Bozos Anonymous

Away

My apologies for being away. Stuff is happening in the real world.

Mirror, Mirror

The starting point in combatting bogosity must be within oneself. This should be self-evident, but an awful lot of people seem to think that the starting point is with everybody else. John the Baptist and Jesus had the most colorful descriptions of those who missed this point ("viper spawn" and "whited sepulchres"), but it is an important strain in many other religions and schools of thought. We have room for but a few examples here of the many ways of expressing this.

"Thou art the man!"--Nathan the Prophet to King David (II Samuel 12:7)

"One who conquers self is greater than one who conquers ten thousand."--Dhammapada

"Kill this devil of desire that destroys Self-knowledge and Self-realization."--Bhagavad Gita

"Acting without contrivance, there is no lack of manageability."--Dao De Jing

"The unexamined life is not worth living."--Socrates

"Let him who is without sin cast the first stone."--John 8:7

So we need to look at ourselves all over, and we need help to be able to look at ourselves. It is the hardest work in the world, if you mean to do it right. Unfortunately, there are an awful lot of people ready at any time to help you do it wrong. The archetypes for this particular form of bogosity are Job's "comforters".

Job is a Babylonian hero whose story was adapted to Judaism. A righteous man, Job was handed a laundry list of disasters, including loss of his property, his livelihood, and his children, followed by disease, and then in addition had to endure the well-meaning but worse than useless advice of his wife and his friends.

Most of the Book of Job consists of Job's friends teling him that it was all his fault, that God was punishing Job for some sin. Job protests his innocence, and then another of his friends starts in on him. Finally God tells the friends that Job was correct, and that they are dangerously wrong. Then he grants Job a serious, major, new revelation--of how little Job knows. No explanation is given for all of the disasters, or of Job's gaining a new fortune and new children. (Thinking that this could make up for the earlier losses and deaths would just be a continuation of the error of the "comforters".)

The bogosity of Job's comforters did not, of course, die out among Jews or Christians just because it was explicitly condemned in the Bible. In fact, it became a leading point of bogosity in the popular theology of some Protestant churches, under the name "The Visible Elect". The theory overall is too complex to expound here, but one offshoot (heretical but widely believed nonetheless) was that you could recognize the Godly by the rewards God gave them, in particular by their prosperity. So poor people were ipso facto sinners, an idea that remains at the foundation of much political thinking to this day. It is of course opposed by the theory that the poor are ipso facto more virtuous than the rich, a theory of equal bogosity and political importance.

No, there is no formula for recognizing your own bogosity. Whenever anybody tries to reduce bogosity to a formula, the formula itself becomes the occasion for yet more bogosity. If you want to avoid this trap, you will have to learn how to keep watch upon yourself, and how to detect the thousand little tricks you come up with for excusing some bogosity or other. Try this one: do you want the mirror to tell you what an all-around swell person you are, or to show you what you really look like?

Credits

Here are some of the inspirations for this blog.

The Buddhist Malunkyaputta Sutta, in which the Buddha denounces Malunkyaputta's bogus questions. Also, the parable of The Blind Men and the Elephant, which was told by Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu teachers, and was later taken up within Islam.

Secrates's preference to be ignorant and know it, rather than know something and be unaware of his remaining ignorance

John the Baptist denouncing the Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism as a "generation of vipers" (Mathew 3:7), and Jesus denouncing hypocrites as "Whited Sepulchres" (Mathew 23)

Jesus's parable of The Good Samaritan

Voltaire's Candide

Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Puddnhead Wilson, and On the Damned Human Race (not available on the Internet)

Walk Kelly's Pogo

The Firesign Theater, I Think We're all Bozos on This Bus

The career of "Landslide" Lyndon Johnson, Master of the Senate

The Internet Jargon File

Car Talk hosts Tom and Ray Magliozzi, aka Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, for the term Bo-o-o-gus!

Anna Quindlen's recent opinion piece in Newsweek, "The Bottom Line: Bogus".

How do I bogot? Let me count the ways

George Burns used to say, "The most important thing in show business is sincerity [pause] and if you can fake that you can do anything." This is the heart of the bogosity problem.

