Ron Rosenbaum launches a long and varied attack on the New Atheism. His complaints are many and his tone heavy, but I don’t think I do him much injustice by saying his central claim is this:
Atheists have no evidence—and certainly no proof!—that science will ever solve the question of why there is something rather than nothing. Just because other difficult-seeming problems have been solved does not mean all difficult problems will always be solved. And so atheists really exist on the same superstitious plane as Thomas Aquinas, who tried to prove by logic the possibility of creation "ex nihilo" (from nothing). . .
In fact, I challenge any atheist, New or old, to send me their answer to the question: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" I can’t wait for the evasions to pour forth. Or even the evidence that this question ever could be answered by science and logic.
I hate to be overly coy here but this really does depend on what Rosenbaum means by “why” and “something rather than nothing.”
When we seek to explain we typically engage in two things
1) We model. We lay down a set of rules or principles such that given facts A and B, fact C must be true.
2) We narrate. We tell a story about how Event X lead to Event Y and then on to Event Z.
If Rosenbaum means that he wishes us to explain the “universe” then we should talk about the properties of high density energy and the creation of bubble universes.
Or, we can tell a story about 11-dimensional membranes which may have collided and produced everything that we could ever see.
However, I think the Rosenbaum wants more than that. I think he doesn’t want to stop at our universe but wants to ask – from the outside of everything in the moment before the first event – why did it become so?
This, however, is a question that makes no sense in the context of our standard system of explanations. Outside of everything there is no A and B which could necessitate C. Before the first event there is no X and Y that could have lead to Z.
This is not, as Rosenbaum suggests, a mystery. It is a bad question. It asks in effect “what is the structure of a structure-less thing.”
Now I don’t doubt that Rosenbaum feels “mystery” and “wonder” when he contemplates the ultimate why of existence. The lack of a model or story generates a thirst within the curious that begs to be slaked.
It does not, however, suggest that such a thirst is slakable. A child might feel that there is some sense to be made of the statement “This sentence is a lie” A budding mathematician might feel that she ought to be able to determine whether Russell’s self-referencing set is really a member of itself.
However, there simply is no sense to be made of these propositions. Equally, there is no sense to be made of the question “why is there something” that is unless Rosenbaum is using different definitions of “why” and “something.”
Now, if I don’t believe that science, reason or logic can answer “why something as opposed to nothing.” Then what do I mean when I say that I am an atheist?
I mean that I believe all answerable questions can be answered with science, reason and logic. Said slightly more formally, there exists no question which can be meaningfully answered that cannot be answered by science, reason and logic.
Lets return to Rosenbaum’s query to see how that works. He asks “why is there something” The theist might answer that God created the something. But, then the theist must be referring to a limited set of something. Indeed, typically we imagine the theist as referring to the physical universe, space, time, etc.
In this is the case the God hypothesis is matched by a number of scientific hypotheses including membrane collision.
However, if Rosenbaum really means an all-inclusive something, then he is referring also to God himself. The answer, however, that God created God is self-referencing and as nonsensical as “This statement is a lie”
So, science, reason and logic cannot answer the deep “why something” question but then neither can theism and this is because the question is itself nonsensical.
Now, does my belief in science, reason and logic constitute a faith?
No.
First, I have evidence for the belief. Predictions based on science, reason and logic tend to come true.
Indeed, I am not currently aware of a case where they have failed to come true and no subsequent reasoned explanation was found. So the trio of science, reason and logic carry with them an incredible track record.
However, this track record could plausibly come to a halt. A pillar of fire could appear before me and declare that he is the lord. He could then go on to predict the violation of the laws of physics and subsequently show them to be false.
He could show me that despite all of my reasoning to the contrary that 2 + 2 = 5, that the logic I depend on explains nothing and that my confusion of this moment tells me nothing about my confusion in the next. Every prediction I make would have results no better than chance but every prediction the pillar makes would come true.
If the pillar then told me that it was God, that it stood outside of reason and time and that it was the prime mover unmoved, I would be persuaded.
Needless to say, I do not expect any of this to happen. Indeed, I would bet my life against fairly small sums that it will not. And, that is what it means to be an atheist. I can imagine evidence that could convince me that I am wrong but I am confident that this evidence will not be forthcoming.
Hat Markedly Tipped to Julian Sanchez
17 comments
Comments feed for this article
Monday ~ July 5th, 2010 at 3:15 pm
Alexandros Marinos
I have been toying with an argument that casts doubt on whether a human can ever seriously be convinced by any evidence a flaming column could provide that it is the prime mover.
