Even a complete world view, learned, used, and trusted, 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 through and through, I may then infer that winning new land for my race and subjugating all other 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. And let us not forget that for 10 years at least, the worldview worked. Beyond dispute, Hitler rebuilt Germany.

   

                       German World War II cemetery in France (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 can 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 the case explained in this book, that effort begins with the epistemology that attempts to build its core around not a political or religious ideology, like Nazism, Marxism, or Christianity, but around sensory evidence of physical reality. We must begin with what we see and hear, and can replicate and measure, even though we will still have to be very careful to sift out only the evidence that we can see over and over and that is described in the same ways by many different observers. In the common expression, we must hedge our bets every way we can.