Even a complete world view, learned, used, and trusted for years, may turn out to be a fraud. Nazism may sound logical if I am told as a boy, by teachers I trust, that every race on earth including my own must fight to survive. I may come to truly believe in their model of the workings of our planet’s biosphere. If I believe it, I may then infer that winning new land for my race and subjugating competing races is my sacred duty to my people. I and millions of like-minded comrades may march off to a war that gets millions killed before my nation loses and the war is finally over.

   

                               German WWII cemetery in Normandy (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

The problem was that the Nazi worldview was built around a core set of lies. The Nazi ideas of race have no foundation in fact; humanity is one species. In science, there is no Aryan race. Different nations and cultures do compete and struggle to survive, and Germany was, and is, a nation that has had one of the harder struggles. But culture is not genetically acquired. Culture is learned; therefore, cultures can be amended by education and experience. 

In addition, war is not the only way by which cultures evolve. Germany, as a nation, changed profoundly after WWII, but then it continued on—very successfully, in fact. It didn’t fizzle out and vanish as Nazi leaders had predicted it would if it lost the war. Millions of Germans and their adversaries died because of an illusion. But Germany? Germany as a nation proved itself to be programmable in the most final sense: it learned, adapted, and went on.

Around our basic ideas, we build more complex ideas. These eventually lead us to ways of acting and living. Once we know how ways of thinking and believing lead to ways of living, and how flawed belief systems can lead us into suffering and even death, we can then try to construct a reliable core around which we can build the rest of our thought system. In my case, that effort begins with an examination of the epistemology that attempts to build its core around not a political or religious ideology, like Marxism or Christianity, but around physical reality.

                               

                                John Locke, empiricist philosopher (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

                     

                                 David Hume, empiricist philosopher (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

In the modern world, the core belief set of most people in the West is the one called Science. Under its view, what scientists seek to know is what is real. What is this ocean of stuff in which we swim and how do the things in it work? But the harder we think about this question, the more it leads us to a deeper one. The crucial question is not “What is real?” but “How can I know what is real?” How reliable is the system we use to absorb and understand the impressions our senses send us about reality? Trying to answer these questions leads us into the branch of philosophy called epistemology, which is the study of the origin, nature, methods, and limits of knowledge, and what distinguishes opinion from justified beliefs.