Let’s say our descendants were to gain the ability to control one’s mind and travel a few years back in time. They would then be able to produce any experience you can imagine. This would not prove they are the prime movers.
I think the upper bound that we can assume given the evidence you mention is that someone has the power to mess with our perceptions, since we are beings implemented on fragile hardware. However we would not be able to conclude that no being greater than them exists.
Monday ~ July 5th, 2010 at 5:19 pm
Florian Blümm
Imho he made a good point in the right direction. It seems like agnosticism and atheism are completely disjunct. You can be an agnostic atheist or an agnostic theist. Being an (a)theist doesn’t depend on possible evidence. It depends on your “belief”.
With your own words:
“I can imagine evidence that could convince me that I am wrong but I am confident that this evidence will not be forthcoming.”
The first part of the sentence implies you are agnostic.
The second part implies that you are an atheist.
Rosenbaum seems to be agnostic too, but came to a different conclusion about god.
And none of this has anything to do with how the universe was created. I wonder why Rosenbaum even mentions that in this context. Believing a religious text word by word is fundamentalism after all and is despised by most believers. At least here in Europe (-;
Monday ~ July 5th, 2010 at 6:44 pm
teageegeepea
I’ve never come across anything thoughtful by Ron. Maybe I just haven’t read enough.
How would you react to the suicide rock?
Monday ~ July 5th, 2010 at 7:07 pm
Karl Smith
Rosenbaum sought to engage with more than “Hitch was mean to me.”
In the interest of encouraging debate I think that warrants a respectful response.
Monday ~ July 5th, 2010 at 10:35 pm
Curt Doolittle
Any number of fairly great minds have pondered this problem at length, and you’re really not even scratching the surface at the level of an undergraduate. I’m not trying to be antagonizing, I’m just stating the obvious. There are volumes on this subject.
“Gods exist like numbers exist”.
They exist because people act like they exist. People use them in the same way: to calculate. To reason. To estimate. To judge. We lack the knowledge, the experience, the perception, the time and computational ability to exist as a polity in a market, in a division of labor, without them. The question is the form of their existence. Do they have the properties that people attribute to them? No, but neither did shakespeare or Socrates, Washington or Alexander. Edison or Michelangelo. Marx or Machiavelli. And the existence of these concepts as memories, as memes, and as complex symbols have extraordinary long term impact on individuals, groups, cultures, and civilizations.
Science is, and always has been, a ‘faith’. Scientific knowledge is the most perishable that we have. Entire bodies of knowledge have expired with one innovation. It’s pretty certain that thousands more will do so. Certainly, we are fairly sure, that we are missing something very important at the subatomic level. Certainly we are very sure that we are missing something very important in the human experience: hume’s problem of induction. Certainly there is something wrong with out entire concept of mathematics. Certainly our belief that the genome project would deliver to us vast knowledge, but in the end, only confirmed our ignorance.
Science is a formal process for discovering patterns and replicating them. It is a process. That is all. What we know from science is that which is falsifiable – the negatives, not what’s ‘probable’ – the positives. Science is largely eliminative. But scientific knowledge is constantly open to further revision, greater explanatory power, and the elucidation of error. It is constantly being disproven. Contrary to our religious wisdom, science is egregiously more perishable. In economics in particular, vast swaths of our knowledge is patently false. THe entire DSEM model appears to be false.
One should separate fully articulated reasoning from the results produced by it. Our politicians rely upon what they believe is scientific thought, and it is articulated as a rational process, even if with competing means and ends. But they have made a terrible mess of the world economy because they believed Nobel laureates – some of whom are being disproven at this very moment, for reasons that most of history’s philosophers would have stated were obvious, as violation of the calculus of measurement. By contrast the church built a vast bureaucracy that governed europe for nearly two millennia and did exceedingly well at it, despite the fact that it’s dogma was absurd, and methods of argument laughable by almost any measure.
Plenty of religious doctrine is simply well-though human behavior codified as the word of god. Sure the reasoning behind it is ridiculous. But it works. Wisdom is generalization. It is rules to apply when facing the unknown. But largely, wisdom is our protection against ignorance and hubris. Warning against Hubris in all it’s forms is the primary teaching of the body of greek mythos. THe fact that it’s conveyed by the allegory of the gods is simply a pedagogical device.
Secular humanism is as much a religion as is any other silly set of beliefs. Humans aren’t that plastic. The greek myths are just as important a set of lessons as are fairy tales, and the two sets of knowledge may be more useful than all the knowledge that science bequeaths to us.
