The price of judgment

In my article “The age of reason” I gave my version of the mechanics involved in bringing about paradigm shifts. I am using “paradigm” in the general sense not the “hard fact” scientific sense. That was a “how it happens” article. This article is a “why it happens” approach.

My research through old documents from all religions seems to indicate a common theme; that judgment is the root cause of our problems. The most familiar version in the Christian paradigm is "But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shall not eat of it" (Genesis 217 KJV). I read this as judgment.

But if judgment is the problem then any answer to the problem must be free of judgment. This means no religion, no philosophy, no right or wrong, no good and evil. It had to be a “stand alone” answer.

As well as that, “judgment” has many meanings so it is necessary to find the type of judgment that plays havoc with the human race. So I am looking for what I call “toxic” judgment.

This is my hypothesis.

If a human does not know something they make a wild guess. They then claim their wild guess is true. From then on every time they make a decision based on their judgment they will mess up because they are making decisions based on a wild guess and not based on reality.

That was the general hypothesis. From there I looked for specific types of wild guess. I identified two types of wild guess that divorced us from reality:

1. finding in the negative because we cannot prove the positive; and
2. finding in the positive because we cannot prove the negative.

I called the first of these “The Hiroshima Principle”.

The Hiroshima Principle: judging the negative to be true because we cannot prove the positive.

We can never know if a new technology will have detrimental side effects because, until the technology is introduced, the detrimental side effects do not exist. It is impossible to prove the existence of something that does not yet exist.

Scientists tell us that there is no proof of any harm associated with the introduction of genetic engineering, therefore genetic engineering is safe. That there is no proof of harm is true. There is no proof of harm because until genetic engineering is introduced whatever harm there may be does not exist.