The inverse law of ignorance and contempt

The less you know, the less you know of your ignorance. The less you care, the less you care that you are uncaring.

These facts follow logically from the nature of things, of course. Your ignorance is only one more thing which you can know better or worse; your ability to care is only one more thing about which you can care more or less. If you are ignorant, you will be ignorant of ignorance; if you are contemptuous, you contemn your contempt.

Last repetition, since I find this phrasing funny: if you don’t know, you don’t know you don’t know; and if you don’t care, you don’t care you don’t care.

This fact is not new, and indeed it is obvious. But despite being known, it lacks a proper name. The entire object of this blog post is to give it a name, so as to refer to it by that name later. It comes up often enough to deserve one.

The fact about ignorance related here is often called “the Dunning-Kruger effect”. This is an incorrect name, because it is a misuse of the study done by Dunning and Kruger. Popular graphs, with confidence peaking at a small height of knowledge, are completely fake and not from the study. So we need another name. And since I am more aware than most people that spirit has two operations, being knowledge and love, I have decided to include the fact about love when giving the name.

As you might have guessed, I have settled, for the moment, on the name that titles this blog post: “the inverse law of ignorance and contempt”. Either side may then be referred to as “the inverse law of ignorance” and “the inverse law of contempt”. But I will suggest some alternative names below; as long as you settle on one, you will be able to refer to this fact more often, which is my object.

• First, you might call it the “inverse law of knowledge and love” and similarly divide it. I don’t think it makes a difference whether you use the positive or the negative words.
• When using the negative words, it seems to make sense also to omit “inverse”, so you might call it the “law of ignorance and contempt” if you prefer.
• Instead of speaking of “laws”, you might emphasize the perplexing nature of this fact by calling it a “paradox”, as in, the “paradox of” knowledge/love/ignorance/contempt.
• Since knowledge and love are the two operations of spirit, I once referred to this as the “paradox of greatness of spirit”, which a friend abbreviated to “PoGoS” – the idea being that spirit may be greater, either in knowledge or in love. You might do that if you want. I have changed my preference of name because I prefer directly naming the two things that the fact is about, rather than an unknown generic name for both of them.

I hope this blog post’s suggestions of terminology will help people speak of this fact more often, when it’s appropriate, and stop misusing the names of Dunning and Kruger. Conveniently, when writing in a hypertext medium, you might hyperlink your favorite name to this blog post, which will allow someone to understand it without your having to explain it, if you want to be brief. I certainly intend to do this in another blog post at some point.

What good is individuality?

Note: This blog post has been retracted, since I no longer think of it as a good representation of how I think about its topic. I may, or may not, have written a better post about the same topic since; check the full list of posts.

Mill, Russell and their like would not shut up about “individuality”, and the “expression of individuality”. Is it even valuable? I wrote this blog post to find out.

In this blog, goodness is rightly divided into the virtuous, the useful and the pleasant. I will not care about other conceptions of goodness.

0. Contents

1. Is it virtuous?
2. Is it useful?
3. Is it pleasant?

1. Is it virtuous?

Individuality

Of course it is not virtuous to be a unique person. No one is better for the reason that he is unique.

However, it is more meritorious to attain to a virtue of which no example can be found in your surroundings; and it will, of course, generate more virtue in others if this is done, since there will now be your example.

Expression of individuality

Given the fact of individuality, is it virtuous to express it? In a certain sense it is – it is honest to give others a true idea of who you really are, and honesty is a virtue.

To that extent, to fail to express your individuality by communicating a wrong impression is an evil and a vice; it is a kind of lie. But to fail by communicating nothing is not evil, as long as it does not lead people, by the silence, to assume you are other than you are.

Of course, there is one caveat. An evil man may think that to publicly commit evil deeds will give others a truer impression of who he is, since otherwise they might be deluded into thinking that he is virtuous. It will do so, but of course, he becomes a significantly more evil man by the fact that he does those evil deeds – up until doing them, he has only thought about doing evil deeds, which is not as bad. It would be sufficient to express his degree of viciousness, at that stage, to communicate his evil thoughts in spoken form, ideally in an appropriate setting.

2. Is it useful?

Individuality

Is it useful to be a unique person? It depends what it is you are unique in.

There seems to be no intrinsic usefulness to someone’s having unique likes and dislikes. It may be useful to him if, for instance, his tastes are particular in being cheaper, so that he may derive more enjoyment while spending less money. The opposite case also exists, however.

