Vague GRAND Truths

So today's thing is still about sth from my school. They're teaching us Greek mythology in class, and part of that means learning about Greek cultural values and extracting lessons from them. Today's story goes like this: a father and a son are mortals, but they build wings and fly. The son flies too high, the wings melt, and he falls to his death. So the Greek cultural value here is: don't do the gods' work, or you should be content with what you have, with the life and the things you already have.

Now extend that to today, and the question becomes: how do you define overstepping? How do you define what you can do and what you can't? And Greek mythology is a perfect example here. Back in the day, people revered and feared Zeus's power — he could raise both hands and hurl a bolt of lightning at the earth, kill people on the spot. So now look at humans. In what way do humans fall short of the ancient gods? Human capability has long surpassed what ancient people ever imagined the gods could do. During WWII, the U.S. bombed Tokyo — over 300 bombers deployed, thousands of pounds of explosives dropped in a single night, killing hundreds of thousands of people in one go. Nuclear weapons were developed — a single detonation releases energy equivalent to multiple earthquakes. Rain-inducing shells were invented — fire them into the sky and it rains. The forces of nature are practically entirely under human control.

Bacon said the purpose of science is to dominate nature. If everyone followed and obeyed Greek cultural values, we would never have achieved these astonishing accomplishments. In the 16th, 17th century, humans flying was still an almost completely impossible fantasy. By the 20th century — just three or four hundred years later — humans could soar through the atmosphere, land on the moon, launch spacecraft into orbits billions of kilometers from Earth.

At this point, the people who cling to these cultural values will say: those definitions were outdated definitions from old dead people; modern humans naturally have better definitions, better boundaries. And I'd ask again: who defines these boundaries?

In ancient times, mythology drew the line and not a single one of those lines turned out to be right. For thousands of years after that, the church drew the line and humanity fell into the greatest intellectual stagnation in history. In the centuries since the Industrial Revolution, no definition of a boundary has held up for more than a few decades. So on what basis can anyone tell you there's a boundary you should obey for your entire life?

This example is just to prove one point: the precision of definitions matters enormously. The mythological story I just told — fine as entertainment, no problem at all. But if you're using it as a grand life lesson, it needs to survive rigorous logical reasoning and argumentation. That story obviously doesn't hold up under scrutiny. A lesson drawn from an unreliable story is, naturally, also unreliable. For example, if you want to sell people on the idea that "people should know their limits" , to maintain your rigor, you'd have to say: people should know the boundary of what one can do to affect others or nature through one's own capabilities, and respect that boundary. (The history of human development is the history of humans changing their surroundings through their own power.) But the moment you express it rigorously, you run into all kinds of problems.

Another example: "follow nature." What even is "nature"? Cancer cells spreading that's natural, should you follow that? A flood destroying a village that's natural, should you follow that? The entire history of human civilization is, at its core, a process of fighting against nature. Once you pin down what "nature" means, you realize this statement is either a tautology or completely contradicts human practice.

A lot of people also like to say "be true to yourself." What is the "self"? Is it what you think now, what you thought ten years ago, or what you'll think in the future? Is the self fixed or fluid? If it's fluid, which version are you obeying? If it's fixed, where's the evidence? The phrase sounds profound, but its core concept of the self is itself a philosophical problem that hasn't been solved in thousands of years.

These kinds of words share one more common trait worth you opening your eyes a little wider to notice: their vagueness isn't accidental. It's precisely by wearing a layer of vagueness that they can swagger into any context and sell themselves as universal truths. That is itself a rhetorical strategy. Plain talk it's just to make you believe.