale of 0 to 10, 0 being complete disbelief and 10 being complete belief. My example would be 0 is the sun rose in the west this morning, with 10 being the sun rising in the west.
  

• Whenever one of his suspicions hits or closes on either 0 or 10, he tries to come up with reasons why said  suspicion, which has morphed into a belief or disbelief, shouldn't be so absolute.

• He pays attention to the suspicions that are close to or at 0 or 10 as they are the ones that can bias his thought the most.

I AM VERY CAREFUL with belief systems. They are dangerous, as dangerous as a drug that one comes to craves. It is very easy for me to fall into the trap of believing things uncritically. I have worked hard to expunge this tendency. I recognize the paradox in subscribing to RAW's method for optimizing his consciousness - isn't it yet another belief system? Unsurprisingly, he warns of the dangers of belief systems elsewhere in his writing. Yet RAW's words ring true on this account.

ONE'S ATTITUDE about uncertainty really gets to the heart of belief and disbelief. One must deal with uncertainty every moment of one's life; how one does so strikes right to the core of the being, one's weltanschauung. Acceptance of uncertainty goes hand in hand with thinking for oneself: it is the very engine of intellectual curiosity. Embracing uncertainty is one of the things that gets me out of bed in the morning and makes life worth living to me. So yes, doubt has set me free.

I am reasonably certain of that.

Inspired by the Victorious Kochs and D.A.F. Sade

 

November 6, 2010

 

Barack Obama has accomplished something very Rooseveltian in the past two years – he saved US capitalism from itself. Unlike FDR, it is very likely that he will be displaced from the Presidency and the Republicans will be fully back in power in 2012. A triumvirate of Sarah Palin, John Boehner and Rand Paul will run the country, with the Roberts Court declaring whatever they do to be perfectly legal. Looks like capitalism’s salvation will be temporary after all.

Some people complain about Roosevelt saving US capitalism. Typically, those who do so envision some sort of socialist utopia having risen in its place, complete with a magnanimous dictatorship of the proletariat. While this makes for an interesting thought experiment or an even more interesting Philip K. Dick novel, it is just idle speculation.

One doesn’t have to speculate much on what will happen in the US should capitalism collapse under the weight its own greed sometime in the next few years. Clearly it won’t be socialism or even anything as benign as, say, Maoism that will rise from Wall Street's rubble.

Instead America will be something out of the fevered visions that Rupert Murdoch has each night as he sleeps, of Glenn Beck sodomizing and flailing him. Rupert feels remarkably exquisite pleasure and pain as he is fucked and tortured; as he orders undesirables slaughtered at home and abroad; as he condemns thousands of the destitute and all their successive descendants to short, hopeless lives in peonage to squalid sweatshops; as he in turn buggers and lacerates Minister of Justice Michelle Bachman; as he watches the whole Sadian carnival of ultra-sadistic delight unfold before him on the 120 television news channels that he personally commands; all the while as he kills with his bare, sweating and blistered hands a litter of kittens and a malnourished orphan slowly and in the most agonizing fashion possible.

Pleasant dreams everyone.  Especially those of you in my country on the pathetic, fractious left, who would rather squabble amongst yourselves than fight for what you claim is important to you.  It always strikes me as funny that you cannot practice anything even remotely resembling solidarity.  This should be your strong point as tolerance is essential to solidarity, and if there is anything that you profess it is tolerance. Yet somehow the religious right, the corporate right and the altogether loony right set aside their differences to achieve their objectives.  Meanwhile you are preoccupied calling each other names like "Zionists" and "anti-Semites","centrists" and "extremists", "apologists" and "retards".  

Of course, I just called many of you "pathetic" and "fractious".

 

$@$@$@$@$

25 December 2021

This essay really has not aged well.  I look back to the days of the Tea Party’s victory in the 2010 mid-term elections and I almost get nostalgic.

We now live in a nation riven in two, with civil war a distinct possibility.  Cartoon-evil characters like Michelle Bachmann and John Boehner pale in comparison to the likes of Ted Cruz and Lauren Boebert, pictured.

Obama would take down Mitt Romney in 2012 but nothing and no one could stop Donald Trump in 2016.  Only a virus prevented a second helping of grift from Queens by way of Mar-A-Lago and mentored by Roy Cohen.  And while I am not as critical of Obama as other left leaning individuals I know, he seems to have really amped up the drone wars in Central Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

Rupert Murdoch’s media empire?  It may have been scary at the time, but it’s nothing compared to Twitter, Telegram and Newsmax. 

Then there’s a sheet of ice larger than Manhatten has collapsed, threatening to let the last remaining ice-bound water above the Arctic Circle melt.  It sounds like fun; it likely will not be.  So please try not to laugh too hard.

And my writing, wherein I use animal cruelty, child abuse and sexual assault as a metaphor?  Grounds for cancellation, if I was ever anyone to be noticed in the first place.

One last consolation, albeit not properly punctuated. 

 

 

 

A Quick Note

I have couple of blog posts under construction right now. When I started this I wasn't going to publish an entry until it was done. It has come to my attention that this is inhibiting me from publishing at all. When is anything done?

No answer, eh? I didn't have a good one, other than, "when it's done", which is less than satisfactory as far as answers go.

So I am going to post blog entries when they are close to done. I will come back and tweak them as I see fit. So if you really, really like every word of a post, save it to your hard drive when you read it. It's all subject to change.

About the Name

I chose "Euronymous Dust" under pressure. I was setting up this blog and got to the point where I needed to name it - if you have created a blog on Blogger, you know what I am talking about. So I ruminated over it for a moment then came up with this name. I have used it before as the title for a song inspired by Michael Moynihan's Lords of Chaos. In this instance I liked the sound of it more than anything else.

Having a name that has no special significance appeals to me because it allows me to write about whatever moves me at the time. Whether it's a review of a record that I like or the most intimate details of my thoughts that I really shouldn't be sharing in a public forum, I can throw it up here, literally and figuratively.

But enough about me.

First Blog

I started this today. We'll see if I do anything with it. Carol says that I should write. She's right.