Lying for profit is the most obvious form of bogosity. We would hardly need to discuss it, except that it takes so many forms, and its practitioners have found so many ways to fake sincerity. Con men, politicians, and seducers are prominent varieties of practitioner. If thy are really good, their victims may never figure out that they were told any lies. The movie The Sting shows one way of doing this.

Then there is fiction, clearly labeled as such. That by itself is not bogus. However, the writer of fiction can easily slant the story to make a point. Much fiction is politically motivated in one way or another, as in the cases of the comedies of Aristophanes, and the novels of Jonathan Swift, Voltaire, or Ayn Rand. Whether you think that any one of these is bogus depends mainly on whether you agree with them. In movies and TV the effect can be multiplied by the actors and directors, and by the use of music, costumes, sets, spectial effects and much more.

More problematic are the bogus who believe in their bogosity. They may really be sincere, in which case they don't have to fake it. They aren't trying to lie to you, no matter how much of what they say is not actually the case. We get this from people suffering from life-threatening disease who are going through the denial stage. The people who deny the link between the HIV virus and AIIDS, or who deny the existence of HIV, are often in this state. Mere commonly, people have no idea how to evaluate the truth of what they hear, and they tend then to latch on to theories that match their preconceived opinions and their emotional reactions. Believers in most isms are like this, as are believers in crackpot pseudo-scientific theories. We also get this in the form of religious, political, and social hypocrisy. John the Baptist, for example, is recorded to have said to a group of Pharisees and Sadducees, "Ye generation of vipers, who told you to flee from the wrath to come?" and he wouldn't baptise them.

The really toughest are nearly invisible to us. This includes the case just above when it is a matter of our own opinions, but even more than that the cases where the whole society, or at least the whole of some segment, believes in some form of nonsense. It can get so bad that those who don't believe feel impelled to go along and to keep their moths shut. The US saw that in the time of slavery, and the following time of Jim Crow, which are now almost universally held to be bogus. Current issues are harder. There may be two or more factions on some issue, such as taxes, regulation of businesses, Gay Rights, Affirmative Action, civil rights, fighting terrorism, abortion, global warming, Big Government and so on. In each case, two or more factions may be mostly holding bogus opinions, or holding opinions in a bogus, uninformed manner that makes them useless even if they are correct.

Let me give one example of this phenomenon. It is generally agreed that election systems using pre-punched cards are no longer acceptable because of the hanging chad problem. Most people have therefore concluded, on no further evidence, that all punched-card systems are bad. This is not the case. The Hollerith punched card company, founded in the 1880s, and its successor, IBM, brought punched-card technology to a high state of perfection, with an error rate of less than one on a billion cards. The cards are not prepunched. The punch mechanism cuts all four sides of a rectangular hole cleanly and completely, and the punch then fills the space under the hole, pushing the cut chad completely away from the card.

At the same time, there has been a mad rush to all-electronic voting systems, as though nobody had ever heard of computer error or software bugs. The big problem with an all-electronic system is the lack of an audit trail. If something goes wrong, there is no way to discover the problem and to diagnose it. Furthermore, the current electronic systems use proprietary software which is not open for inspection to validate its correct application of election and counting rules, its security, and any auditability it may provide.

Not that any of these bogosities are going unopposed. There are people with experience in election systems and an understanding of the issues, who are promoting solutions that actually address the issues, including security, auditability, and ways to validate election software, or even to write Open Source election software that anybody could examine. But you will notice that you don't hear about this in the media.

The political Right and the political Left agree that the media are bogus (for the same reasons, but of course not based on the same selection of evidence), and so does everybody else I know. That may be, but if it is so, isn't that because we, the audience, demand that the media give us bogosity?

Bogosity Revealed

Animals, we are given to understand, are not bogus. They act according to instinct, emotion, and desire, and what you see is what you get. We are definitely bogus. Where in our ancestry did bogosity arise? How did it evolve? What is the missing link of bogosity? Nobody knows. The origins of bogosity are lost in the mists of prehistory. We can conjecture that bogosity took hold somewhere in the period where language and clothing were invented, but we don't even know where or when either of those events or processes happened, or which came first.

