The “MINDS MATTER MOST” Manifesto – The 4Ms
We have no Divine Right to Absolute Knowledge. This explicitly contradicts the current SCIENCE-DELUSION that we can know everything, eventually. SCIENCE is today’s religion – you cross its priesthood at your peril. Nowadays however, we risk mimicking the Easter Islanders who sacrificed their only life line, timber, to an untenable credo – in our case, we sacrifice consciousness.
In 1980 psychiatrists issued an ex-cathedra Papal Bull excommunicating the mind. Those who find this unbelievable should check the DSM-IV, psychiatry’s current ‘bible’. Those who accept it as ‘scientific fact’ should set about joining the Easter Islanders. If, on the other hand, you oppose it, and wish to support this Manifesto then Tweet “#YES_to_4Ms” to @BobTrustConsent, and we’ll vote this iniquitous Papal Bull down.
We all crave security, peace of mind and fear-free zones – it’s an essential part of our humanity. However, the only tool we have to achieve anything like it, is our rather restricted reasoning ability, which happens to be essentially mono-threaded, like eyesight. Unhappily for our multiple priesthoods, the world in which we find ourselves, our immediate environment, is decidedly multithreaded – an infinite number of things are going on at once, and always have been. Not only that – none of these threads has a First Cause, a Beginning, a Creator – there are several candidates for the post, but none of universal merit. For completeness, it was David Hume who suggested in 1745, that not one of the links in these chains could ever be relied on 100%.
Those dismissive of such philosophical niceties should note that the penalty for getting them wrong is inexorable, severe and irredeemable, as the Easter Islanders found. Living things, ourselves included, can only survive, as Darwin pointed out, if they adapt – i.e. if they change in response to alterations in their immediate surroundings. Failure to appreciate that one’s surroundings have changed, or otherwise to ignore this vital fact, does not incur any divine or moral wrath – it merely guarantees extinction, partial or otherwise.
What to do? I prescribe the reinstatement of consciousness, the full rehabilitation of the concept of mind – the most important organ we humans posses, the organ of socialising. It is essential that every one appreciates quite how widely the mind is currently denigrated – it is arrogantly regarded as the weakest link, the feeblest feature, the least tangible, the most subjective, the one item for which there is no scientific evidence that it even exists – whence the above Papal Bull. Yet in reality, it is the only one of our faculties which offers any hope of security, of realism or of the possibility of survival, let alone peace of mind.
And what it does, contrary to Scientific Determinism, is move things about, create things that were not there before – else we would long ago have become extinct. In this it defies ‘entropy’, disorganisation, as does every other living thing whatsoever. Only by doing so, can it counter the inexorable running down of all other physical systems – as the laws of thermodynamics so ominously imply – and with which it meekly complies, once dead.
So here we have two indigestibles – firstly the current scientific endeavour can never fulfil its hubristic ambition; and secondly, any theory that emerges, any laws of nature you might devise, can be varied, and indeed must be varied anew, by living organisms battling their way against ever-changing cosmic chaos – it’s what Darwin called ‘evolution’. The time has come to give our mental energies their due, to stop arguing them out of existence, and to uncover rules-of-thumb which encourage them to grow. We know how to cultivate plants for heaven’s sake – why not pay as much attention to minds?
So what does this Manifesto entail? It should prompt an immediate and fully comprehensive rebuttal of the inhuman Papal Bull described above. It should implement an immediate promotion of the ‘soft’ sciences over the ‘hard’, since the latter can never provide us with the mental security we all need. It should do this by immediately promoting the notions of Human Rights, of consensual approaches, i.e. Truth, Trust and Consent. By working together we can build Fear Free Zones, and so guarantee to create what we all so desperately need – peace of mind, self-confidence and security. This, at last, will allow us all to enjoy the way we were all born – i.e. as Lovable, Sociable and Non-Violent. But don’t take my word for it, try it out for yourself.
NOTE – these points were all valid before I was born, and will remain so long after. It’s quite a wrench to concede just how ignorant we are, and always will be – but as any good physician will tell you – do the best you can with what you’ve got. And in this case we have the miracle of life which, if we act responsibly, we can fill with delight and joy – rare enough in today’s conventional wisdom.
Dr Bob Johnson Monday, 2 May 2011