The price of judgment

I call it the “Hiroshima Principle,” because before Hiroshima and Nagasaki the scientists who invented the atom bomb thought there would be a big bang and it would be over. They had no idea about radiation sickness, acid rain or any of the other side effects of nuclear weapons would occur because before Hiroshima and Nagasaki these side effects did not exist. None of the scientists predicted radiation sickness and acid rain any more than anyone can predict the fallout from genetic engineering.

The second form of toxic judgment I call “The reverse Hiroshima Principle”.

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

Someone robs a bank. They are caught, tried, found guilty and thrown into jail. I see no problem with that. But using the Reverse Hiroshima Principle, we are found guilty and thrown into jail because someone said we were thinking about robbing a bank.
It is improbable that you are thinking about robbing a bank, but it is impossible for you to prove you are not.

I will run through a case study using the recent history of Iraq as a base to show how the Reverse Hiroshima Principle really fouls things up.

The weapons inspectors in Iraq said they could not find any weapons of mass destruction, but needed more time to make certain. This to me is a perfect response. There is doubt, so let's make certain.

A captive under torture gives the CIA information that Saddam Hussein had mobile laboratories running around the desert producing weapons of mass destruction. Nobody seems to have told the CIA that people being tortured have a habit of telling their torturers whatever the torturers want to hear.

Colin Powell then goes to the UN with a slick presentation of trucks driving around the desert, and nobody could prove it wasn't true. This is the Reverse Hiroshima Principle. It was accepted that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction because it could not be proved he didn't.

The “coalition of the willing” invaded Iraq but did not find any weapons of mass destruction. George Bush then goes on television to say that while there where not any weapons of mass destruction there was indisputable evidence that Saddam Hussein was thinking about producing weapons of mass destruction (The Reverse Hiroshima Principle again). Without the Reverse Hiroshima Principle the Bush/Blair/Howard war in Iraq would not have happened.

The Reverse Hiroshima Principle leads the human race into acting insanely. The worst aspect of it is that there is nothing that can be done about it. If someone makes a toxic judgment based on what another person is thinking, what their motivations are, what they were trying to do or any other judgment that cannot be proved there is no defense. There is no such thing as “innocent until proved guilty” with the Reverse Hiroshima Principle.

I believe this is an original hypothesis, so if you try to research the contents the only likely reference that will come up will be my book The Fall of Man. Other may be working along similar lines but I am unaware of such works. If there are others working along similar lines I would be interested to see what they are doing.

What happens if a group of wild guesses that are claimed to be true are bought together in the human brain? We call it a belief system. It is not really a “belief” system but a glob of toxic judgments. When more than one person club together and share similar their globs of toxic judgment the result is called group think, or a paradigm. This is where I began with my previous article, "The age of reason".