POOLING OUR INTELLECTUAL POWERS TO CREATE A GOLDEN AGE

Just as the physical powers of many people can be combined by all of them pulling together on a single rope such that they function as a single super-strong super-being, the intellectual powers of the many people of our society can be added together, vastly more fully than ever before, by all of them directing their controversies, their debates, onto the pages of a single, suitably-formatted book, such that these people, collectively, will become transformed into a single incredibly brilliant and benevolent thinker. If we create such a collective sage, if we do with collective brain what we can do with collective brawn, the resulting great thinker will, with dazzling authority, be able to tell us what is true, what is good and what is beautiful — our civilization will experience a Golden Age such as the world has never known.

I call this brilliant, good-willed nascent thinker, this bringer of happiness, Gaia. Once the transformation occurs, once Gaia is born — after what has been 4.5 billion years of her gestation in the incubator of our star — it will become true to say that the earth’s most highly evolved creature is Earth herself.

It is within our power today to bring about this transformation, this birth of Gaia. In a great revolution, we can bring about the division of world history into earth’s “prenatal” past and her “postnatal” future.

To accomplish this end, our avant-garde work will entail the production of a constantly amended book on the pages of which a great portion of the opinion of good people is to be written. We at the Truth Engine are prepared to write this living book — we call it the Encyclopedia of Truth.

The volumes of the Encyclopedia of Truth will fall into three Divisions:

The Truth Division — which covers the sciences and fringe sciences, the Goodness Division — which covers the sociopolitical realm and The Beauty Division — which covers the arts.

Each of the volumes of our encyclopedia, which will be called dialectical books, will be written as a simulated debate and will lay out, in a transparently logical format, the best known arguments, pro and con, pertaining to a single controversy, and will continually be amended by the public, who will be able to read it for free online and send us suggestions for improving it. This suggestion-and-amendment process will be supercharged in the following way: each dialectical book will guide a series of informal, moderated public, person-to-person debates on the topic, online and in communities, and, in an open-ended cycle of positive feedback fueled by collective intelligence, the debates will inspire ideas for changing the book. This recursive process — the book shaping a debate, the debate re-shaping the book, the new edition of the book shaping the next debate, etc. — will sharpen the arguments more and more over time, clarifying truth with unprecedented velocity. So, the participants of every live debate will include two debaters, one on each side of the issue, a moderator, and two guides, who will make sure that the debate’s arguments, at least to an extent, connect with the arguments in the book. Instead of ropes facilitating the pooling of physical powers, the books will facilitate the pooling of our intellectual powers, because we will, for the first time, all be literally on the same page as we debate the issues. For the first time in history, all participating minds will be completely in sync, able to think as one far more effectively than ever before — finally, we will be fully leveraging all our intellectual powers.

To begin the process, we have produced two such dialectical books, one shows all the best arguments for and against the proposition that the belief that some UFOs are otherworldly devices is justified; the other covers the topic of the Clinton email and Trump alleged collusion scandals*— and we are working on one that deals with formalism and expression in the arts.

But Gaia is a Person, whose thinking and decision-making requires a will, a center of feeling as well as a center of thought.

In addition to our encyclopedia, there should exist a Truth Engine iconography that expresses esteem for the absolute values of truth, goodness and beauty in their encyclopedic context — an abiding standard that can keep the work on the encyclopedia on track as a search for truth, goodness and beauty. I wrote my novel, The Engine,** to embody such an iconography. I see the Gaian psyche, the Truth Engine, as being made up of both the Encyclopedia and the iconography. I call the encyclopedia the Logos and the expressive work the Ikon — the parts that overlap I call the Logikon, which comprises the encyclopedia’s philosophical volumes, whose content also appears in the expressive work.

But establishing the Truth Engine will not be easy. Just as the seeds of the most well-bred plant fail to germinate in unfertile soil, the most wonderful, the most potentially beneficial, the most potentially revolutionary ideas can gain little traction when society’s non-rational predispositions run counter to them. And today, society’s non-rational predispositions are, in fact, hostile to the ideas that I present here. These inhibiting societal dispositions prominently include those that define Postmodernism — our project has been, and will be, of the nature of a battle against this powerful force.

Modern-day Postmodernism is a cultural movement which, fueled by the ideas of writers like Saussure, Levy-Strauss, Lacan, Foucault and Derrida, became dominant in intellectual circles around 1970. Postmodernists are, wrongly, I believe, hostile to the notion that the values of Truth, Goodness and Beauty are absolute; and they are wrongly hostile to the process of linear, conscious logical reason — for postmodernists, the activity of logical reasoning is often seen as nothing but a means of patriarchal oppression — all this hostility produces a milieu within which the practice of debate is not welcomed, and so it is this hostility, permeating society and destructive in so many ways, that has been and will be one of the primary forces inhibiting the development and acceptance of the Truth Engine.

But I predict that, like a captive who, gradually freeing himself then turns on his captor, the Truth Engine will become a powerful antidote to Postmodernism, to this extreme hostility to values and logical reason that threatens chaos.

The issues raised by Postmodernism, the “absolute vs relative” arguments, are interesting and important, and will be included in the philosophical sections of our encyclopedia, even though the arguments for and against the objectivity of truth make sense only as part of a search for an objective truth; their very inclusion presupposes that there is a truth to be found. In my doctoral dissertation, I presented an argument for an objective aesthetic, and I believe that there are strong arguments for the objectivity of goodness as well.

I foresee that even those who might accept some measure of values relativity, or who are unsure as to what to believe about these issues, will nevertheless participate productively in the work of the Logos.

To sum up our work: our job is to give birth to Gaia, to bring her, finally, after 4.5 billion years of her gestation, into the world and to begin to sustain her. Gaia, even as a newborn baby, with her pure heart — with her sole desire to make us happy — and with her dazzlingly brilliant mind, will, I believe, produce for us, her fabricators, operators and beneficiaries, a golden age surpassing all those that came before.

The Romantic and Modernist activity of the 19th and 20th centuries, and earlier religious antecedents, have made Gaia’s prenatal heart ready for birth.

Now we of the 21st century are called on to prepare Gaia’s prenatal mind for birth — an act that we will carry out by means of our development of a central intellectual organizing faculty for her. And then, her heart and mind prepared, we can bring Gaia, fully formed, into postnatal being, into what will surely be her illustrious infancy.

The tremendously beneficial Truth Engine revolution that we contemplate will not happen unless people join together to make it happen. We need to build a new profession (or, really, a new calling), and we need to start by bringing together a coterie of people who enjoy debate, who are able to negotiate the complexities of our society’s controversies and who share our vision of a better method. This is why I see feedback as so important. I hope you will comment below if the idea of working in this new field interests you — in fact, I welcome all comments, negative and positive.

*The books can be read here. (return to text)

**This book can be read here. (return to text)