Untrue Things
- Most Of What You Believe Is Not True
- Rights
- Justice
- Duty and Honor
- Patriotism
- Laws
- Natural Law
- Real Law Versus Man-Made Law
- Penal Law
- Why Do Most People Believe What Is Not True?
- Government
- Organizations
- Teams
- Unions
- Corporations
- Contracts
- Constitutions
- Psychology
- Emotions
- Repression
- Evolution
- Environmentalism & Ecology
- Sociology
- Anthropology
- Science
“The majority of men prefer delusion to truth. It soothes. It is easy to grasp. Above all, it fits more snugly than the > truth into a universe of false appearances—of complex and irrational phenomena, defectively grasped.” [H.L. Mencken, The Anti-Christ] Therefore: “The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés.
Everyone knows everyone has rights, but no one can say exactly what rights are. The founders of the United States described rights as something humans are endowed with by God: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” [Declaration of Independence]
Justice is the relationship between one’s choices and actions and the consequences of those choices and actions. The consequences of one’s actions are always just so long as those consequences do not involve any interference by other human beings. I will call this, “real justice,” because when there is no human interference, reality alone determines the consequences of one’s actions. Reality penalizes all wrong acts and rewards all right ones.
Both “duty” and “honor” have good and important meanings. This fact makes the way both these words are usually used very deceiving and very dangerous. I will explain the true meanings first. The True Meanings of Duty and Honor Duty means an obligation. If one has a duty to do something, it means they are morally obligated to do it. The only moral obligations one has to others is to never interfere in anyone else’s life and keep all of one’s promises.
Most Americans identify themselves as patriotic Americans. They may not use the same word, but almost all people in whatever country they were born and raised identify themselves as patriotic, whether patriotic Greeks, or Thais, or Russians, or Koreans. (Perhaps not if they were born in North Korea, although publicly they better not admit it.) The general meaning of patriotism is love for one’s country, meaning a love for the place where one was born and grew up, and for all that growing up in that country one learns to love and enjoy.
The word law is a bit ambiguous because it is used to identify two very different things. It is sometimes used to mean principles, especially the principles of science. It is not this use of the word law that is of interest here. All other laws are the inventions of human beings. Most man-made laws are government laws, but there are others coming from religion or other ideologies. The primary difference between genuine laws, those principles determined by reality, and what I will refer to as ersatz laws, those made up by men (or believed by men with no rational basis, such as religious laws) is that genuine laws require no enforcement because reality itself enforces them, but ersatz laws require some human agency to enforce them.
Most people have never heard of the concept of ‘natural law,’ and are apt to confuse it with what are called ‘the laws of nature.’ The difference is very important. The laws of nature are principles determined by the nature of reality itself and include all scientific principles, such as those of physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine. They also include those principles that are determined by the nature of things such as life, consciousness, and the human mind.
Real Law which I’ve also referred to as the “laws of reality” are the principles that describe the nature of reality. Those principles determine what an individual must do and how one must live to live successfully and happily in this world. The principles cover the two aspects of reality: the physical world and life. The principles describing the physical world are the principles of science, also called “scientific laws.”
Penal law is sometimes called criminal law, which is law that defines both what constitutes crime and the penalties or punishments that pertain to particular crimes, and how they are to be prosecuted. This chapter is only about laws pertaining to the punishment or prosecution of crime. Whatever one thinks of Ayn Rand, her explanation of the need of penal law is probably the best; it is at least the easiest to understand and the most plausible.
This is an unplanned article addressing those things most people believe that are not true introduced in the article, “Most Of What You Believe Is Not True.” I think the most quoted words about, “rights,” at least in The United States, are these from The Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
The purpose of these articles is to demonstrate that most of the things most people believe are not true, that they not only believe them but take them for granted as unquestionable facts. The necessity of government is one of those things people take for granted. If you ask 20 people why they think government is necessary you’ll probably receive twenty different answers. Here are some of them: To protect human rights.
“Independence is the only gauge of human virtue and value. What a man is and makes of himself; not what he has or hasn’t done for others. There is no substitute for personal dignity. There is no standard of personal dignity except independence.” [Ayn Rand, “For the New Intellectual—The Fountainhead,” “The Soul Of An Individualist”] Most people believe the opposite of this. They believe human virtue and value are determined in some collective sense, by what one has, “contributed to society,” or what they mean to other people, or by what they are associated with.
