21 levels of Self-Deception: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

T W E N T Y - O N E L E V E L S

On a personal level, we face a similar dilemma to that faced by society at large. The outward, expansionist view of life (health, career, material affluence, body image) denies that ultimately these things will fail. Too much investment in them therefore is to live in denial (and perhaps also in fear). It is better to acknowledge our limits, to find what we really want to do within the context of these limits and to invest in this, rather than invest in abstract, unrealisable goals. There is also much that we need to let go of. The economy of descendancy is better placed to come to these realisations.

Science, by its own lights, regards itself as having a purely ‘rational’ view of the world. It would therefore deny any underlying desire that motivates what is researched, for instance, and the way the results of research are presented and crucially, how the information gained is applied in technology. It can be noted that science is predominantly ‘monist’ in that it reduces everything to one substance — matter. (As we’ve noted, ‘matter’ is now something of an ambiguous term, as so much of physics is about energy. But nonetheless, there still seems to be a yearning to have everything defined as some kind of particle.) The fact that some matter forms itself into living beings is still a largely mysterious process. But the ‘solution’ at the moment seems to be to reduce biology to chemistry and chemistry to physics. Consciousness is described as an epi-phenomenon — a side effect of a purely physical process. It might be suggested that the underlying desire in all this is for power over nature.

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