A coincidently understanding of the 'Royal road to chaos'

Coincidence is sometimes a little unsettling.

Sam Harris

The movement to “Occupy Melbourne” had reached something of a crescendo as I neared the midway point of the book “Lying” by Sam Harris.
The book had been closed for the last time when the media erupted with the news that Victoria’s former Chief Commissioner of Police, Simon Overland, had been treated less than honestly.
Although not described so honestly and blatantly, he had been lied about and to.
The OccupyMelbourne people were protesting about corporate greed, a hunger for profits assembled legally and within the bounds of democracy, but which are frequently the proceeds of mischievous honesty and questionable egalitarianism.
However, as with many things it is not that simple, for close examination will quickly and easily show, that many protesting are simply using the medium as a vehicle to express a private grievance. They are, in fact, also lying.
Harris claims he had no specific memories of his values about lying before he took a course at Stanford University “The Ethical Analyst” which was built around the single question “Is it wrong to lie?”
He said that course “profoundly changed my life” and his book subsequently had a significant impact on my thinking.
Harris discussed the difficulties we all experience in maintaining our fidelity to a life of non-lying and the first personal identifiable encounter came after the recent John Furphy Memorial Lecture.
Traditional politeness elicits a degree of “harmless” lying as when talking with others about such orations; diplomacy displaces honesty.
Professor Geoffrey Blainey is a fellow who I respect and was looking forward to an uplifting and inspiring address and there were some high points, but broadly I was disappointed as he had used his rich historical knowledge to inculcate doubts about the science that legitimizes climate change.
Adhering to the new personal measure, not lying, it was at the after-lecture refreshments my first test emerged when others who had been at the lecture asked my opinion.
Explaining personal conflicts with Prof Blainey’s views, I was surprised, and delighted, to find that many others felt the same confirming that sometimes the sense of the crowd is to be of more value than that of authority – I use the term ‘crowd’ with some disquiet as it was really only about six people.
Lies, from white to black and every colour in between, seem to be the superstructure upon which life is built right from the supposed democratically elected most powerful man in the world to the appropriateness of you wife’s latest outfit.
Harris has described lying as the “royal road to chaos”, an observation certainly confirmed by the first of those lies with the second being subjective, for all parties.

Feeding the doubt and worsening the dilemma

Life at either end of any spectrum is mostly untenable.

Life at either end of 
most any specrrum can
 be untenable.

Contentment, serenity, ease, happiness and reward are all to be found mostly near the heart of that span, with the discomfit worsening as one reaches the realms of the malcontent.
Although that underlines and reinforces populism, it doesn’t necessarily mean the other, who might be simply a protestor or a mischief maker, is mistaken in their beliefs.
They are, in the minds of some, iconoclasts; therefore being people who challenge traditional beliefs, values and customs and in disturbing populism they are frequently forced to the extremes of the spectrum.
Having listened to many debates about climate change, it is one of those conversations that almost immediately dumps people at the extremes of the spectrum – to participate you are forced to those extremes declaring yourself a believer or a skeptic for no-one, it seems, can logically, and comfortably, walk the middle ground.
That became clear recently when listening to ProfessorGeoffrey Blainey talk in Shepparton about climate change, its impact nationally and on the Goulburn Valley in particular.
The professor had a wonderful historical argument, that being as it should for he is a noted Australian historian, but that view, as sound as it was, overlooked modern science that illustrates, conclusively, the existence of significant changes to the earth’s climate.
It was interesting to sit in the Harder Auditorium at Shepparton’s TAFE College and hear the John Furphy Foundation Memorial Lecture and almost feel the near 160 strong audience warming to the thought that we need to apply more than simple raw science to the climate change conversation.
For too long it seemed people had been forced to the extremes of the debate and driven into that untenable position of either being for or against climate change.
In his friendly and knowledgeable way, Prof Blainey allowed people to stroll, intellectually and metaphorically at least, in the comforting middle ground, some distance from those untenable extremes.
Personally, the professor’s views were somewhat discomforting as he cast some doubt on the modern reasons for climate change and encouraged those in the audience to give even more weight to historical arguments.
Being a thinker of particular clout in our national community, his views that brought doubt to the modern understanding of climate change would be seized upon by skeptics and used to further leverage their argument that the climate debate it a fraud – it is not, and to interpret the eminent man’s views that way would do him disservice, or maybe it wouldn’t?
Skeptics thrive on such doubt and the subsequent confusion they sow further delays the action this human induced dilemma demands.