Part I: The Right Kind of Person
The right kind of person is the person who cares about truth and cares about being a good person. The person who cares about truth is the same person who cares about being good, and vice versa. Both reduce to the same desire to be reconciled to reality. This desire is the love of God. When I say I love God, I mean that I feel an overwhelming desire to be reconciled to reality. Christians are familiar with this weight of getting right with God. For the Christian, to lack a love for God is to lack the desire to be reconciled to reality, and thus to fail to be the right kind of person. (A lack of love for God coincides with the sin of pride, the failure to humble yourself by acknowledging that you need reconciliation.) The fear of God is the fear of what happens when you fail to be the right kind of person. The love of wisdom is the love of that which reconciles you to God. You cannot love that which reconciles you to God unless you first fear what happens when you fail to be so reconciled. This is why the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. Philosophy, the love of wisdom, is the practice of reconciling oneself to reality. This practice consists in reading, writing, thinking, and wrestling with the deepest and most important questions humans can wrestle with. Ultimately, this practice involves killing the parts of you that are out of step with reality. Philosophy is a highly personal project that looks different for everyone brave enough to embark on a truth-seeking journey.
It might sound strange for me to say I love God when I’ve lost faith. But we can still invoke God metaphorically, poetically, emotionally, or rhetorically when we need to. For me, loving God refers to a collection of ideas; one is a running away from that terrible feeling of being out of step with reality, a feeling that has always haunted me; another is that Stoic resolution and acceptance of life come what may – that Nietzschean embrace of reality despite its horrors. To love God is to love life and death and everything in between, to celebrate agony for its realness, and to mourn agony for its evil all the same.
Part II: Intellectual Virtue
The person who cares about truth will possess intellectual virtues. It is no surprise that the person who cares about intellectual virtue would be the kind of person to care about virtue more generally; so again, caring about truth and caring about morality go hand-in-hand. The right kind of person is the person who possesses virtue, both intellectual and general.
If you care about truth, you will have a passion for truth.
You will be humble, admitting that you do not already have all the answers.
You will be honest about what exactly you believe and exactly why you believe it.
You will be brave about pursuing the truth, willing to undergo that painful process of changing one’s mind, even giving up your deepest sense of yourself, in the event that your most cherished beliefs turn out false.
You will be disciplined, not generalizing in a hasty manner or jumping to conclusions. You will put in the work needed to become well-informed in your beliefs, always testing your theories for weaknesses.
You will be empathetic to those who hold different views from yours, and seek first to understand competing theories before trying to tear them down, steelmanning rather than strawmanning, building up opposing views to their strongest version so that defeating them is as meaningful as possible. Who knows, maybe in your practice of building up competing theories you will realize that the view you were prepared to argue against is really the better view.
You will be kind when discussing these matters with others, never engaging in character attacks or expressions of hatred, judgment, or blame. Instead you will demonstrate patience, understanding, and gentile correction, always seeking to highlight the insights of others, always seeking your own correction – always celebrating the joy of philosophy and inspiring that joy in others.
Part III: Truth and Power Come Apart
You will notice that most people are not intellectually virtuous. This is not their fault. Where would they get the idea of intellectual virtue from? It’s not taught to us by our parents, or in school, or in media or entertainment or even college.
The only reason why I know about it is thanks to the internet, which exposed me to certain books and videos that discuss these things. (To give myself some credit, I did come up with the "signs of the truthseeker" in college; though even that was thanks to a helpful professor's nudging me in the right direction. It was later that I discovered these "signs" have a name: virtues.) I did not learn these things from my community or culture or education.
However, growing up Christian, I did inherit the attitude that what you believe is what matters most. For the Christian, believing in the truth is the most important thing, a matter of life and death – even more than that, a matter of salvation and damnation. Though I have lost my faith, I cannot shake the habit of viewing true belief as the most important thing. Say what you will about Christianity, it did give me my passion for truth, and from that the rest followed. Christianity, in this way, provides the tools for its own destruction. Christianity demands us to take it seriously, but when we do we discover challenges to Christian belief that render it impossible to be Christian.