The most important question is this:
The only reason for this debate, is for the purpose of coercing someone to do with himself or his property what you wish, against his desires, without compensating him with something for which he would willingly part with it.
In other words, these are political arguments. As political arguments, like all law, they are practical, not truthful. THey are for the purpose of persuasion. And the only reason for political persuasion is to redirect resources and energies from where they are, to wehre you want them to be.
And as such, political, pseudo-scientific, religious and moral arguments are nothing but feints and parries in a fencing match. And you, the spectator, are simply distracted by the hand-waving prestige of the magicians on the sidelines.
Numbers exist. Gods exist. Science exists. They exist in the same form. As ideas. And the only reason to debate them is to lie, cheat and steal. Because otherwise we would simply engage in mutually beneficial trade.
Monday ~ July 5th, 2010 at 11:20 pm
jazzbumpa
Wow, Curt. This is filled with all kinds of wrong.
They exist because people act like they exist. </b?
When my daughter was 6, she acted like unicorns exist. Guess what – there was no way I could give her on for her birthday. You've been reading too much Neil Gaiman.
Science is, and always has been, a ‘faith’. Scientific knowledge is the most perishable that we have.
Uh . . . no. While it’s true that very few of us explain combustion by referring to phlogiston these days, that doesn’t mean we’re replaced old dogma with something more current, but still faith-based. It means we’ve learned. Science is an attempt to explain the physical universe in logical terms. As we learn new, more, and different, our descriptions get better. Relativistic physics didn’t supplant Newtonian physics the way oxygen displaced phlogiston, because Newton’s ideas had a better grounding in reality. Later on, we learned that there are special cases.
Science is a formal process for discovering patterns and replicating them. It is a process. That is all.
All work is a process. Making a naked assertion does not reduce science to a tautology.
What we know from science is that which is falsifiable – the negatives, not what’s ‘probable’ – the positives.
The mathematical basis of all science is probabilistic to it’s core. Earthquake prediction is probabilistic. I’m pretty positive if I jump out the window, I’ll either land on the ground or on whatever else happens to be in the way.
In short, your attempt to trivialize science is itself trivial.
Lord -
I don’t think the “why” question has any inherent utility. Did it, in and of itself, lead to 11-dimensional membranes, or did that happen because somebody was trying to uncover something else about the physical universe?
Cheers!
JzB
Tuesday ~ July 6th, 2010 at 12:09 am
Curt Doolittle
Well, I’m sure you think you’re making an argument. But you’re not. Let’s try this another way. Lets define existence. How do numbers exist? If you answer that question you’re half way to understanding the mistake you’re making.
Sure, if you’re daughter believes that unicorns exist, then she will behave as if they do. The same is for religions. Except when enough people believes something in a polity, it becomes increasingly hard to falsify. Now, put another way, you mean, it isn’t objectivaly provable that what she believes is true independent of her thinking. But then why would you WANT her to disbelieve in unicorns? This is the whole point. Now, swap your daughter with your neighbor, and why does it matter if he thinks gods exist? What about your numbers? How do your numbers, narratives, and formulae exist?
You are applying the principles of science in the physical world, which is a process of DISCOVERY, to the principles of science in the heuristic human world, which is a process of INVENTION. And in confusing those two, you fail to understand the nature of the scientific process and scientific knowledge. Human complexity is not predictable because mathematics is non-causal. THe cause is external to the symbols. We supply it. Also, it’s closed. (Goedel). The GSEM in economics has turned out to be false. THey tried to bring calculus to economics. IT worked to some degree. But while human systems appear to equilibrate, they are not equilibria. We are adding that causality as a bias.
The process of science is a method. The method is what is scientific, not the knowledge. The knowledge is more rapidly perishable than synthetic statements. That’s the point.
Yes, science is still faith based. Each evolutionary cycle is slightly better in explanatory power than the previous one. But belief in the scientific method, particularly in the social sciences, is entirely erroneous. That does not mean that physics is false. it means that what we understand at the scientific method may yield false knowledge. It certainly has in any number of fields.
I am not going to take on your probabilism argument. Just think about it a bit post hoc instead of property hoc.
You may not understand that you are trying to justify your actions. THis is what it means to be a member of the religion of secular humanism. It fulfills just as odd a bias as did anthropomorphism. You just can’t see that it’s a belief system. It’s just your belief system. Getting beyond that belief system requires quite a bit of work. See Popper and Kuhn, but Popper in particular. Since he is the originator of just about every idea I am using here.
