The Dictatorship behind Personal Opinion

How dangerous is this idea of "Personal Opinion."

It looks like "Freedom of Speech". It looks like a good thing. It looks like the individual is free to say and think what they want.

Awesome! except for a problem. In my freedom I only have an "Opinion" alongside all others, but what if I am right? Is that worth more than opinion? Freedom appears to mean that all individuals have equal say, regardless the quality of what they say, and that means that truth goes in the bin. Its an odd contradiction. Is it only opinion that all people have equal say, or is it Truth? Freedom denies us of any worth.

By contrast "Collective Opinion" is not formally accepted in the West. But when the whole Western media agree on something like "Collectivism is bad" that is actually just "Collective Opinion" yet it seems even in the freedom of the West that "Collective Opinion" is more truthful than "Personal Opinion". How ironic that the collective belief that "Collectivism is bad" is actually more important than "Personal Opinion"! How is that freedom? So what freedom really is there in "Personal Opinion"? Who cares for "Personal Opinion"? Why even have "Personal Opinion" when it has no more value than anyone else's opinion. Don't we really want our "Personal Opinion" to agree with others so that really we hold "Collective Opinion"?

This comes out in Democracy and Voting, and also in Social Media "likes." The more "likes" we get the more we belong to the Collective. The more Votes we get the more Power we get. But we can still be wrong. Hitler was actually voted in, but History will record that the German Voters got it wrong. An individual with a Time Machine and hind sight can go back to 1933 and scream and shout at the German people to try and persuade them against Hitler but it will just be their "Personal Opinion" and make no difference to the Collective Will.

And so it is that the desire for personal individual freedom, really just leads to a collective oppression! 

What we had before the crazy idea of "Personal Opinion" was Truth. This means that a collective can be Wrong and an individual can Right. Isn't the Story of Jesus the most spectacular (albeit subtle) version of this. One person against the whole Roman Dictatorship and ultimately becoming worshipped as the Single God of what was Pagan Society even above Tiberius and the Caesars themselves.

Now how do we discover truth when we can't use Voting or Likes? Well this is the great question. As proven many times in logic, computing and I'm sure in this blog, if there was an algorithm for truth that we could follow like a recipe then we can use Diagonalisation to contradict it. One method would be construct an "I am False" statement that breaks the system. More generally a statement that uses the output of the algorithm to give a different result. Then when you then use the algorithm on this statement you get a contradiction.

T(x) is 1 when x is True and 0 otherwise.

y = T(y) != 1

Which is pseudo logic/programming code for a statement y which is True when y is false. y can work this out using T(y) == 1 when y is True.

But what now of T(y)? y is always the opposite of T(x). So whatever T(y) says y will be the opposite. T() cannot consistently work out the Truth of y. It is broken.

Note Godel does the exact same thing, just instead of Truth he uses Provability. So P(x) is true if x can be proven. So we construct our Beq statement that is a contradiction if it can be proven. #TODO complete this.

This is the universal pattern it seems for all Diagonalisations from Gödel to Tarski to Turing.

So there is no algorithm for truth. You cannot use voting, or likes, or appeals to experts, or "Collective Opinion" or "Personal Opinion". The only way to see if its true is just to see if its true. Sounds crazy, but if we are not able to know what is true, then what is the point of true!

So all these meta statements about truth like "Personal Opinion" are actually Political Totalitarianism in action! Such ideas are designed to control us, and are nothing to do with freedom.

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Another aspect of this is "being heard." It's one thing to speak the Truth, but do we need to be heard? Its quite interesting what the Religious leaders have said. Jesus gives the Parable of the Sower where he admits he has no control over the ears (pun on ears of wheat in English as well as ears of men). And Buddha says quite openly test my teachings and if they do not work for you then ignore them, and he accepts that what people hear depends upon their conditions and where they are on the path to freedom.

Yet in the modern world things are much more Evangelical. There is not just a desire to spread the truth, but there is open marketing to coerce people to accept it. The media for example uses all kinds of language to bias people and agree with the political powers and Hegemony that exists. I do not know whether this is always subversive brainwashing of people, or whether journalists are so  hegemonic themselves that they cannot help publishing what to them looks fair and multifaceted.

My own view is get things right first, and the worry about what you do with that second. To even get the first part right is already a monster achievement. I wonder sometimes the merit of writing a blog. I believe my first post was on this. What do I hope to gain? Well primarily a record of my own thoughts. I used to write onto paper, but have a drawer of this. The other is that there is a chance that the workings of the universe may conspire to do something with these words. I don't know what I expect of that, but perhaps a helpful comment that puts me right or gives me the insight I wish for.