So we cannot fault folks for their failure to be intellectually virtuous, because one must be taught intellectual virtue or to have the right kind of inputs that cause someone to become intellectually virtuous, and most never get a chance to be taught it or to be exposed to those inputs. Speaking of inputs, another reason why we can’t fault folks for their failure to be intellectually virtuous is because they are not paid to be intellectually virtuous. Very few jobs require intellectual virtue or build up one's intellectual virtue by working that job.
People go where the money is, and culture is shaped by that which makes money. People admire and respect that which survives, and they take pity on that which doesn’t. Philosophy doesn’t make money, and so it is to be pitied by ordinary folks. If a high-effort activity doesn’t make money, then it’s not worth it, says our culture. They are correct. If at the end of the day you cannot pay your bills and survive, then what’s the point? Poverty causes great misery. No amount of virtue is worth misery, our culture has spoken. Or rather, you can’t be virtuous when you’re dead. So survival is the more urgent need.
If people go where the money is, and there is no money in virtue, then people will naturally end up away from virtue. That’s how you end up with a rotten culture. And yet, this is all necessary, because society is shaped by the most common and powerful biological pressures. Food, clothing, shelter, entertainment, social pressures, and so on, are the common needs and the most urgent pressures. There is little if any biological pressure to be a virtuous person, especially when being virtuous entails going against the values of your community – the very people who help you survive. Being anti-racist, though a virtue, would be socially costly in the Antebellum South.
If you wish to shape culture in a certain way, then you must implement survival pressures to create that shape. If people received money from the government or tax breaks by passing a yearly BMI test, then people would be more motivated to maintain a healthy weight. If you want people to be a certain way, pay them to be that way. If you want people to not be a certain way, then pay them to be something else.
Power validates things, and the most fundamental power is to exist and to keep existing. Imagine an invincible human who could not die, and could teleport anywhere he wanted to. He could not be captured or killed. He could criticize Russia in Russia, and instead of disappearing instantly like the others, he would remain. He could go against the wealthy elites of the world without ending up dead. His existence would become like a law of nature, with everyone forced to live with him and to look upon him. While dead men are forgotten, the invincible man who speaks truth to power would be impossible to ignore.
There is only a tenuous connection between virtue and survival, and between vice and death. Often, the connections are reversed, with virtue leading to failure and vice leading to success. This is why CEOs and kings and emperors are tyrants and dictators – ruthless, evil, insane. "When you play the game of thrones you win, or you die." Virtue has everything to do with being a good person, but little to do with being a person who survives. Was it virtue that enabled the man to become a model? It was his looks. Was it kindness that landed the actor a million dollar role? It was her skill. It doesn’t matter how good of a person you are; if you sing off-key, they boo you off the stage. There is a deep meanness to life because survival itself is mean. Death is mean. So of course there will be a meanness to power structures; of course the most powerful people will be, in general, the most evil.
The problem of injustice is exactly this problem of the disconnection between truth and power. When a man is sentenced to prison on a false conviction, does his knowledge of the truth have any power? Or when the Armenians were attacked by the Ottomans, did their sheer desire to escape violence stop the attack? Did their sheer certainty in the wrongness of the genocide have any effect?
Wanting something has no necessary connection to obtaining it, no matter how virtuous the desire or how better off the world would be. And wanting something has no necessary connection to preventing you from obtaining it, no matter how vicious the desire or how worse off the world would be.
The government then, as the enforcer of the social contract and the upholder of justice, is meant to play the role of that connection. The government must act like a predator introduced to an ecosystem to cull the population of a vermin, in this case greed, corruption, and vice. Ideally, laws would enable the good and rational to get what they want while the evil and irrational do not.
Unfortunately, the government itself is governed by survival pressures, and so conflict of interest is built in. The laws are made and sustained by those in power, and so naturally the laws serve the powerful. And if power and truth naturally come apart, then there is no necessary connection between laws and justice. Nothing could be more obvious than that – how often do we see states commit atrocities? But then this means the government can never fulfill the role of providing the connection between virtue and power needed to ensure justice. Injustice is as much a built-in feature of life as gravity or entropy.