The purpose of a religion is to justify actions in the face of ignorance. Science would not postulate anything other than an “Open Universe.” THe reason to have the argument about god and science is for one side or the other to persuade each other for political ends. This is simply theft by fraud, no matter which side is in play.
We have supplanted moral and religious argument for economic and scientific except it turns out that our faith in our understanding of these principles far outstrips their demonstrable capability. Almost nothing humans do is predictive.
I would not return to religion, but to it’s moral content, rationally articulated, because it has survived the test of history – and the only measure of a philosophy is the economic status of it’s adherents. I would not place much faith in science for it’s political value. Because it has proven insufficient for solving hume’s problem. And without the solution to that problem, we are treating heuristic human knowledge with the dim tools of our current explanation of probabilism.
And you may not know this but Keynes’s first major work was “A Treatise on Probability” and the application of probability to human actions is still the subject of heated debate among the greatest minds in the field, and the jury is still out on the subject.
There is no difference between the political use of secular humanism and the political use of christianity or islam. Politics is a process of utility not truth. And the only purpose of debate is to obtain another’s property for one’s desires rather than theirs. By inventing politics we traded violence for fraud. But science is just another religion.
The real answer to the ‘why not atheism’ question is that the subject has no merit in political discourse. Politics is either utilitarian, and for the purpose of solving practical problems, or it is, by definition, beyond human knowledge and in the realm of faith. This is the point. There is no point in holding the atheist or theist debate unless you seek to oppress one group or another. Just stick to practicality. And if you’re oppressing someone, regardless of which number, narrative, or formulae that they believe in, then you’re simply an opressor, and have no place in government.
Put this together and it will change your world.
Monday ~ July 5th, 2010 at 10:49 pm
Lord
The question why may be unanswerable, but that does not mean it is unuseful. It is that very question that led to high density energy and 11-dimensional membranes. All science starts out as conjectures. Yes it proceeds with tests and evidence, but at the beginning it is no more than such questions asked consistent with most of what we know. Science may not rest with such questions, but it does rest on such questions. We may consider it groundless speculation, but without such speculations and even some belief in them there would not be science as we know it for there would be no reason to investigate.
Tuesday ~ July 6th, 2010 at 9:17 am
rjs
“what is the structure of a structure-less thing?”
ask a zen master…
Tuesday ~ July 20th, 2010 at 11:19 pm
rickflick
You can ask all you want. What I doubt is he’d have a convincing answer. Like speaking to the dead and expecting an answer. The speaking is easy.
Tuesday ~ July 6th, 2010 at 10:26 am
jazzbumpa
Curt. Lots of words and hefty references, none of which support your thesis, which I take to be:
But belief in the scientific method, particularly in the social sciences, is entirely erroneous.
Science is empirical, faith isn’t. The scientific method is an attempt to understand the real world based on the measurable properties of the real world. The only faith involved is that the careful use of the senses and invented measuring devices is capable of giving real information about real things. If that is wrong, they we all might as well believe in unicorns.
The concept of “social science” is less valid than “natural science” because a collection of people is more different, and in a greater variety of ways than a collection of oxygen molecules or green beans. Hence, the use of probability becomes problematical. Let’s not even go there.
Faith involves belief in the unprovable. Science is a search for what can be proven.
You might not know this, but before Adam Smith wrote THE WEALTH OF NATIONS he wrote THE THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS. Which, like the writings of Keynes, is totally irrelevant to the discussion.
Cheers!
JzB
Tuesday ~ July 6th, 2010 at 1:03 pm
Curt Doolittle
You made my point. Thank you.
Faith is a political, social concept and social content is NOT probabilistic. It CANNOT be. We can debate wether in retrospect we can measure correlation of historical data. But human behavior is only correlative and historical. It is not probabilistic and predictive.
