Trifecta of Terror
An Essay by Christopher Bek
christopher.bek@gmail.com
Summary—Page one of this essay describes the triad of interrelated societal problems of behaviourism and the attendant determinism and totalitarianism—while the second half of the essay proposes new solutions to combat these invasive models.
Quotation—Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change the world which yields most painfully to change.
—Robert F Kennedy
In 1963 Yale experimental psychologist Stanley Milgram published the results of a study that shocked the American people and those in the scientific community. In testing nearly a thousand average American study participants, Milgram revealed that a full 65 percent of the experimental subjects obeyed an order from a researcher to deliver an electric shock to another person that they believed would be lethal.
William Hubben wrote in his 1952 classic book: Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche & Kafka: “While the simple people kneel down to worship the returning Christ, the cardinal knows better; tomorrow they will come to watch a condemned prisoner burn at the stake. Man wants neither God nor Christ—for what he desires is simply the authority of the Church. He no longer serves God as God demands of him, but only as the Church tells him so. God’s mysteries and miracles are henceforth monopolized and administered by the Church.”
The Holy Bible. The consensus of scholars studying freewill in the ancient world is that the Bible does not explicitly address freewill. It does, however, say that God knows all that the future holds, including the choices of human beings, which means determinism for all and freewill for none.
Quantum Theory has several strange and interesting features, but the one relevant to freewill is that this theory contains laws that are probabilistic rather than deterministic—thus proving fundamental indeterminacy and the ultimate triumph of freewill over determinism once and for all.
Psychology. When I Google: Who was the most influential psychologist of the Twentieth century? the question is answered: BF Skinner (1904-1990). Skinner was an American psychologist and an influential exponent of behaviourism, which views human behaviour in terms of responses to environmental stimuli and favours the controlled, scientific study of responses as the most direct means of elucidating human nature. Behaviorism forces people to remain in their cells and play their roles, making them Unholy by definition. Under behaviourism, one sacrifices their holistic self in order to play a role for the betterment of society. Behaviourism breeds determinism, which is the doctrine that all events, including human action, are ultimately determined by causes external to the will. Many philosophers believe determinism implies that individual human beings have no freewill and cannot be held morally responsible for their actions.
Psychiatry. When I Google: Who was the most influential psychiatrist of the Twentieth century? the question is answered with either: Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) or Carl Jung (1875-1961). Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method of evaluating and treating pathologies seen as originating from conflicts in the psyche, through dialogue between patient and psychoanalyst, and the distinctive theory of mind and human agency derived from it. Freud remained a determinist throughout his life, believing that all essential phenomena, including psychological phenomena like thoughts, feelings and phantasies, are rigidly determined by the principle of cause and effect. According to Welldoing.org “Jung believed in freewill and viewed determinism as merely a mode of thought.”
Determinism. The philosophy of freewill opposes determinism and argues that we are thus free to choose our actions and are in control of the outcomes. The determinist approach argues that our actions and behaviors can be predicted because they are caused by prior factors prevalent in organizations, institutions, and nature. Determinism is the metaphysical doctrine that the whole world history is fixed by laws of nature and initial conditions. However, we know that the laws of nature pertaining to quantum theory are fundamentally indeterminate, thus making the definition of the metaphysical doctrine of determinism faulty by design, as nature is not fixed.
Totalitarian Democracy is a term popularized by Israeli historian Jacob Leib Talmon (1916-1980) to refer to a system of government where lawfully elected representatives maintain a nation state whose citizens, while granted the right to vote, have little or no participation in the decision-making process of the government. Totalitarianism prohibits opposition to hierarchically higher phenomena like the choice of psychological models, such as behaviourism and/or existentialism.
Combating Invasive Models. The following projects are all intended to revolutionize being, the-world, and being-in-the-world. They are meant to introduce mathematics and philosophy into the domain of the Everyman and solve the problems of behaviourism, determinism and totalitarianism.