I mention language because it is such an effective instrument of bogosity, and clothing because so much bogosity focuses on it. Fashion, in particular, but actually the whole concept of dressing modestly, or dressing at all. This is of course a big deal among many religions, but consider what Judaism, and by inference Christianity and Islam say about it. Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The immediate consequence of this error was that they noticed that they were naked, and were ashamed, and set about making clothing out of fig leaves, which God told them they shouldn'ta oughta done. The second consequence was that they were barred from access to the Tree of Life. So that sounds like we would have to not be ashamed of nakedness in order to get to the Tree of Life. In fact, we were all born naked, and there is no shame in that.

But this is a myth, and myths are notoriously hard to interpret. Centainly if the people who care about this particular myth notice what I have said about it, a lot of them will complain. So forget it.

Where bogosity really becomes visible in ancient times is in Greek culture. The Kings and Princes in the Iliad, especially Agamemnon and Achilles, were paragons of bogosity. The Iliad starts with Achilles sulking in his tent like a small boy because that big bully Agamemnon took away his toy--no, sorry, his captured slave girl Briseis--no, actually his sex toy. The whole business started when three goddesses tried to bribe this guy Paris who was judging them in a beauty contest. As if beauty contests weren't bogus enough without cheating. Anyway, the goddesses of Power, Wisdom, and Love offered bribes of, well, Power, Wisdom, and Sex with the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, and Paris being a guy we know how that turned out. With the aggrieved husband chasing him across land and sea, and a whole big war, and as I said Achilles sulking in his tent and holding up the whole show, which is where we came in.

In the Greek Classical period, bogosity really took off. The Sophists were inventing logic, the use of logical fallacies to win cases in court, and lawyer jokes. Philosophers were coming out with a hundred crackpot theories about anything and everything, some of the most bizarre of which turned out much later to be true. Greek drama evolved out of little interludes in long religious ceremonies, taking as their central theme the variety of bogosity that they called hubris. People and demigods are constantly playing God in Greek tragedies, and shooting themselves in other people's feet. Greek comedy makes the case even clearer. Cloud Cuckoo Land, from the Aristophanes comedy The Birds, is still a byword for bogosity in politics.

The whole development of bogosity in theory and practice takes a new turn with Socrates. In his last public speech, given at his trial on a capital charge of impiety, he explained (at least according to his disciple Plato, who was there and wrote it down with some degree of playwright's license) how he had come up against the problem that I am calling bogosity, and what he decided he should do about it. A lot of people know a fair amount about a lot of subjects, but Socrates observed that people who knew a lot tended to assume that they knew more than they did, and that the people who knew the most often claimed to know, in effect, everything. Socrates declared that he was unwilling to fall into this form of bogosity. He would rather know nothing, and to know that he knew nothing, than to know a great deal but make the mistake of thinking he knew far more.

Socrates got killed, in large part, for telling the rest of the Athenians that they were all bogus and he wasn't. The crimes he was charged with at his trial didn't matter. Actually if he had just stated his opinion and his choice they wouldn't have bothered about him. No, he had to go and prove to everybody who was anybody in Athens that they were personally bogus. It is actually hilarious to observe Socrates, in the early Platonic dialogues, getting his victims to tie themselves up in knots, but of course they didn't see it that way at all.

It is actually very difficult to be properly aware of the extent of your ignorance, sinco it concerns things you don't know about. It takes work, and discipline, and a lot of help. Of course, people who know about something that you don't know about can easily see your ignorance, but if they tell you about it they risk the fate of Socrates. Not death, but certainly disapproval and active hostility. There are a few groups who work on this awaresess of ignorance as a professional matter. They include many scientists, some members of some religious traditions, and a very few philosophers. There are, of course, bogus scientists, like Fleischman and Pons of Cold Fusion infamy, but it is solidly established in the practice of science that we don't know more than we have tested, and in fact not all of that, and most scientists stay within that boundary most of the time.