And, all of my references support my position. This is just Popper revisited. Popper argues for an open universe. He argues (along with godel) that we have made a mistake in the calculus of measurement. Taleb make the same argument and warns of the fallacy of prediction in financial markets. Hume argues that we cannot know what we do not know. Kant tries to solve the problem and fails miserably, although artfully by trying to create a closed (chrsitian apologist) system. Weber refers to content of religious concepts. Pareto describes the limits of human knowledge and the human reliance upon sentiments. Hayek warns us about the limits of knowledge. Michels warns us that bureaucracies must possess limited knowledge and therefore becomes self serving. Mises makes the same proposition. The line of probabilists from Walras to Keynes to Samuelson all argue for probabilism, but all their models are demonstrably false in practice because the categorical representation of any measurable object of utility is necessarily erroneous because the UTILITY of any object is plastic or polymorphic. Unlike the physical world. And therefore it is the DIFFERENCE between possibilities that is the real, and therefore, hidden cost of all human behavior. (All costs are opportunity costs. Therefore we only record and quantify history but not hypothesis, because the hypothesis is unimaginably complicated and purely mental in construct. Likewise, (Mandelbrot) people and markets react to learning curves and forgetting curves. The greater and more frequent the stimulation the more attention it gets, and the less the less it gets. This is the only logic present in the stock market: frequency of stimuli and the plasticity of the objects traded in reaction to that stimuli.
The point is, that you are confusing TWO DOMAINS OF KNOWLEDGE and committing an ERROR. The gains from science are in the PHYSICAL non-heuristic fields of DISCOVERY of an existing and CLOSED system. The gains in the political sphere are horrendously more complicated than that of the physical world and far less open to our method of scientific testing.
You are applying an irrelevant standard to the concept of god. If “social good” exists, then god exists. Good luck defining either one of them.
The monotheistic religions are ridiculous as stated. But they are terribly successful algorithms. Much of science in human history has been well articulated, but entirely false. I’m not supporting monotheistic religions however.
But I do understand the problem of pedagogy:
1) children must learn symbolic social judgements by habit and narrative before they have the capacity to understand rational judgements.
2) people are vastly unequal in their ability to make rational judgements. In fact, it is an expertise and a product of life long mastery.
3) reason has been demonstrably ineffective compared to law and religion and credit, in creating social order. Largely because it is so susceptible to error and fraud.
Reason is insufficient and the narrative method and allegorical content are a superior means of providing actionable content to human beings of different abilities, different ages and different experiences. We live in a vast division of knowledge and labor, with multiple social classes, multiple mythologies, and multiple forms of social cooperation encoded in different categories of property rights, freedoms and constraints.
Science is the process by which we slowly chip away at discovering fundamental objective causality. But as it stands, it is insufficient for the composition of a social order. And it has been demonstrably harmful to apply such standards to the social order in the vain assumption that our traditions err.
Tuesday ~ July 20th, 2010 at 11:26 pm
rickflick
This sounds to me like boilerplate constructivism, which sounds like a form of insanity to me. But I’m positive it isn’t. Perhaps we can generate a consensus.
Thursday ~ July 8th, 2010 at 2:17 pm
Lord
Impressive.
“Politics is a process of utility not truth. And the only purpose of debate is to obtain another’s property for one’s desires rather than theirs. By inventing politics we traded violence for fraud. ”
Shouldn’t this be: property is theft, war is struggle over it, politics negotiation on it, and trade exchange of it? In war, might makes right, politics lowers the cost through the fraud of property, which trade can then exchange. Even the prehistory is reversed. Politics can reduce war, and trade can reduce politics, but larger populations, densities, and interactions increase politics and politics increase war.
Thursday ~ July 8th, 2010 at 3:47 pm
Curt Doolittle
@Lord. First, thanks. Second, your summary is both astute and accurate.
Although, the form you’re using (which is the civic republican set of assumptions, and assumes equality) employs a neutral point of view, and the form I’m using (which is is machiavellian politico-scientific which assumes inequality) is intentionally constructed to demonstrate the error of applying the criteria of either religion, science, or philosophy, to the field of politics — when the first three presume a search for objective truth, and the latter is the domain intentional rhetorical fraud for the purpose of obscuring the contests over property and masking the facility with which the bureaucracy exploits it’s position for self gain behind the necessity of implied moral contrivance, and political expediency. In other words, I’m assaulting the assumptions upon which republican government are based.
So I was chastising the authors for silliness by stating that the only reason for debate is to mask their attempt at taking each other’s property.
But back to forms: The civic republican model is based jupon the assumption that public debate and voting will produce optimum use of resources among people with similar interests. However, this model originated with small populations, with a minority of the productive social class of participants, with hard money, and where these politicians possessed similar economic incentives, and where the agrarian model, and sail-based shipping guaranteed long time frames for decisions, and accounting periodicity, and where production consisted of fairly simple products converted from a resource to a consumable. All of wich allow for fairly simply accounting processes, and limit the bureaucracy to what can be borrowed from external entities, and therefore what non-bureaucrats are willing to subsidize.
