Truth is Hard and Dangerous to the Social Order

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schools should include a class called Truth Is Hard, where u get bombarded with examples of confused eyewitnesses, incorrect public outrages, studies that failed to replicate, super convincing arguments that fall apart with one additional fact u didn’t expect, etc.

Aella @Aella_Girl
Posted on X March 27, 2022

Nice idea. But I don’t think it would ever be accepted in todays K-12 schools. There are far too many people who have false beliefs which they could not tolerate being faced with overpowering evidence of their falsehood. It would disrupt the social order.

At the college level classes which include similar material do, or at least used to, exist. The book Is it really so?: A guide to clear thinking, no longer in print, was used in one of the classes I took in college. It was written by the grandfather (or perhaps great uncle) of one of my college classmates. A few days ago I went looking for it in my library and I could not find it. I’ll look again someday. I remember it as being like a one hour read. I would like to read it again.

By the same author I also had, and perhaps still have, Who Should Have Children?: An environmental and genetic approach. It is still in print. I find it to have the potential to be far more threatening to the social order. But, I expect that is not how the majority of people see it.

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10 thoughts on “Truth is Hard and Dangerous to the Social Order”

  1. That’s the problem with schools now. They try to bombard students with examples. That only works to a certain point.
    Whole word english is a classic example. They teach you vows, then bombard you with words.
    To this day I can’t spell worth a damn.
    On the other hand, someone taught phonics. Will sound out and spell words correctly without having to imagine the whole word in their mind before spelling it.
    Teaching people to think critically is not that hard. It’s just the most un-desirable of outcomes for the management class of super-stupid running our world right now.
    Imagine people being able to look up the carbon cycle in nature. Then do the math on how much CO2 humans are in control of. (Less than 5% of the 400 PPM total, if your asking.)
    That would totally blow trillions of dollars’ worth of “green energy” scams right out of water. To say nothing of the losses in political power?
    Imagine telling LA, smog is your problem. I’m tuning my car for top performance. Global warming-climate change-were all going to die tomorrow if you don’t do what we say, rather than what we do!
    Is bullshit, and we got the proof.
    Bombarding people, (especially kids that can’t hardly sit still for 10 mins.) doesn’t work. Except when obeying authority training is the desired outcome.
    You have to let them fail, then guide them back. Then let them fail again.
    Teaching them to examine their failures. Then they can start examining others failures. And spotting failures before there made.
    Which is what true society should want for its people.

  2. Government schools and colleges would never teach such a class.
    They want “truth” to be consistent, palatable, boring, delivered from the Arbiters Of Truth from On High. They do NOT want people capable of critical thinking.

    Example: The Allies had the Enigma Machine code broken. We could read, and record every message the Germans sent, more or less in real time. The various slave labor camps like Auschwitz (and all other significant personnel concentrations) sent daily reports with all the camp statistics for personnel, people/prisoners arrived, people / prisoners shipped out, etc. Nowhere in those reports are numbers that in any way indicate mass executions or die-offs or body disposal in large numbers. Nowhere at all. So even if the Germans were meticulous in expunging from their own records of the claimed “Holocaust,” there is no record pointing to it in our own intercepted and translated message traffic from the whole war. Nor are than any significant gaps in either records such that they don’t line up. So what does that mean?….

    • It means that you are a Holocaust denier? Just for the record, Enigma was used for military communications when time sensitive and/or landlines weren’t available.

  3. Telling children “Truth is Hard”? And giving them examples of irreconcilable contradictions? Before they even have the rudiments of a world outlook beyond Mommy and Daddy take care of me?
    Louis L’Amour, the author of Western novels, wrote in his book, “Education of a Wandering Man: a Memoir”, that children can learn to do anything until you tell them it is “Hard”, after which the child finds it impossible.

    Truth is hard? They won’t even try to sort out conflicting eyewitness accounts, they will just vote for whatever benefits them the most and is most comfortable.

    It is the end of any objective truth, and the end of a final determination of fact as with a Jury, charged with determining what the facts are.

    • This sort of blather would be taught by teachers totally untrained in the subject who think they are qualified by virtue of them being teachers and knowing the techniques. That they know nothing about the subject and definitely nothing about the details so as to be able to address the give and take of moderating a discussion. I still remember the day my 11th Grade English teacher got it into her head to teach a day on ethics, and her only example to begin the discussion was “Would you steal to get money to buy medicine to save a life?”

    • My math teacher in middle school had a saying that she pulled out all the time: “It only gets a little bit more complicated.”

      Not “harder”. Just “more complicated”.

      Then she would break it down so we could see where the “more complicated” part was, but also see where the rest was old hat.

      By then, all her students were confident that if they had the last topic figured out pretty well, this next one would require some effort but be 100% doable. And she wanted to see collaboration among the students; if someone had trouble, they were encouraged to ask for help, and for the rest who understood it to help them out. (By the end of the year, not one of us had not asked someone else for help with something.)

      Easily one of the best teachers I ever had.

      But I could see how if she had said “harder” instead of “more complicated”, it would turn a LOT of young minds off of whatever she said next.

      It’s interesting how, some 30+ years later, those memories and lessons still resonate and gain an even deeper meaning than it did back then.

      • I like that phrase. Will be stealing it come this fall when I’m back in the classroom.

        • If I had a place to use it, I would too. I think of what one of the older Space Forcemen said to Matt whatever his name was in “Space Cadet”. “You’re ideally suited to teach calculus. You know what it’s like to not understand the subject.” Somehow in my education, in Junior High School, High School, and college, they always wanted to select as math teachers the ones who liked the subject, lapped the subject up eagerly, and had no concept of not understanding what the subject was. Most people are not wired that way.

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