safer by far out of jail

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I only edited this a tiny bit for typos and to make it easier to read. I don't know if you ever bothered to go to the archive to look at any of his personal musings, but I did a long time ago and completely understood.

Irrationality in Argument
by Julian Assange
29 August 2007

The truth is not found on the page, but is a wayward sprite that bursts forth from the reader's mind for reasons of its own. I once thought that the Truth was a set comprised of all the things that were true, and the big truth could be obtained by taking all its component propositions and evaluating them until nothing remained. I would approach my rhetorical battles as a logical reductionist, tearing down, atomizing, proving, disproving, discarding falsehoods and reassembling truths until the Truth was pure, golden and unarguable.

But then, when truth matters most, when truth is the agent of freedom, I stood before Justice and with truth, lost freedom. Here was something fantastical, unbelievable and impossible. You could prove that (A => B) and (B => C) and (C => D) and (D => F) and Justice would nod its head and agree, but then, when you turned to claim your coup de grace, A => F — irrevocably — Justice would demur and revoke the axiom of transitivity, for Justice will not be told when F stands for freedom.

Transitivity is evoked when Justice imagines F and, finding the dream a pleasurable one, sets about gathering cushions to prop up their slumber. Here then is the truth about the Truth; the Truth is not bridge, sturdy to every step, a marvel of bound planks and supports from the known into the unknown, but a surging sea of smashed wood, flotsam and drowning sailors. So first, always pick your poetic metaphor, to make the reader want to believe, then the facts, and — miracle! — transitivity will descend from heaven, invoked as justification for prejudice.

Often we suffer to read, "But if we believe X then we'll have to...", or "If we believe X it will lead to...". This has no reflection on the veracity of X and so we see that outcomes are treated with more reverence than the Truth. It stings us, but natural selection has spun its ancestral yarns from physically realized outcomes, robustly eschewing the vapor thread of Platonism as an abomination against the natural order, fit only for the gossip of monks and the page.

Yet just as we feel all hope is lost and we sink back into the miasma, back to the shadow world of ghosts and gods, a miracle arises; everywhere before the direction of self interest is known, people yearn to see where its compass points and then they hunger for truth with passion and beauty and insight. He loves me. He loves me not. Here then is the truth to set them free. Free from the manipulations and constraints of the mendacious. Free to choose their path, free to remove the ring from their noses, free to look up into the infinite voids and choose wonder over whatever gets them though.

And before this feeling to cast blessings on the profits and prophets of truth, on the liberators and martyrs of truth, on the Voltaires, Galileos, and Principias of truth, on the Gutenbergs, Marconis and Internets of truth, on those serial killers of delusion, those brutal, driven and obsessed miners of reality, smashing, smashing, smashing every rotten edifice until all is ruins and the seeds of the new.

No, really, I can completely identify here. People see supposed outcomes of truth, alchemically, metaphysically, before the truth even enters and — KA-BAAAM — it is not licensed. It is shunned. It is beaten to death with a club.

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love, 99
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