Unique likes and dislikes may have great extrinsic usefulness insofar as they are a necessary part of a unique personality which is able to have unique talents and create new true knowledge.

It is, of course, very useful to have unique talents, and more useful than if they are similar talents to those of others – this is the law of comparative advantage.

It is also useful to have unique knowledge, since you are then able to teach others things they didn’t know.

Expression of individuality

It is extremely useful to tell your unique knowledge to others, but it becomes less unique in the process – knowledge is still useful, but much less so, if it remains unique. I am not sure if spreading your true knowledge is an expression of individuality, since the more it is expressed, the less it is individual.

Unique talents are, similarly, only actually useful if they are expressed through their practical application.

To express your unique likes and dislikes is, intrinsically, useless to others. It may be useful, to the person expressing them, insofar as it inspires others to create more of the things you like and less of the things you dislike. This, in turn, is also useful to whomever else profits by this production, but it may be a disutility to someone with conflicting likes and dislikes – that is, who dislikes the new things produced, or likes the things of which fewer were produced.

Of course, a man does not generally know for a fact that his likes and dislikes are unique. If they are not, in fact, unique, they may serve to acquire friendships, as common likes and dislikes often do. There is, therefore, good reason for people to share their likes and dislikes when they think that they might not be unique.

3. Is it pleasant?

Individuality

Is it pleasant to be unique, and different from others?

I think not. Generally, people tend to resent the fact that they are different from everyone else, that no one quite understands them, that they are alone in this world. Others will also resent him for it – people often seem to dislike others for the main reason of their being different.

However, some people seem to take a perverted pleasure in being unique. If you are unique in a sense which clearly makes you better than others, it is, of course, not perverted to take some pleasure in being better, although this can lead to the evil of pride if done wrongly. But some people seem to cope with the loneliness of being unique by supposing that their difference makes them better when it really doesn’t.

Expression of individuality

I think it is clearly pleasant to express yourself. This is, I think, the principal reason why Russell and Mill valued it.

Is it pleasant to others? It is, of course, pleasant in all the ways it is useful – it is pleasant to benefit from someone else’s unique talents or unique knowledge.

I think it is also pleasant in the way it is virtuous – people may appreciate the expression of someone else’s unique personality for the principal reason of the fact that it is true. They may say that it gives them insight into human nature, or at least into the nature of one human person.

The caveat from the usefulness section applies – people may not know for a fact that they are unique, and expressing themselves may allow them to make friends by finding out that they are not, in fact, unique.

The caveat from the virtuousness section also applies – it is usually not pleasant when a vicious man “expresses” his vice, which is, of course, nothing but to bring his vice further into actual existence.

Property, friendship and hierarchy

Some considerations on private property, friendship, and marriage which I thought fit well together into one blog post.

0. Contents

1. Property is of one
2. Friendship is of similars
3. Marriage is hierarchical
4. Notes

1. Property is of one

The perfect form of property ownership is to be owned by a single man, that is, private property, as opposed to common property.

The essential reason for this is that of action conflicts. When property is owned in common, the common owners may have conflicting plans of what to do with the property. Since the plans are conflicting, the same property cannot be used for both: the conflict must be resolved.

There is no perfect method of conflict resolution except the foregone decision of the winner. A majority vote is the best one we have, and yet it may result in a tie when there are even numbers, or it may not solve anything at all if a minority party is sufficiently strong, and willing to resort to violence. The perfect conflict is solved instantly, which is to say, there is no conflict: the owner decides.

In many cases, property must be considered the property of a society, which engages in a joint enterprise. The analogue of private property in the case of a society is hierarchy. Conflict is avoided among the members of a society by its foregone conclusion: the head decides.[1]

This is, I believe, the essential reason why private property is the best form of property; but there are other alleged reasons, which I will not discuss here.

2. Friendship is of similars

Friends are, properly, of one mind. “It is proper to friends to approve and disapprove the same things, and to be delighted in and to be pained by the same things.”[2] “God is ever drawing like towards like, and making them acquainted.”[3]

Against this it was urged[4] that similars can do nothing to each other that they could not do to themselves; hence, they cannot be of use to each other, and therefore cannot be loved by one another. But friendship requires mutual love, and therefore friendship cannot be of similars.

This argument, which is perfectly valid, only seems soluble by denying the major. What, then, do similar friends provide to each other?

