Jan 26, 2017
12 min read 2279 words

This is a repeat of what I consider to be one of my best posts here on Steemit

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What I will be getting at is the frustrating human attempt to fully explain a situation we don't have enough hard facts for a clear judgement on. I will say upfront, we should be careful in making these judgements, but that does not mean we should absolve ourselves of the responsibility to make the judgement, to continue to seek facts, and to possibly reverse our judgement.

SO what I'm going to do is start by looking at impossible logical conclusions to start with, then take a look at a plausible yet unprovable conspiracy theory on the kakistocracy (not to be confused with khakistocracy, and then narrow down to Pizzagate.

Impossible Logical Conclusions

You can't prove to me that g!d exists. However, you also can't prove to me that g!d doesn't exist. So I have to use my own judgement on this. IF I have experienced g!d directly, then I will know that g!d exists, but unless you shared a similar experience, I can't prove his existence to you...and if you had a different experience with g!d than I did, then our "proofs" (and therefore our knowledge of) of g!d will be different as well.

Let me say then, that when we make a judgement in something we can't prove, that we should call that faith. Faith is not a bad thing.

You can understand something in two ways; from your personal experience, or from someone else's. You get your understanding from others in reading their study, and you have to share a common understanding with them (in math, for example) to get what they are saying.

Suppose someone hands me a plate with a brown substance on it and tells me it's chocolate cake. If it smells like crap to me, and it looks like crap to me, I'm not going to bother to apply the taste test. He can eat all of it he wants. I'm not going to.

HOW do you prove something to someone when there is no evidence?

There is a saying:

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

This post goes into great deal to debunk that statement. The correct saying should be:
Absence of evidence is not proof of absence

Absence of evidence is conditional; is there evidence of absence where there should be something?

And what happens when you have faith in something that you can't prove?

Let's look at Carl Sagan's "Invisible Dragon":
The Dragon In My Garage from The Demon-Haunted World

"A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage"

Suppose (I'm following a group therapy approach by the psychologist Richard Franklin) I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you'd want to check it out, see for yourself. There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity!

"Show me," you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle -- but no dragon.

"Where's the dragon?" you ask.

"Oh, she's right here," I reply, waving vaguely. "I neglected to mention that she's an invisible dragon."

You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon's footprints.

"Good idea," I say, "but this dragon floats in the air."

Then you'll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.

"Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless."

You'll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.

"Good idea, but she's an incorporeal dragon and the paint won't stick." And so on. I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won't work.

Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I'm asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so. The only thing you've really learned from my insistence that there's a dragon in my garage is that something funny is going on inside my head. You'd wonder, if no physical tests apply, what convinced me. The possibility that it was a dream or a hallucination would certainly enter your mind. But then, why am I taking it so seriously? Maybe I need help. At the least, maybe I've seriously underestimated human fallibility. Imagine that, despite none of the tests being successful, you wish to be scrupulously open-minded. So you don't outright reject the notion that there's a fire-breathing dragon in my garage. You merely put it on hold. Present evidence is strongly against it, but if a new body of data emerge you're prepared to examine it and see if it convinces you. Surely it's unfair of me to be offended at not being believed; or to criticize you for being stodgy and unimaginative -- merely because you rendered the Scottish verdict of "not proved."

Imagine that things had gone otherwise. The dragon is invisible, all right, but footprints are being made in the flour as you watch. Your infrared detector reads off-scale. The spray paint reveals a jagged crest bobbing in the air before you. No matter how skeptical you might have been about the existence of dragons -- to say nothing about invisible ones -- you must now acknowledge that there's something here, and that in a preliminary way it's consistent with an invisible, fire-breathing dragon.

Now another scenario: Suppose it's not just me. Suppose that several people of your acquaintance, including people who you're pretty sure don't know each other, all tell you that they have dragons in their garages -- but in every case the evidence is maddeningly elusive. All of us admit we're disturbed at being gripped by so odd a conviction so ill-supported by the physical evidence. None of us is a lunatic. We speculate about what it would mean if invisible dragons were really hiding out in garages all over the world, with us humans just catching on. I'd rather it not be true, I tell you. But maybe all those ancient European and Chinese myths about dragons weren't myths at all.

Gratifyingly, some dragon-size footprints in the flour are now reported. But they're never made when a skeptic is looking. An alternative explanation presents itself. On close examination it seems clear that the footprints could have been faked. Another dragon enthusiast shows up with a burnt finger and attributes it to a rare physical manifestation of the dragon's fiery breath. But again, other possibilities exist. We understand that there are other ways to burn fingers besides the breath of invisible dragons. Such "evidence" -- no matter how important the dragon advocates consider it -- is far from compelling. Once again, the only sensible approach is tentatively to reject the dragon hypothesis, to be open to future physical data, and to wonder what the cause might be that so many apparently sane and sober people share the same strange delusion.

