2026-03-15
Over the course of writing articles for this website, I have come to the realisation that much of what I thought I knew about the world and its workings has been wrong. Wrong not in any obvious way, but in either subtle or even outright deceitful ways that invalidated my worldview. Wrong nevertheless.
After all, our direct experience is limited to what we can personally touch, see, hear, taste, smell, or otherwise feel, and even these five senses require a great deal of learned interpretation before we can extract appropriate meaning from these inputs; it's why we spend the first few years of our lives pondering these mysteries and working out how to interpret them in ways that seem to work, whilst our parents take care of our every need. We (eventually!) reach the stage that we believe that we have it all sussed ... but have we really?
Probably not.
Even the five senses listed above are, as it turns out, insufficient - we must add intuition. Intuition can work at a subtle level so that we don't even recognise it for what it is, or it can if necessary smack us in the face should for example our lives be in imminent danger. I have experienced both. It is most unwise to ignore it!
The world is a hugely complex place and the likelihood is that whilst much of what we have come to believe works well enough for us on a day-to-day basis, much of it is still incorrect, especially the information that reaches us second-hand from others (ie: nearly all of it), who inevitably have their own misconceptions embedded within their worldview. It's misconceptions upon misconceptions ...
Logic can help to sort these out to some extent - where one misconception clashes with another, we can recognise the conflict and check further, but such logical falsehoods are often not immediately obvious, and must be teased out.
I now work on the basis that much of what I "know" is likely wrong in some way, and I have come to accept that ideas which seemed far-fetched in the extreme within my earlier worldview may in fact have a great deal of validity in them.
And as a bonus, I find that the world has become a great deal more interesting again!
This is not merely an attitude of mind.
It is the fundamental prerequisite to becoming a free-thinking human being with the free will to make something of our lives that nobody else can do for us. It frees us from the need to be a slave to the views and intentions of others, and enables us to develop self-mastery, and to contribute our insights to the world around us.
Postscript
Of course, there's a difference between free-thinking and all-knowing. "Free-thinking" allows us to aspire to "all-knowing" but the nature of our world is that it's probably not possible to achieve full mastery within our allotted four score years and ten.
The war in Iran is a good example of a situation that has so many layers to it (or could have) that it's not rational to expect to reach a complete understanding of it whilst it still unfolds. There is of course no shortage of pundits who will overestimate their powers and tell us with certainty that x or y is going on, oblivious to the uncertainties within their own worldview.
In some ways this is instructive. One man's meat is another's poison. Those who reflexively support Israel may equally reflexively blame Iran for their supposed terrorism (but who attacked whom here? Was a bomb on a girls' school within the opening salvos not just as bad as any supposed terrorist attack?).
Likewise those who observe Israel's treatment of those who originally inhabited Palestine when the British marched in to replace the Ottoman Empire's oversight at end of WW1, may have a differing viewpoint. The British were later driven out after Zionist terrorists got their way with atrocities against British troops, the State of Israel was formed with the conditional blessing of the UN (that must have been comfort to some, but probably not to the previously extant population), and the British left Palestine after WW2.
Ever since then Israel has been a source of perpetual strife, displacing the original population to make space ("lebensraum"?) for Jewish/Zionist immigrants. WW2 was reportedly precipitated by just such an expansionist policy by Germany.
Add the mercurial Trump into the mix and who knows what's going on? Even seasoned commentators like Alex Krainer admit their bafflement.
Even the invariably pro-Israel TCW has produced an unusually balanced (but very pro-Israel) piece on the latest situation. It might so easily have been written entirely differently had the author chosen to look at the greater sweep of history rather than merely at the latest flare-up.
One might also mention that many commentators believe between them that the City of London has interests historical and probably still current in Israel (Balfour Declaration), in Iran (oil), and in the Ukraine ("Russia Russia Russia") not to mention the undemocratic EU that Ted Heath took us into in its embryonic form, and the Israeli-dominated USA with which we have (or had) that enigmatic "Special Relationship". Do all roads really lead to the UK?
Nobody said that untangling this mess would be easy, but many assume an ease that is manifestly illusory.