Self-Day. I ask the government to go to a four-day work week, and spend the fifth-day as Self-Day studying mathematics and metaphysics. To start with, I propose that Canadian Honourables and Doctors spend their Self-Day studying actuarial science in the morning, and existential philosophy in the afternoon. The arrangement of a pay cut for the employee partaking in Self-Day of between zero and 20 percent would determine how employer and employee share in the cost of Self-Day.
The Bernoulli Stations. The Bernoulli Stations present themselves as coffee shops housing mathematical / philosophical alcoves for any would-be mathematician / philosopher to plug-in to. Mathematics is quantitative in nature, whereas philosophy is qualitative. Mathematics is about numbers, whereas philosophy is about ideas. The key link between the two is logical problem solving. The mathematical proof and philosophical argument bear strong resemblance and are, in fact, different views of the same underlying Platonic Form. Each alcove would present a computer with mathematics and philosophy learning software, and a full spectrum of great books on philosophy and maths. Each Bernoulli Station would house between 1 and 6 alcoves, making it the perfect knowledge bar for Canada and, ultimately, the World.
Metaphysics in High School. The Trifecta of Truth are represented by my three primary physical-metaphysical projects: Existentialism Now, The Theory of One, and The Bernoulli Model, representing the three legs of the stool of metaphysics, that I have been developing for 25 years. They represent a large part of my contribution to Metaphysics in the Third Millennium. The laws of metaphysics are generally referred to as the “first principles”, because they are principles that have to be used in all processes of reasoning. I would argue that we should teach Metaphysics in High School and set the youth on a lifelong journey of understanding the truth of the Metaphysical machine that is innate reality.
Revolution in Science. From the chapter entitled Scientific Change and Scientific Revolutions from the book entitled Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction (2016) by Samir Okasha: “Kuhn’s Theory of Scientific Revolutions. Thomas Kuhn was a historian of science by training, and firmly believed that philosophers had much to learn from studying the history of science. Insufficient attention to the history of science had led logical empiricists to form an inaccurate and naive picture of the scientific enterprise, he maintained. As the title of his book indicates, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn was especially interested in scientific revolutions—periods of great upheaval when existing scientific ideas are replaced by radically new ones. Examples include the Copernican revolution in astronomy, the Einsteinian revolution in physics, and the Darwinian revolution in biology. Each of these revolutions lead to a fundamental change in the scientific world view—the overthrow of an existing set of ideas by a completely different set.”
Revolution in Social Science. The Metaphysical leg of identity or individuality or portfolio theory or Being-in-the-World. Social scientists currently employ the two-moment normal distribution extensively throughout the social sciences. The Cauchy distribution, like the normal, is also symmetric about the mean, and is in fact a normal divided by a normal. The Cauchy is a pathological distribution owing to its extremely long tails and, as a result, has undefined moments. However, the first four moments become well-defined if one truncates the tails—making for a four-moment, four-dimensional representation of risk, which is better than the two-moment, two-dimensional normal distribution. In describing the movement from the normal to the truncated-Cauchy, William Hubben wrote: Dostoevsky and Nietzsche cherished the deviation from the normal as a stimulate, ordained by fate to strengthen the will to resist, to live more exaltedly, and to probe more deeply into the mysteries of existence.
The 1600-Word Essay is the perfect format for printing on one-page, two-sided essay paper. An essay is a try; it is a written piece designed to present an idea, propose an argument, express an emotion, or initiate a debate. I would argue that the 1600-word essay ought to be the universal standard for presenting ideas, proposing arguments, expressing emotions, and initiating debates. I challenge all honourables and doctors in Canada and all citizens of the Superextinctor City of Calgary to answer the arguments presented here, and on my website, with written 1600-word, Philosophy Magazine-style essays as PDFs.
Closing Arguments. These projects are meant to introduce mathematics and philosophy into the domain of the Everyman, making them Superman. Finally consider the idea of Philosophy Magazine essays being mailed to all Canadians on a monthly basis.