The “team” concept is ubiquitous in business, education, politics, and most organizations. It’s supposed purpose is to facilitate cooperation between individuals for the achievement of some common purpose or goal. Is there anyone who does not believe this idea and does not repeat it themselves? It sounds so good. If we all just work together as a team, we can achieve anything. Origin Of The Team Concept It is difficult to precisely identify the origin of the concept “team.
Labor unions are organizations that supposedly help workers have more success as employees. In fact unions only “help”employees who cannot (or will not) improve themselves and their position by their own effort while harming the truly competent and ambitious. Unions are essentially gangs that achieve whatever they achieve by intimidation and threats. Labor Unions are organizations and have all the faults of organizations. The idea of labor unions is much more insidious than that, however.
Corporations are another kind of organization. Unlike other organizations, corporations are not formed by their members, or any people at all. Corporations actually exist to hide or at least protect any real people associated with them. Corporations have two unique characteristics: 1. they can only exist by the authority of some government, and 2. there is no real entity or any real people who are a corporation; corporations are, in fact, fictions.
A contract is a documented agreement between two or more parties (individuals or corporations) that is legally binding. Though technically a contract does not have to be written, since the whole purpose of a contract is to ensure all parties to the agreement fulfill their obligation giving all parties legal recourse in case of breach of contract, without a written record of the agreement, such contracts are usually unenforceable.
I am only concerned with the American Constitution, but many other constitutions around the world are modeled on the American one and this will apply to them to some extent as well. The American Constitution begins with a lie: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Psychology, which is the study of human consciousness, or the mind, is a very important discipline that unfortunately got off on the wrong foot, so to speak, and has never recovered. What goes by the name psychology today is as wrong and as superstitious as alchemy was or astrology still is. From the very beginning psychology made two disastrous mistakes: it failed to identify the nature of volition and totally misinterpreted the nature of emotions.
We certainly have emotions and they are very important. They are, in fact, necessary for our enjoyment of life. Unfortunately the emotions are not a source of enjoyment for most people, because what most people believe about them is not true. Wrong Views of Emotions The Emotions, which we also call feelings, including the feelings we call desires, are our nature’s way of providing us a direct visceral experience of the most important of human attributes, the mind.
I’ve addressed the question of repression in both the Desires article and the article, Repress, Repress, Repress. Here I want to emphasize the great danger and very real harm that is caused by the completely wrong-headed idea propagated by psychologists that repression is bad. By repression psychologists mean not doing what one has a desire to do. In their twisted story, when one has a desire they suppress or ignore, one may become unaware of the desire, but it is still there in one’s subconscious (or some other made-up place) and even though one is not aware of the desire any longer, the “repressed” desire still affects one’s feelings and thinking, usually in an adverse way.
Was man created? No! Did man evolve? Nobody knows, though that is the hypothesis being promoted in academia and the political world, and accepted as received truth by every pseudo-science, such as environmentalism, psychology, and sociology. In the grand scheme of things it does not matter how the existence we now live in became that existence, or even if it became what it is rather than always being what it is.
Environmentalism, like psychology and evolution, is a pseudo-science. It is put over as a science, and, since most people’s scientific knowledge is minimal, it is able to claim outrageously unscientific things and get away with it. Most notably, so-called anthropogenic (man-made) global warming. The claim of global warming is not about science at all. It’s purpose is to alarm or terrorize people with threats of disaster with the intent of promoting a political agenda.
Sociology, is a pseudoscience, like psychology, and evolution. Unlike psychology and evolution there is no science at all associated with it. The idea of sociology was originated by the French philosopher Auguste Compte, who, influenced by Hume, sought a, “science of society,” as rigorous as any of the physical sciences. (The word “altruism” was invented by Compte, and the ideas of socialism, social engineering, and humanism were all originated by him as well.
Literally, anthropology means the study of man, but it is not a study of the nature of man like physiology or neurology, or even the philosophical nature of man, as the rational animal, and it is not the study of what men have done, like history, or of man’s accomplishments such as in the sciences and technological. It is not even a study of the great and important men which a study of the more significant biographies might be.
Science is the objective study of physical existence. About one tenth of one percent of what is called science is actually science. (The figure is admittedly a guess and probably a little high.) The problem with calling science, “something untrue that people believe.” is that there is a tiny fraction of all that is called science that is real science, and a slightly larger number of things called science which are legitimate fields of inquiry, though not actually science.