Notice that God also does not provide that connection in this life. Losing faith involves losing, among other things, that optimism that comes with the belief that justice is built into things with God in control. Without God setting things straight in the end, the injustices of this world are in a sense permanent, replacing our optimism with pessimism. This is one reason why pro-theism (the view that we ought to want God to exist) is obviously true. If God wants to fix the sinfulness of the world (as he apparently did when he sent the flood), all he has to do is establish that connection between virtue and power (and vice and weakness) and overnight the world would turn into a heavenly place.
Part IV: Social Structures are Power Structures
Humans are biologically contextualized creatures. Non-human animals are not interested in seeking truth beyond survival, and humans are not categorically different from the other animals. In the face of suffering and death, humans and the other animals share the same interests. Humans are very interested in not suffering and in not dying.
So it's no surprise that just as the non-human animals are more interested in survival than truth, humans too are forced to be more interested in survival than truth. Philosophy then is the most inhuman activity, as it's an activity that disregards survival and pursues truth. And yet, in another sense it's the most human activity, because, as Aristotle would say, exercising our rationality is what makes humans unique among animals. Because humans should always strive to evolve, they should always look for that activity which is both totally human and totally inhuman, as that is an activity that is at the edge of humanity. These activities are superhuman, and it is by engaging in them that we stand a chance in going beyond the limitations of our present species.
As biological creatures, humans reproduce sexually. Sexuality itself is a survival structure (the human race goes extinct without it), and sexuality is social in nature (it takes two to tango). Humans are forced to come together to keep the human race going. And it's just as well, because co-operation is essential to human survival anyway. So social structures are survival structures because 1) Humanity relies on sexuality for its survival, and 2) Individual humans rely on their communities for access to resources.
Social success is a matter of life and death, which is why we have evolved to find humiliation (social failure) to be one of the most painful feelings. Social pressures become immensely influential on us, because resisting social pressure risks humiliation.
If power and truth comes apart (one can have truth but lack power), and social structures are power structures, then the social way of being comes apart from the truthseeking way of being (being a genuine truthseeker does not guarantee social success and can even entail social failure).
As we've already discussed, speaking truth to power can get you killed, or at least harassed, bullied, mocked, labeled a heretic, ostracized, excommunicated, disfellowshipped, and so on. While it's painfully obvious to us now how stupid and evil racism is, there have been cultural settings where being anti-racist would have meant your social failure. If you can convince a group of people that something is weird, then you can turn them all against it no matter how good that thing is. In a world where being normal is the greatest virtue, being normal and evil is better than being weird and good. Being a Nazi was normal in Nazi Germany, and opposing Nazism was weird.
I have told this story but I'll reproduce it here briefly. At a Bible study a long time ago I asked the following question: Does prayer change the mind of God? If not, why pray? If yes, then is God's mind in need of changing? I was hoping for a rich theological discussion to follow. Instead all that followed was awkward silence, and I was quickly made to feel unwelcome in the group.
In a church setting, it is weird to challenge Christianity. But is it wrong, or evil, or stupid? No. It's right, virtuous, and smart to ask those kinds of questions. But that rightness, virtuousness, and intelligence didn't prevent social failure. More broadly, being a genuine truthseeker is weird. People go where the money is, and there is, usually, no money in being a genuine truthseeker. People go where social success is, and there is, usually, no social success in being a genuine truthseeker. This is why it's not a coincidence that philosophers have a poor reputation as far as their social affinity is concerned.
But as the quote goes, attributed to J. Krishnamurti, "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."
For the truthseeker, no amount of social success is worth the cost if the cost is believing in truth. This is the archetype of the martyr, to pursue truth even in the face of persecution.
The observation that society is woefully (but understandably) lacking in intellectual virtue brings us to an important ingredient to the understanding of human nature: the surface layer vs the deep layer.