Humility is often promoted as a religious virtue, but one does not see it as much practiced. Quite a few bogus religious teachers will tell you that they are in possession of complete, total, and absolute truth, and that they have the answers to every question. Since they all give the same reason for their separate assertions of infallibility (revelation, or the equivalent, divine inspiration), but differ wildly in their doctrines and practices, I conclude that they are all wrong. At least, they are all as wrong as the blind men describing the elephant. Maybe they have a little bit right, but you can't tell what it is in the midst of their insistence that they know all about it

Philosophers are notorious for claiming that they have worked out everything in their own minds, in a manner that cannot be disputed, and then sticking their feet squarely in their mouths. Most of them claimed that they had achieved proofs of something that everybody already knew, and were praised greatly for their achievements until it turned out that what everybody knew wasn't so. Kant, for example, claimed that he had proved that Euclidean geometry was true a priori, as the form of our perceptions,not very long before the conclusive discovery of non-Euclidean geometry. The most notable excepttion since Socrates was David Hume, who noted that we only know what comes to us through our senses, and resolutely rejected every form of received opinion about the certainty of anything beyond that. Descartes was one of the worst offenders. You could say that his doctrine was, "I thought it up, therefore it is."

Then there are politicians.

What you mean "We"?

The biggest issue in fighting bogosity is recognizing it in yourself. It is therefore difficult to be an authority on the matter, since having credentials on this topic is essentially self-contradictory. The self-assurance required of a self-proclaimed authority on almost anything is, after all, the essential hallmark of bogosity. Well, I'm bogus enough for the present purpose, and self-assured enough to take it on. So here we go.

The essence of bogosity is the practice of dividing people into two groups, the presumed un-bogus ("Us") and those who are by definition utterly bogus ("Them"). We all do it. There are those who Get It, whether "It" is Republicanism, Democratism, Libertarianism, Greenism, Socialism, or even Communism, or rooting either for or against the New York Yankees, and those who don't. To those who Get It, it is basically inconceivable that any sane human can actually hold any of the contrary utterly bogus opinions, and the next step in this chain of illogic is the conclusion that the Bogus are actually non-human, or at least sub-human, especially if it also happens that they can be regarded as inhumane, like the Nazis in the extreme case, or the way pro-choicers and pro-lifers go on about each other killing babies or mothers.

Now, if you are paying attention, and especially if you Get It, it should be occuring to you about now that a division between those who divide humanity into two groups and those who don't is itself necessarily bogus. "How," you should be asking yourself, "can he [That's me.] set himself up as the Arbiter Bogotiarum [Ooh, a Latin title. How bogus!] over all of us [That's you lot, again.] Well, you're right. I can't. I said I was bogus enough for this discussion, but I'm not that bogus. No, the answer is that there is no such division. "Them" is us, and there is nobody else. We're all bogus. (If you ever do run into somebody who doesn't do the whole Us and Them business, let me know. I would like to have a word with any such person, and so should you.)

The other big problem is Autobogotophobia or Autobogotiphobia, the fear of being, seeming, or being discovered to be bogus, or of being made bogus. Instead of the puffed-up state of the truly bogus, the Autobogotophobe is often convinced of some kind of inferiority, especially of not meeting the standards of parents, teachers, or peers, or of being required to behave in a bogus manner by those in authority, especially bosses. Forget it. Don't let them tell you that you have to be bogus to be acceptable or successful. You are the best example of you in the world. A genuine you is far better for you and the rest of us than any bogus construction you could try to create to hide your supposed shortcomings.

What really gets to me is the extent to which we are all supposed to be bogus in order to impress other bogus people, and how we are all copying each other's bogosity. By the way, what is supposed to be so great about being somebody to a bunch of nobodies, anyway? I mean if you want to be somebody, that means you want a whole lot of other people not to be as much somebody as you are, so they will pay attention to you being somebody. I'm somebody already, and I don't need to put somebody else down to make me a bigger somebody. I like being somebody to a lot of other somebodies.

Care to join me?