Technocracy is not explicitly socialist, but like Marxism and Fascism it springs from the same roots. Each ideology claims to order society by scientific principles, with science cited as the basis of both its inevitability and its moral claim to power. In spite of these scientific pretensions, each ignores reality in service to its vision – in particular, the nature of the human material from which each would construct its vision of heaven on earth. But ‘scientific ideology’ is a contradiction: the hallmark of any ideology is the filtering of reality through the lens of political fantasy, the opposite of the pursuit of transcendental reality that defines science.
— Avery Easton
Category: Avery Easton Quotes
Avery Easton on Scientific Honesty
These ‘priests of science’ are really no different from anyone else: when money, power, and status are on offer, they too will lie, cheat, and steal. Even if the gains are short-lived. Even if they destroy their reputations and credibility. Even if it wrecks the prestige of their profession or field. They’re only human, after all – a fact that they may find even harder to admit to.
— Avery Easton
Avery Easton on Winning Arguments
The desire to win arguments is an intellectually corrupting one. When winning rather than a better apprehension of the truth is the goal, one is inclined to use any manner of sophistry to do so. The truth actually becomes an obstacle to doing what it takes to score points. The lust for demonstrating one’s superior intelligence overcomes any scruples about intellectual integrity.
— Avery Easton
Avery Easton on Pedants
Pedants are a dime a dozen. It takes little intellectual firepower to memorize the logical fallacies well enough to ‘find’ them everywhere, or to reflexively demand sources and attributions for every claim or conjecture, or to seize on some immaterial discrepancy to ‘win’ an argument whose substance one hasn’t even perceived – let alone attempted to understand well enough to counter. The measure of wisdom is not that one can poke holes in the arguments of others, but that having discovered a hole, one can offer constructive guidance for how they can patch it. Pedantic ‘gotcha games’ don’t prove intellectual superiority, they just demonstrate a shallow intellectual vanity.
— Avery Easton
Avery Easton on the Blindness of Experts
It disturbs me that it escapes so many ‘experts’ and ‘intellectuals’ that their supposed contributions to human knowledge are not just frivolous or pedantic, but often intellectually destructive, civilizationally corrosive, dehumanizing, and ugly.
What scares me is that there are some who do in fact understand this. And embrace it.
– Avery Easton
Avery Easton on Solving Problems
No one ever solves a big problem in one go. But that doesn’t stop people from looking for, or demanding, a ‘magic bullet’ solution anyway, some perfect approach that will fix everything all at once. Or from rejecting any partial solution or step in the right direction until they find it.
– Avery Easton
Avery Easton on Reductionism
Experts are also prone to reducing complex phenomena to single-factor causes – factors which happen to align with their own expertise. But complex phenomena are rarely understood through such reductionism, just as most problems have many contributing causes, and the root cause may not be the obvious one or the one that confirms one’s personal or professional biases. Attempting to manipulate a complex phenomenon through one or two simplified variables is a recipe for unexpected if not chaotic outcomes.
— Avery Easton
Avery Easton on Pontificators
Those who passionately pontificate about something they don’t fully understand or haven’t put sufficient thought into will, when pressed to articulate their thoughts, bluster about the obviousness of it all and assert that there is no need for them to explain: ‘You know what I mean!’
Perhaps you do. But why should you have to fill in their blanks? Why should you have to make sense of what they are unable to articulate, or read between the lines what they are too cowardly to state explicitly?
It’s not up to you to do the work of understanding their ideas for them, let alone make those ideas workable where they can or will not.
— Avery Easton
Avery Easton on Theories
There is always the danger with any theory of finding it so flattering to one’s personal biases and convenient to one’s personal interests that one applies it even where it doesn’t work.
— Avery Easton
Avery Easton on Infallibility
People who revere ‘experts’ never consider whether the years of study and practice they view as ‘credentializing’ a given expert may have been in the service of ideas or doctrines or schools of thought which are factually incorrect or even morally abhorrent. Error doesn’t become infallibility through perseverance.
– Avery Easton