Everything I had once believed in suddenly seemed a lie. That was also true for my religion. Losing faith was a gradual process that took several years. I didn’t give up on it on a whim. I had friends in the Christian student club Alpha, and I could discuss the issue with them. In those years, Losing My Religion by REM became a number-one hit. I turned atheist but not hostile to religion. Some people hate religion because of trauma. But no one had forced me. I had chosen to be religious myself. My mother complained that I didn’t take care of myself. She kept telling me I was too skinny and looked like Jesus. And there was a lot to ponder. What is truth? And can we know it? Can we be sure about anything? Nearly every day, I went to the forest near the campus to ponder these questions. For several months, there was no end to doubt. Logic was the last line of defence.

I had been a simple guy, not aware of much. A******* had reproached me for being naive. It seemed imperative to fix that to fix my life. I followed the metaphysics course to learn what it was. It is about the nature of reality. The lecturer discussed ancient Greek philosophers. Some believed that earth, water, air, and fire were the building blocks of nature. Others addressed the nature of truth and what we can know. Then, the lecturer came up with something interesting. If truth doesn’t exist, then that must be true, so truth must exist. The non-existence of truth is logically impossible. At the time, it seemed the discovery of my lifetime. The truth is out there, somewhere, lurking, and it might one day take us all by surprise, which was somehow comforting rather than unnerving.

The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates sought the truth in his famous dialogues. The sophists were his opponents, the lecturer told us. Using clever tricks, these people made false suggestions. He had an example. A sophist would say to a peasant that he could prove that an empty glass equals a full glass. The peasant wouldn’t believe him. The sophist then challenged him to make a bet. He would ‘prove’ it as follows:

Sophist: ‘A glass half-full is the same as a glass half-empty. Do you agree?’
Peasant: ‘Yes.’
Sophist: ‘If two volumes are equal, and you multiply them both by two, they must still be equal. Do you agree?
Peasant: ‘Yes.’
Sophist: ‘If you multiply half-full by two, you have full, and if you multiply half-empty by two, you have empty, so a full glass is the same as an empty glass.

And so, the peasant lost his money. This sophist lived off defrauding people. The sophists weren’t popular with the general public, the lecturer said. More generally, they were relativists who didn’t believe in absolute truth. They thought the truth merely depends on perspective. Socrates opposed that kind of thinking. The truth is out there. It has always been there, is still there, and will be there. So, what I believed was fickle and could change. If I did my best, I could come closer to the truth. My doubts receded, but the comfortable feeling of certainty was gone forever. Something could always pop up, overthrowing everything I had learned so far. It had happened once. It could happen again.

Socrates believed that investigating matters with an open mind can bring us closer to the truth, and that greater knowledge is progress. In that sense, we have progressed. We can invent things, but forgetting inventions is much harder. That might require measures like burning books and murdering scientists. And we cannot undo our deeds. You can’t return to ignorance or inexperience once you have crossed a line into knowledge or experience. You might call that progress. Somehow, we think we are progressing. But are we? If it all ends in a nuclear Armageddon, it would all be pointless. So,

Making a career before the bomb falls
Working on my future before the bomb falls
I’m running around my schedule before the bomb falls
Safe in the health insurance fund before the bomb falls

And when the bomb falls
I’ll be lying in my suit, diplomas and my cheques in my pocket
My insurance policy and my vocabulary, aww
Under the apartment buildings in the city next to you

Just drop it then, it’ll happen anyway
It doesn’t matter if you run
I never knew you. I want to know who you are
I want to know who you are

Doe Maar, The Bomb

In the second-hand bookstore De Slegte in Enschede, I stumbled upon a booklet about Hegelian dialectic. The cover promised that it would be about progress using arguments. It began by stating that progress arises from a thesis (the current situation), an antithesis (a challenge), and a synthesis (a resolution), so that looked very promising indeed, and that was the reason for buying it. Once I started reading it, and to my great disappointment, it soon turned political. It was about framing questions with particular wording so that the solution would present itself, the book argued.