I think the answer is another body. Even if friends start with the same knowledge, unable to teach anything to each other, they must of necessity have different pairs of eyes, and, therefore, notice different new things about the world. They can share this new knowledge with each other for mutual benefit. They can also do more things together than apart.

This is the meaning of the assertion that a friend is “a single soul dwelling in two bodies”.[5] Friends are of one mind, and they provide to each other the benefit of additional bodies; there is no conflict in this, because they agree on everything, insofar as the friendship is perfect.[6]

Given this fact, and only given this fact, can we explain the assertion that “friends hold all things in common”[7]. Friends, being alike and similar in all things, can enter upon no action conflicts: they always desire to do the same things with their property. They may consider each other’s property as their own because they are, to some extent, the same person. “Things we do through the agency of our friends count, in a sense, as done by ourselves.”[8]

Partly because of this, friendship is acknowledged by all to be an equal relation; neither friend is the head of the other.

3. Marriage is hierarchical

Another reason why friendship is an equal relation is that a friendship is not a society; it is not created to achieve a specific end or purpose.

When a society is created to achieve an end, some property usually needs to be considered property of the society, so as to divide what is dedicated to the ends of the society as a whole from what may be used to achieve the exclusive ends of its particular members.

For this reason, companies are considered to have property of their own, even when there is no “limitation of liability”; this property is dedicated to achieving the ends of the society, which is, for instance, the making of shoes, in a shoe company. States have their “state-owned” property, to achieve the end of the state, which is the general good;[9] and families also usually have some property as a family, such as a house or a collection of books, in order to achieve the ends of the family, namely the begetting and education of children.

Friendship, by contrast, is not created to achieve some end, and hence no property is properly needed to be owned by the friendship, qua friendship. Friends hold all things in common insofar as they are friends, but if the friendship is faced with the fact of its imperfection – if the friends turn out to have some conflicting desires – there need be no property of which the control is ambiguous. If it comes to it, each friend has his own property.

Moderns, because of their Epicurean sympathies, tend to err by making marriage and family into nothing but a close friendship – one involving living together and having sex, say. They see no necessary connection between marriage and children. As such, they see no need for the existence of societal property of the marriage; couples hold some things in common in just the same way as friends do.

Besides, they deny the perfection of private property, which is affirmed here. It is best for every society which owns societal property to be hierarchical, in order to achieve the perfect resolution of action conflicts among members. This is especially true of a marriage, where a majority vote is impossible, since there are only two members.

It is not necessary, in principle, that the head be the man. But generally, and traditionally, it has been, and not without reason.

The man is, generally, stronger: it is difficult for the stronger party to be the submissive one, since the stronger can easily challenge the rule by threat of violence.[10]

The man was also, traditionally, the only, or the primary, source of income of the household, which made it easy for him to make the choices, since he could threaten not to contribute any more income to the society if its decisions were not his liking.

I believe that these are the essential reasons why the rule of the man was instituted, but there are other alleged reasons, which I will not discuss here.[11]

4. Notes

[1] ‘head’ of the hierarchy, which word is substituted in specific hierarchies for ‘leader’, ‘boss’, ‘chief’, ‘king’, ‘bishop’, ‘Pope’, etc.

[2] SCG, 3, 151.3; Thomas attributes this quotation to Cicero elsewhere – see fn. 10 of page 44 here – but it is actually from Sallust, Bellum Catilinæ, ch. 20.

Addition, 2022-02-20: See also Plato, Republic, 5.462b

[3] Homer as quoted in Plato, Lysis, 214a

[4] Plato, Lysis, 214e

[5] Aristotle, as quoted by Diogenes Laërtius

[6] I might, in a future blog post, attempt to give an explanation of the precise respect in which friends are similar, so as to explain friendships which seem to be very close, and yet between widely different people.

[7] Plato, Phaedrus, 279c; see also Xenophon, Memorabilia, 2.4.6

[8] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 3.3, slightly changed

[9] Whatever the hell the “general good” is. I might make another post about that.

[10] This blog post originally said that the rule of the man is “fitting” for this reason. An update on 2022-01-25 removed this phrasing. The same update also added the following reason, about income, which was not listed before, with strength being the only reason I could originally think of.

Besides these changes, however, the update did not fully bring this blog post to the way I would have written it in this later date, which is why I left in the reference to “Epicurean sympathies”, despite that blog post having since been retracted.

See the newer blog post, which was written on the same day as the update, for more on hierarchy within marriage, in particular.

[11] cf., for instance, C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, book 3, chapter 6 (quoted here)