In my continual observation of the world, I note with sadness how it seems that a great many people have not made the commitment to immerse themselves in an uncompromised lifetime of truth. They have somehow squelched, or someone else has managed to squelch for them, that most natural of childhood traits by which people want to know and to understand the truth about things. The “why” has all but disappeared from view, at least in some areas of life; the reasons for things have become less important. The explanations and the logic behind things doesn’t seem to matter nearly as much as it once did, and they value the security of certainty in a matter much less than before.
Please understand that I’m not suggesting that most folks have made a commitment to a lifetime of falsehood and deceit. No, that’s not where I’m going. My thoughts at present are simply about how they generally keep the truth at arms’ length—not as if it were an enemy, but perhaps more like one keeps a romantic suitor whose constant interest fails to inspire the same interest in return.
By way of analogy, I imagine the swimming pool and those who haven’t made the commitment to a swim, but who stoop down to dip their toes or fingers in the water on occasion. This is how a lot of people interact with the truth. That “water” is not their natural environment–not their daily home–and they’ve never once explored its depths. But from time to time, they have cause to dabble in it a bit. Interestingly, it seems that the entertainment challenge of mere trivia may be the lure that draws people most often to that “water”. Did you know that the “horns” on the great horned owl are neither horns nor ears? Or did you know that JFK once proudly proclaimed in German to a Berlin audience, “I am a jelly doughnut”? These are the types of things that might prompt a dabbler to make a quick trip to Wikipedia or Snopes—and perhaps, once in a while, they may also give some careful, if short, consideration to matters that actually bear some weight, such as their own religious, political, or scientific beliefs.
When some issue is raised, such as might come about from a child’s question, or even from the rarer question raised by a peer, these folks will sometimes kneel next to the pool and put in a hand to swish about in search of the truth. I witness, however, that they rarely stay long. It’s as if they’re afraid of falling in. No, they don’t go around thinking, “I’m afraid of the truth”, but something more like, “This is not the right time to dive into all that.” And even when curiosity gets the best of them and they fall in, rarely do they think, “Well, I’m in it now; I might as well stay here and enjoy myself.” Instead, they seem in quite a hurry to get out and to get dried off, being more unsettled and upset by the terrible inconvenience of the matter than inspired by the wonders of the water.
Yet if you ask them whether they like the “pool”, they may well go on and on about how much time they spend there and how beautiful, peaceful, and relaxing it is. In response to the question, they may proclaim their solid and unswerving commitment to the truth via science or their religion or their political beliefs, and had you not already been watching the way they actually interact with the truth, you might well walk away with an overly-generous view of their commitment to and appreciation of the truth. Even if you ask them how much time they spend swimming, you are quite likely to get an inflated answer—not necessarily because they are telling a deliberate lie, but because it is their way of life to be overconfident in their own cognitive abilities and commitments.
What I’d like to know is where one can find the avid divers—those who spend lots of time right down in the water and who aren’t afraid to get wet all over. I look for them in the human institutions that so many hold dear, and on the rare occasion that I find one, it generally turns out that he’s on his way out of the institution, having discovered (or being yet in the process of discovering) that most human institutions are not for divers but for dabblers, and that he are simply not a good culture match for the institution in which he has found himself.
This is the difference between those who have made the truth a primary foundation in their lives and those who merely find the truth to be convenient or entertaining from time to time: One dabbler, leaning carefully over at the brink of the truth proclaims, “Aha! I have discovered that America is not a ‘democracy’ but a ‘constitutional republic!” Immediately after that “discovery”, he pulls his hand back from the water and shakes it dry. Meanwhile, a committed diver in that same pool will discover that that “constitutional republic” was merely the Constitution’s plan for America, but that we are in fact at present a mercantilist oligarchy. And the dabbler has no response to this discovery because he wasn’t really in it for the truth, but for some brief titillation of the intellect for entertainment purposes.
It turns out that there are a bajillion distinctions to be made between what the dabblers consider to be the truth and what the devoted divers can discover. Ironically, it seems that the most egregious of all these distinctions is that—and please keep quiet about this—dabblers are not divers. Yes somehow a great many dabblers think they are divers, so as they read this brief article, they are the ones thinking about how “spot on” this article is with regard to someone else they have in mind—some unfortunate soul whose skills in the truth are not on par with their own.
If you don’t have an ever-growing pile of distinctions of truth that are setting you apart from the world around you, you are a dabbler, my friend, and not a diver. And to make things even more complicated, even if you think you have an ever-growing pile of valid distinctions between your own understandings and those of the world around you, you may be a deceived dabbler—one who has not learned the truth at all, but who has been duped into thinking that you have!
We live in a world of dabblers and every single venue of human activity is filled with them. And to add more trouble to the mix, there are also those who seek to profit from them in one way or another—most of whom trade in making people think they are thinking when they are actually not thinking at all. They will say, “Welcome, would-be divers, let’s dive into these seven bullet points that the world around you is too shallow and ignorant to appreciate.” Never will they tell you, however, that these seven points were gleamed from the surface of the pool and that seven billion more lie beneath them! Nor will they tell you, at first, that you will not be welcome in their group if you insist on taking it deeper!
These scoundrels snag millions by printing the words “healthy” or “natural” on the box, and those who think they are thinking have already discovered plenty about this wonderful product when they read those words. “Ah, I’m going to do better than these idiots around me;” they think to themselves, “I’m going to buy this healthy food.” But do they turn the box around to view the ingredients? And have they ever studied what those ingredients are and whether they are indeed healthy?
True divers will quickly discover all manner of issues with the conventional “wisdom” and “truth” practiced by the masses. It is as stark a difference is would be a green goldfish amongst all the gold ones, or as would be a mansion in a slum neighborhood. Generally speaking, you can tell a true diver by the fact that he is willing to go it alone, wherever the truth may lead. Should his investigation lead him away from the established tenets of human institutions, he will follow it anyway. Dabblers, however—even those who think they are thinking when they are not—will find an excuse to remain in the institutions that tend to validate their existence, even though they are aware of at least some of the institution’s incorrigible flaws.
Error, presumption, and dishonest prejudice are the order of the day in our world and the true divers are its only hope. Meanwhile, the dabblers continue adamantly in their shallow “solutions” and won’t be persuaded that something deeper is needed, even if their shallow solutions should continue to fail for yet another century.
Some discover “diving” on their own. I cannot help but wonder, however, just what a difference it would make if the few “divers” out there were to become apt recruiters and trainers of yet other divers in a deliberate attempt to change the world. Surely, some appreciable number of dabblers exist who would be inspired to become divers if only someone would show them how!