It looked like a textbook on propaganda, and a communist seemed to have written it. By using words, you define reality. It was also how the sophists operated, so it didn’t seem an honest quest for truth, because the facts don’t depend on the wording. But the question remains: what are the facts? Let’s illustrate the issue with a few examples. You can apply the tactic to the estate tax, like so:

• You can call it a death tax, thereby implying that governments profit from the death of people, suggesting it is a bad tax, or that the tax is evil.
• You can call it a parasite tax, thereby implying that the recipients haven’t earned it and suggesting that it is a good tax, or that not having the tax is evil.

People who have worked and saved have already paid taxes on their labour, and if there are wealth taxes, also on their estate. In that sense, it is unfair. Those who receive an inheritance usually haven’t worked for it. In that sense, it is fair. That is the problem with many issues. The opposing sides may seem equally reasonable. And there are practical consequences. Inheritance taxes can ruin family businesses, while not having them can lead to a class of billionaire oligarchs ruling society.

Framing can be misleading. Climate activists label tax breaks that corporations receive on fossil fuels as subsidies. These weren’t subsidies but lower taxes. These tax breaks exist because of competition. Corporations elsewhere don’t pay these taxes either, so a corporation would go bankrupt if it had to pay them. Production would move elsewhere, and nothing would change for the better. Climate is one of the most pressing global issues. The reason to mischaracterise the situation in this manner may be to fire people up by making them angry and inspiring them to take action, but it won’t help.

Hegel’s idea of a hidden truth behind seemingly irreconcilable views greatly helped me. There is a higher truth, and instead of taking a side, you can investigate opposing views and try to resolve them. A resolution is a more profound insight rather than a compromise. It is a brutal process as I have experienced firsthand. We don’t depart from our views unless we have no choice, so we usually do so only after failing utterly and being cornered with no options left but to admit that we are wrong. It is often also unclear who is right, so you can stick to your opinions until you fail. Hegel’s idea is that a competition of ideas drives history, so superior ideas replace inferior ones, and that this may require revolution and warfare. That would be progress, but there can be no progress without a goal.

Hegel envisioned that God’s plan worked like so. We would end up in God’s paradise through progress. That was the goal. In doing so, he laid out the scheme for a dialectical struggle between progressivism and conservatism, leading to achievements such as the end of slavery, workers’ rights, universal suffrage, equality between men and women, equality among races, LGBTQ rights, and the like. That progress came with activism and sometimes with warfare, such as the American Civil War. Marxists and the communists built on Hegel’s scheme and replaced ‘God’s plan’ with ‘historical necessity’, claiming that we would end in a workers’ paradise rather than God’s paradise.

Both sides of an argument represent different realities that can be equally true. One side’s reasoning may appear stupid to the other, and the right choice depends on the weight of the arguments. Hegel was far more important than I realised at the time. His philosophy is a foundational pillar of Western civilisation, and perhaps the only way in which Western civilisation might be universal, as it promises a path towards a world civilisation. At the time, all that eluded me. Still, the idea that opposing arguments both reflect an underlying truth put my mind at ease. I couldn’t live with the idea that there is no truth and only perspective. My previous ideas hadn’t become worthless overnight. They were as true or false as before, and so were my new views. Nothing had changed, except my perspective. The truth exists, and my beliefs are irrelevant. My doubts faded,

You say the hill’s too steep to climb
Chiding
You say you’d like to see me try
Climbing
You pick the place, and I’ll choose the time
And I’ll climb
The hill in my own way
Just wait a while, for the right day
And as I rise above the treeline and the clouds
I look down, hearing the sound of the things you said today

Pink Floyd, Fearless

I came to relate this song to the challenge A******* had given me and conveniently ignored a second part that didn’t seem to fit into the picture,

Fearlessly, the idiot faced the crowd, smiling
Merciless, the magistrate turns ’round, frowning
And who’s the fool who wears the crown
Go down in your own way
And every day is the right day
And as you rise above the fear lines in his brown
You look down
Hear the sound of the faces in the crowd

