Truth and Desireability

Hello again internet.
You can see that not a lot has happened on this blog since my first post.  However lots has happened away from this blog, and it seems time to inscribe again, but in a different way.  Reading the first post back, although I talk about beauty and knowing beyond what is verifiable, the whole tone seems cold to me. 

When I wrote that post I was just back from a fairly isolated year in Poland.  I had grown used to being a stranger looking in, and didn't have the personal know-how to properly integrate myself into soft life there.  Perhaps my habits of thought had become more abstracted from day to day social sharing and caring.  Perhaps I was reading too many books.

Now I have been living in Bristol for a year and a half.  I have never been more aware of the positive power of human cooperation and love.  I know amazing people, have helped build amazing things and participated in too many beautiful experiences to remember.  I am also aware that there is a depressing group of people actively trying to rearrange the way that we share and care with each other.  These people want to make our hospitals run for money, nudge young parents back to work that makes money sooner, carve up our green space for the 0.3% that own 50% of land in Britain to build more money making machines on and they can't seem to understand why we wouldn't want to dedicate 36 hours a week of the only life we'll ever have to working for Tesco.  These people call themselves government and unfortunatly them and their mates get to have a say in a lot of our lives.

Anyway, basically when I think about all that sort of stuff I realise that there's no use arguing with these people just in terms of truth.  I mean we can use truth to argue about all these policies of course and the facts about what they will do on the ground, and the assumptions they are based on, and the inequalities that they deny, and all that.  We can, and we can get a long way with it.  But it's not enough.

We need to use all those other things that are desireable aside from just truth.  Building an economy that gives loads to some people and not much to other people, and then aggressively expanding this system into more and more facets of our life so that we have got no choice; making a system that obliges a few powerful managers to economise at the expense of the working conditions of the large number of people that are crucial to building their system; seeing people that are doing good work caring for people that are vulnerable (as we all are without social supports) and cutting their capacity to do that work.  The main thing about all these things is that they are mean. 

So from now on this blog will not just consider a truth criteria for good knowledge that helps expand our positive capacities.  I want to say that truth means nothing without kindness.

Have a good evening internet.