Today, instead, we live in an industrialized world of multi-part products composed from across the world, with complex human capital requirements, and vast differences in price structures, and where the rate of movement of economic forces is incomprehensible to an individual. (And where it is precisely that incomprehensibility that makes socialism impossible – socialism being management of production, but which is now commonly applied to redistribution.) Further, we live in a world where the government is both a domestic and international empire that abuses multiple groups under the auspices of shared benefit, while bankrupting the civilization on scale unimaginable by the Athenians. Where politicians do not read, and cannot even understand much of the law that they pass. And where, having removed the gold standard, and allowed the pooling of financial information both through taxation on the way in and lending on the way out, we launder all ability of individuals to comprehend the instructions we give each other through the pricing system, both temporal, and inter-temporal. And by this laundering, and loss of the boundary held in place by hard money, have removed the only means by which external wisdom can limit the ignorant politicians, and the corrupt and ideological bureaucracy.
So, In practice, debate is fraught with fraud. There is nothing dishonest about violence. ie: we have traded violence and the use of the parliamentary system to protect us from undue violence by the king and unite us in that pursuit, for fraud, and the use of parliamentary drapery to subject us to extortion and class warfare.
So, in practice, yes, you are both succinct, and correct. But you’re not providing the reason why – and as such, are positing a memorable solution but one easily dismissed. The reason you’re missing out on is an epistemic one: That the government is large enough, over too divergent a set of interests, and our pricing, accounting, tax and law systems inadequate to provide politicians with the information necessary to make decisions about the matters with which we charge them, and possessing levers that are too imprecise to achieve their desired ends. In this environment of inadequate information, bureaucrats have no choice but to rely upon metaphysical and cognitive biases when making decisions. And because law makers feel the need to make laws, they do so, and poorly. And because laws do not perish with the fools that write them, the are calcifying the body of law, and as a byproduct losing the faith of the populace not only in them, but in rule of law itself.
Politicians are not evil. they are merely human. And they are unable to synthesize sufficient information about our state of affairs to make rational judgements because our information systems are insufficiently complex enough to allow them to do so. Consequently, rhetorical debate is easily fraudulent under this system because there are no external checks and balances via credit and hard money, vie minority vote, vie accounting, on the politicians or on the bureaucracy. And in this arena a fraud, debates about religion, science, and the like are ridiculous. They are ridiculous first, because they are insufficient means of solving the problem, and second because the only reason you would need to rely upon them is because you lack rational, scientific, quantitative information, OR are not regulated externally by limits to credit, and as such, one must resort to Morality, Beliefs, Preferences, instead of resorting to facts as established by monetary information and access to credit.
Thursday ~ July 8th, 2010 at 8:16 pm
Lord
Perhaps I am more machiavellian as I see politics as little more than veiled violence, and for all its civic republican puff and drapery, deception, and fraud, still well in control of the powerful, though with a broader set of tools, and as politics wields power, many powerful from their control over it, and politicians as decorative mouthpieces who service the powerful, sometimes openly but more often obscurely. Has power ever had any real checks than the power of others? This increases the complexity byzantinely and renders the drapery leading to disillusionment, but was always an illusion. Then again, perhaps I am being too cynical since most want similar things and life isn’t zero sum.
Wednesday ~ July 21st, 2010 at 1:34 am
Curt Doolittle
Well. Yes. And that’s precisely Machiavelli’s point. And the machiavellians all support the same conclusion. And I’ve elaborated above their reasons for it. And they are caused by necessary epistemic limitations of human beings.
And despite your observation, it doesn’t mean we have an alternative. Unless, that is, you want the weak to have control?
(Isn’t that a non-sequitur?) Or for none-to have control? Or for control to be unnecessary? And then, how do we make collective decisions? Or are you saying we don’t have to?
And How would we do such a thing, such that fraud was impossible? How can we have logical and rational debate when we lack the knowledge, the measurements, and perhaps the understand that would make resolution of disputes possible by rational means? Isn’t fraud or deception the only alternative to admitting that we have insufficient knowledge to resolve conflicts? Technically speaking rational debate isn’t possible any longer. Or, in an environment with multitudinous, perhaps infinite wants, how do we choose how to expend scarce resources among the alternatives? Rationally speaking.
Isn’t that why we invented the market? Distributed computation? So how could we apply that to the state?
You’re not being cynical. You’re just stating the obvious. And those that disagree with you are falling into the cognitive bias of the “False Consensus Effect”. Or stating that the harm is better than the alternatives. That the rhetorical state is simply the least of all evils.