Hard sciences pretend, at least, to follow a clearly logical process. Most people don’t understand the whole idea. They get the part about sampling data, organizing, and reaching certain hypotheses. They don’t get the proving part. Hypotheses are tested, not by proving, but by attempting to disprove, to show there are conditions when it does not work. Then the hypothesis is reworked and the testing proceeds from there. We presume a certain honesty in the effort to disprove, but you and I know in reality scientists are people, too. They will cheat themselves and everyone else because they believe things strongly. Politics infest the hard sciences, too. No one living is truly and fully able to be impartial, so science is sometimes just an expensive guessing game, and results are overturned later.
The softer sciences, so-called, are actually simpler. If we talk about economics, we can lay out a vast hoard of data, interpret what the data seems to indicate, and conduct various tests to verify our interpretation. No one expects pure scientific work, just a reasonable estimation. Oddly, the application of such is often very dogmatic, with grand orthodoxies aplenty. The results may take a while, but most of the time these orthodoxies crash because political pressure is even stronger in behavioral sciences, of which Political Science is but a sub-genre.
Attempts to use computers still suffers from the bias of the programmers. For all our efforts mankind is not capable of creating a purely logical process of deciding what we should do in this world. The conflict between what might well be the very best answer versus the one we can persuade others to accept is still the most infuriating aspect of it all. We seldom use even the best we get from such shaky processes as the various sciences. Yet a very strong part of our prison is we are compelled to act as if the best of science somehow matters, in spite of the background awareness we never will know because we don’t get to try it.
To a large degree, this is the nature of the prison. We might have an intellectual awareness of better things, but it never seems to head far towards the best answer before someone exercising some power over others hijacks it. There is something at work which forbids even the best we can know, and that something is the prison.
This prison has a warden. While the warden is a person in one sense, nothing in our intellect is prepared to handle properly the nature of this person, so we end up with an “It.” Yet It is a person, insisting on asserting It’s power over the rest of us. The primary failure of those who think about escaping is trying to deny the personal nature of It. This is the same blindness which finds people honestly expecting somehow to overcome human nature and enforce purity of thought and science. Not only is any particular pure answer unlikely to be The One Truth, because we are all in prison, but we can’t find a way to apply that truth without some leverage against the masses.
The fundamental nature of dealing with people is that they are people, with more variations than anyone likes to admit. We have to make generalizations or we can’t even pretend to have behavioral science, and they are academically valid exercises. But it always breaks down when you try to make it work in the real world. People are still people, and nothing inside this prison will ever make them more than broken people in prison. Whatever system you create to make things better absolutely most include a very human flexibility, or it is wrong before it starts.
It requires understanding this whole situation is a matter of persons, not objective truth. A critical element in escaping the prison is escaping the false notion there is such a thing as objective truth. Everything truly critical to freedom is inherently personal in nature.