Pink Floyd, Fearless

For nearly a year, thoughts filled my mind. If I had done this or that differently, then things would have turned out differently. After initially being kind, A******* turned hateful within a few weeks. Having been hated all my life and not knowing any better, I accepted it. Yet, the dormitory felt like the place where I belonged. It was Paradise. Only, I didn’t fit in, and that was because of what my life had been like. Living there made me realise that it didn’t have to be that way. My childhood could have been different. At the time, I blamed my parents, but they had done their best. And that was the past, and the past was gone forever, so there was no point in dwelling on that. The future might be better if I changed my ways.

There were notable differences in backgrounds between A******* and me, and somehow they proved an unbridgeable gap. A******* appeared progressive and had lived a cosmopolitan life, while I was conservative and rural, and had not seen much of the world. Nijverdal was a rural area. Art and literature didn’t interest me. The incident foreshadowed a conflict that you can see today in several Western societies. There is a growing disconnect between leftist city people in intellectual jobs and rural people, like farmers, who lead an entirely different life. And so, came to see these cultural differences as a major contributing cause to the most epic disaster of my lifetime.

Until then, culture had seemed a vague concept debated by academics. Suddenly, it became very real to me, making me feel an urgent need to understand people who were different. I had to adapt and fit into various environments. It didn’t come naturally to me. Years later, I found out that I was autistic. And so, studying culture and human conduct became a conscious effort. My intuition had failed me, so I learned to understand differences and cultures by seeing the relationships between what people said and what they did, and by identifying patterns. People with similar backgrounds or properties display identical behaviour. Over time, it made me as good as, if not better than, others at understanding and predicting behaviour. After a few years, that began to show itself.

After finishing her education, my sister had difficulty finding a job. Yet my first application succeeded, and to a great extent, that was due to my understanding of the company’s culture, which allowed me to provide answers that made it appear as if I fit perfectly within the new corporate vision. That was not the case, but I had succeeded in making it seem that way. Despite applying for dozens of positions and being talented in fashion sales, my sister received no job interviews. My mother then asked me to review one of her application letters. The letter was boastful and without substance. For instance, it claimed that she had excellent commercial skills without any evidence to back it up, followed by more bluster without proof. And so, I asked my sister, ‘Where did you get this letter from?’ It came from a friend who had applied to the Dutch telecommunications company KPN. They hired her as a manager.

That made sense. KPN’s recruitment advertisements suggested they were hiring arrogant, boastful people without substance for management positions, which explained why they hired her friend. Most people would reject unsubstantiated bragging. After all, it was the Netherlands, not the United States. It might have worked in Amsterdam, where the cheeky people lived, but not in Arnhem, where my sister was. I told my sister that she could say she had good commercial skills, but should back it up with evidence. She had done an internship, and the company was very pleased with her, so I said, ‘Mention that to back it up, and tell what your job role was and tell about a few things you did.’ She then revised her letter, got interviews, and was hired soon afterwards. And you can see the consequences of not understanding culture. KPN was in a different league because it wanted to shed its dusty government image and play with the big boys in telecom. That didn’t end well, but that is another story.

Dutch public television featured human interest programmes about people living far away. You could learn about how people lived on the Mongolian steppe and their thoughts and beliefs. Minorities like Muslims and Hindus had airtime on Dutch public television, so that you could learn about them as well. Once at the Utrecht Centraal train station, a few Hindus handed me a book containing some of their Vedas. I had never encountered such a hazy prate, except, perhaps, Hans van Mierlo’s, making me quit reading after a few pages. When discussing what had happened at the dormitory with my best friend Arjen, he said, ‘You do not mince words. You say what you think.’ It is a quality that doesn’t help you in life. It can annoy people. Since then, I spoke my mind less often.

Featured image: El Uruguay a través de un siglo. Carlos M Maeso (1910). Public Domain.