The surface layer is of heuristics while the deep layer is of understanding. The surface layer is fast, the deep layer is slow. The surface layer represents simplicity, survival, feeling, impulsivity, first impressions, knee-jerk, instant gratification, basic needs, socializing, outsourcing your worldview to others, and so on. The deep layer represents complexity, truthseeking, thinking, calculation, deliberation, investigation, delayed gratification, higher-order needs, introspection, soul-searching, thinking for yourself, and so on. The surface is the what, the deep is the why. I may know how to use a mathematical formula, but do I understand why the formula works?
A great deal of society exists on the surface. Most people most of the time live on the surface, because this is the layer of survival, and because a great deal of the population is young, and younger people, especially kids and teenagers, are most likely to live on the surface most of the time. We may think of these as ways of being. Humans, as they develop their critical thinking skills and abilities, gain access into the deep way of being. It’s not accurate to think humans are always in one way of being or another. Humans can drift in and out between the layers throughout the days and years of their life. Even children can have moments of insight, and adults can fail to think for themselves.
An example of this concept playing out in real life is with trolling. Trolling exploits the surface layer for one's own amusement. To troll is to say something or do something as a way to test people and elicit a funny, exaggerated response. For example, "Islam is right about women." On the surface layer, this is a vaguely racist remark. But on the deep layer, it's a dilemma. Either you admit Islam is wrong about something – a violation of our multicultural beliefs – or you admit regressive views about women, which is misogynistic.
Those on the surface have a knee-jerk, emotional, antagonistic reaction. They have not researched or put any real thought into what Islam teaches about women. You could do the same with "Islam is right about gay people." Again, the "surface-dweller" has to choose between their values of multiculturalism and pro-LGBTQ.
If you say "Islam is false" at the wrong time, with the wrong people, you will receive nasty looks. Ironically, those nasty looks will come from people, probably white women, who are themselves not Muslim. They are living on the surface, which is the layer of social stability. Saying things like “Islam is false” is not conducive to social stability. Acts of social instability are met with social punishment, even when they are virtuous and accurate. Is it inaccurate to say Islam is false? No. Is it important for us to be able to have a mature conversation about the truth of Islam? Yes. Can we have that conversation? Maybe not. Maybe the social pressure to avoid certain topics is too strong. Repeat for other controversial topics.
The truthseeker does not admire this burying of one's head in the sand. She admires those who bravely tackle difficult, important topics, and who bring kindness, sophistication, nuance, and the indisputable tools of reason to bear on them.
People say that politicians are all liars – politicians dodge questions in a dishonest way. But politicians are doing what normal people do every day—navigating social situations in a strategic way—just on a bigger scale. Everyone masks. Carl Jung wrote about the persona and the shadow. The persona is the mask, the facade, the front-facing shield that gives one access to the surface layer and allows one to achieve social success. The shadow is composed of those parts of you that are hidden to avoid social failure. Some parts of you are truly bad and should be burned away, but other parts are neutral or good that are suppressed purely because of social risk. Integrating the shadow is that process of discerning the unhealthy and healthy shadows, starving the unhealthy parts while strategically bringing the healthy parts up into the persona at the right time. Ideally, a balance is achieved between authenticity and social success. In some cases, like the gay rights movement, an acceptable degree of both authenticity and social success is only possible for a group after a great deal of effort is made to reform society.
End
Life, just like a conversation, has a flow to it. You must let go of yourself and go with the flow. When the universe sends you a message, you must listen to it. Don’t be like Jonah who ran away from Nineveh. We must be like Nietzsche who promoted amor fati, the love of fate – the radical resignation to the Real – we must be like Jesus who prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, "Not my will, but yours be done" – we must go to Nineveh, to Golgotha, even if it means going to our death. The love of truth entails giving up all that’s false, even if that means giving up what we want most. Only the one who loses his life finds it (Matthew 10:39), and only the one who hates his life can follow the truth (Luke 14:26). When truth and survival come apart, the disciple of truth disregards survival, and thus disregards their own self. When Truth calls a man, she bids him come and die. Only then is he ready for reconciliation.
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