And that is an excellent discussion of faith versus evidence. However, some have used that argument to attack religious belief. We have to go back to the conditional use of absence. If there is a place where there SHOULD be evidence of g!d, then you have proof that g!d does not exist.

The problem is that there is no situation in which g!d should leave evidence.

On the other hand, the Invisible Dragon concept can be used to describe some liberals faith in leftism.

The Soviets murdered millions of people

That's not leftism

Venezuela's economy was destroyed by leftist economics

That's not leftism

Che Guevera executed a 12 year old girl in Castro's dungeons

That's not leftism

Unemployment rises in cities where minimum wage rates have been enacted

That's a republican lie

Repeat, ad infintium...

This brings us to circular logic

If I need evidence of something, and the proposition is that the evidence is destroyed as part of the process, then we have another impossible logical situation to prove.

I'll focus on Pizzagate. IF the victims are being killed, then there will be no witnesses to come forward.

Circular logic is regarded as a logical fallacy (but not a formal one). The problem is that such questions do come up in the real world, and with viscous and cruel circumstances.

And when there is no proof, that does not mean there is not a human need to do something. Altruism and X-altruism are characteristics that many people have. Without proof, people turn to faith which is dependent on everything else they have experienced, or shared the experience of some one else.

What's on the other side of human nature from altruism?

That would be the worst of humanity. And rule by the worst is kakistocracy. The word comes from the Greek words kakistos (κάκιστος; worst) and kratos (κράτος; rule), with a literal meaning of government by the worst people. (Khakistocracy is another word for military rule, usually in term of a corrupt military government)

I had heard the term before, but I had heard it described as "rule by thieves". Kakistocracy is actually much darker in nature than simple thievery, and if it is true, the allegations of government involvement in child abuse point to that darker nature.

For the record, the existence of a kakistocracy is unproveable as the discussion we have just had. While some noble member of a kakistocracy could go against his nature and his self-preservation instincts, he would have to be high enough up to be able to bring solid documentation and to prevent reprisals against him.

There are parallel situations in which this has happened. Defectors from Soviet Russia and it's subject states and defectors from Scientology have shown that people do break from evil and dishonest systems whether from disgust, or fear from their own safety, or even monetary gain.

That indicates that we should have seen some defection...some evidence...of a world-wide kakistocracy, a New World Order, right? Maybe.

We should never forget we all have a self-interest bias, even defectors. And we have had whistleblowers in our own country, people who have given testimony against abuse in our own system. from my own judgement, some of these whistleblowers(especially in our security services) gave false testimony in self-interest, either for monetary gain (book sales) or social capital. But let's be honest: I don't have the proof to make that case solidly. And I have my own bias in that I want to believe that our security community is made up of honorable men.

I make those judgements based upon faith, and my own experience.

Cognitive Dissonance and Mental Instability

Every questioning of "the way things are" is made by a conspiracy nut, right?

All of us have seen the guy that gets angry as hell when any of his propositions have been contradicted. Hell, many of us ARE that guy at some point or another.

Our faith is important to us; we react to the world based upon that faith, and we define ourselves by our faith. When the bulk of our faith is reflected in objective reality with the world, we are happy campers indeed. When our faith is slapped around repeatedly by a Clue-by-Four, we either adjust our faith, or we reject reality.

The scientific term for losing your shit in this fashion is cognitive dissonance. If a lot of your faith is based upon unproveable potions that have real life repercussions, you are probably more subject to a little cognitive dissonance.

In some religions, this is baked in the world view, and faith becomes a reservoir of personal strength. On the other hand, sometimes the failure of faith to meet an individual demand pushes a person away from their religion.

In any case, the common need to do something combined with cognitive dissonance can lead to false testimony, and it can lead to believing any story that reinforces your own worldview, no matter how outlandish or improbable it seems to others...

...many of whom have a self-interest in seeing things as they appear, not necessarily in how they are!

The End of Part One

I started this with a fairly solid outline of where I wanted the discussion to go, but as always, full discussion leads you down one more path. I think there is enough here to read and think about for one setting, and I need to adjust my outline for the next part of the discussion.

Think about this...did you think that ANY government employee would tolerate child abuse before the exposures in Rotherdam?

I have some suggested reading for Part Two. If nothing else, look at Dr. Andringa's interview:

• Interview 1109 – James Corbett on Hastert, Political Pedophilia and Kakistocracy
• The Clinton-Silsby Trafficking Scandal And How The Media Attempted To Ignore/Cover It Up
• Interview 1024 – Tjeerd Andringa Exposes the Kakistocracy
• Pizza Gate, Satanism, and the Holy Grail
• Who is telling you what - propaganda, conspiracy, and critical thinking
  Note: One reference has since disappeared, and has been removed - 2019

Part Two will be in a coupla of days