A mission statement

Pornography is a cute word

A blog, of course, cannot be without a constitution - a mission statement of sorts to define its agenda. Otherwise, it wouldn't be much of a blog at all. The subdomain ought to point you in the the right direction - it's about putting Lady Veritas on display - undressing her, exposing her in a pornographic manner.

Now, pornography is mostly just a cute word that we don't need to dwell too much on, but it does have some very appropriate connotations. As you might know from personal experience or should at least be able to imagine - pornography doesn't leave even a square inch of skin out of view for the sake of propriety.

Pornography has an air of indecency and smuttiness to it - somewhat undeservedly, one must say, because pornographers don't go out of their way to be nasty as a matter of principle. They are mostly trying to make a living, and ultimately their creations reflect market demand. One might not much appreciate the fact that there are people who get off to watching multiple penetrations in sixty high resolution frames per second, but then again - the truth doesn't play well with wishful thinking.

Exposure therapy

This segues nicely into an explanation the title of the blog - Exposure therapy for reality. Most people, it seems, have a developed very sophisticated immune systems to theories, to concepts - even to facts themselves. It is certainly not a modern phenomenon - divorcing one's beliefs from observation is more or less a prerequisite for religiosity, if not the very definition. As such, we can safely say it predates the invention of writing.

Perhaps the most high profile and illustrative example of keeping reality at arm's length goes back to the seventeenth century. A man named Caspar Hofmann was given a demonstration of how the heart circulates blood throughout the body, which was in contradiction with established medical doctrine. Hofmann retorted I see, but I do not believe, which at least signals his detachment from reality rather honestly.

This is but one of many psychological defense mechanisms. The more common one is to taboo topics - dissenting religious views are blasphemous and should not be uttered, much less discussed. For sexual topics, obscene serves the same purpose, and in modern society, labeling an opinion offensive is a great way to put a lid on discussion. Think of the children!

Now is not the time to elaborate on the details of mental self-defense. The ultimate purpose of this blog is to fight this sort of phobic reaction to mere words. That is of course not to say that every claim must be believed or every idea taken as gospel - spiders can indeed be dangerous, but panicking whenever you see one on a TV screen isn't ideal. The idea of exposure therapy is acclimate yourself to something you fear in a safe and controlled environment, so that you are able to stay calm and composed when you have to deal with it in the wild, that is to say outside of the laboratory.

Truth trumps hurt feelings

Notice that there is nothing outrageous about someone thinking seven times six equals fifty. There is no temptation to label this calculation as heresy. A sane response is to point out that seven times seven is forty nine - seven times six ought to be less. Curiously, there seems to be an inverse proportionality between how offensive an idea can be, and how obviously wrong it is.

Consider for a moment that, throughout all of history, the vast majority of discoveries and inventions have been due to men. If this statement of fact isn't enough to inspire indignation, try to also entertain the possibility that perhaps this might be because women in general are less talented than men. There exists no straightforward refutation of this theory - on the contrary, it matches very well with data from a number of different fields, such as computer science, chess and entrepreneurship.

This is not to say it is necessarily true - though it is certainly worth a thorough analysis before one goes down the path of so-called positive discrimination. The mantra of an honest thinker must be that a true, offensive idea is worth understanding, and a false, offensive idea should be met with reasoned counter-argument. Focusing on the truth value rather than a smokescreen of moral indignation is in either case the winning move.

Aurea mediocritas

As motivation, consider that any number of sensible thoughts would have been outright dangerous to utter in public some time ago - that Jesus was just a charlatan, that homosexuals shouldn't be persecuted or that people aren't meaningfully different from animals in a biological sense. It is of course possible that we have recently arrived at the apex of wisdom, that there are no further misunderstandings to correct - it just seems rather unlikely. At the very least, the taboos of today deserve scrutiny.

Keep in mind that there are many ways to go wrong - in the words of John Brunner: There are two kinds of fools. One says, this is old and therefore good. And one says, this is new and therefore better. For all its faults, chronic conservatism is probably a saner position than reflexive contrarianism. Not every conspiracy theory holds true - few of them are even compatible. There is no royal road to truth, only the hard work of incessant thinking.