Truth is under no obligation to make sense. It is inherently irrational, because truth is obliged only to state the facts as they are, without distortion.

Only conclusions and interpretations of facts can be rational or not. They are rational if they follow Aristotelian logic, regardless of the truth of the premises. You can make a perfectly rational logical process that starts with the premise that all men are crocodiles, another premise that Socrates is a man, and correctly concludes that Socrates is a crocodile. Rationality, therefore, doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with truth.

Truth is also under no obligation to be elegant. The Greeks loved elegant lines of thought, and that almost always resulted in their adoption of utter falsehoods. Truth can be messy and inelegant. For instance, the beings on Earth evolved this way not because some elegant master plan of a wise divine being, but because global cooling and a big asteroid impact wiped out the dinosaurs, and forced the survivors to either learn to hibernate, or to migrate to warmer parts, or develop big enough brain to be able to make clothes and use fire. This entire set of circumstances is inelegant, but true. There’s no circle or a sphere or a dodecahedron underneath, just a huge mess of thermodynamics, entropy, accident and chaos.

The reason why I believe in some things that sound crazy isn’t because I think they are elegant and rational. The entire model that sees Sanat Kumar as an explanation of the mess we are in is the exact opposite of rational elegance. It is ugly and messy and based on randomness and chance and exceptions, not all-encompassing general rules that make elegant models. So, it’s neither its elegance nor rational aesthetics that make it appealing. Unfortunately, it just happens to be the best interpretation of facts and evidence that I managed to formulate. I didn’t even make it up; for the most part, I simply accepted it, because huge parts of it were already provided by Gods, saints and people gifted with particularly good spiritual vision. I actually knew about that model for a decade and a half before I stopped resisting it – I hate it that much. I prefer impersonal models. I prefer a model of gravity that simply states that mass curves space. I wouldn’t like a model that assumes existence of an evil god Tatarus under the Earth, and explains gravity by him trying to suck everything into his realm. However, the fact that I would hate that model doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t accept it if forced to do so by the facts. That I had to accept a model that ascribes huge part of all perceivable phenomena to a quite insane spiritual being who did it all out of hatred for God and out of wish to prove some crazy point, is painful. I actually tried to come up with some other interpretation of the facts, for instance to interpret the Sanat Kumar phenomenon as a very old giant tulpa created in the Earth’s astral field by some form of coherence in thinking and emotions by a very large number of humans and humanoid beings that preceded them in evolution. If this structure were to behave according to the classical tulpa model, it would be a very good explanation of the perceived reality. However, I am aware that this explanation is merely an outburst of my hatred for the inelegance of my primary model, and that I was willing to ignore a significant amount of facts and evidence just to come up with an impersonal, elegant model.

However, if we come to elegance, how is inheriting a bad powerful entity less elegant than making one gradually by means of collective spiritual pathology of mankind? If we imagine that the Sanat Kumar entity was indeed created by mankind, and that mankind perished in an ice age or a nuclear war, and he survived to make weird, irrational things later on, how would his existence and actions be perceived by our successors? Would they perceive the solution as elegant?

So, my best effort at achieving intellectual elegance only produced the same inelegance, one step removed. It’s like the panspermia theory of the beginning of life – it removes the problem of primordial soup from Earth only to displace it into the supernova remnant cloud. It is for this reason that I simply suspended my desire for rational elegance and accepted this mess as it is – filthy, disorderly and inelegant, with the only condition that it be as close to the truth as I can possibly understand it. And that, of course, is the limit of the entire problem, because the actual truth and the actual facts might be completely beyond the grasp of human cognition, and only accessible in a pure spiritual state, unbound by physical incarnation. Be it as it may, I will continue trying to comprehend it, to the best of my abilities, and without conditioning the facts with the prerequisite of rationality. After all, if platypus and blob fish exist, then any kind of weird inelegant shit is not only possible, but probable.

I’ve been thinking about how politics, philosophy and religion are always intellectually degraded when the medium for their presentations is a conflict of opposing opinions.

This is opposite to what people believe, of course; it is commonly believed that a dialogue of opposing views improves the arguments, but this is not my experience. According to my experience, I can present the highest quality of arguments and make the best possible case for my ideas when I’m left alone to write a careful, deliberate monologue in which I can explore ideas in peace, and write one of my rhetorical arcs. Occasionally, I can improve my arguments in a discussion with an intelligent, knowledgeable person who has an intellectual position that is very close to my own. If I’m having a discussion with someone whose opinions differ greatly from my own, the result will be that everything beyond the intersection of our opinions will be hotly contested, and since I’m yet to see someone actually change his mind based on good arguments from the opposing side, usefulness of the entire exercise is questionable. The best discussions take place when the point in contention is very narrowly constrained; the wider the constraints, and the greater the area in contention, the greater the probability that the entire discussion will degrade into a shouting match and an ad hominem shitstorm. Similar but slightly different viewpoints, on the other hand, can create very fruitful brainstorming sessions, but of course one must be careful not to descend into the echo-chamber mentality in which outputs are reused as inputs and people start using very dubious suppositions as facts on which they proceed to build quite insane mental constructs. It must always be an exercise in “let’s see where this leads if we take the arguments to their reasonable limits”, but one must remain mindful of the word “reasonable”.

I tried dialogue as a rhetorical instrument. God knows I tried. The results were almost always insignificant compared to what I could do in a monologue, when I can explore my thoughts without interruptions. What interruptions can do is clearly visible in TV and Youtube arguments where all discussions worth seeing are basically between people of very similar positions. Whenever their positions diverge too much, the discussion degenerates and is very difficult to watch. I’m not talking only about the positions I personally agree with – for instance, I personally hate Islam and hold it in greatest imaginable contempt, but if I want to understand what the Muslims really think about an issue, I will watch them talking to other Muslims, expressing their true thoughts unhindered and uninterrupted by opposition, among people of similar beliefs. Watching a Muslim’s speech interrupted by constant shouts of consternation isn’t useful for finding out his actual opinion. The same goes for everyone else; a discussion between advocates of very different positions is more of an exercise in rethorics and skill in manipulating the audience with sound bites, than an exercise in finding out any kind of truth. I, personally, don’t function well in a situation where I have to condense my entire position into less than five carefully weighed soundbites delivered with humour and cynicism. I prefer to tell a story, to make an atmosphere in which you can get a taste of an idea cooked in its own juice. I prefer it to be a complete meal, rather than a short snack.

Don’t get me wrong, I am good in a live dialogue, but I’m deadly in a written monologue, because when I’m arguing with someone in realtime, I have less time to consider my arguments and it is more difficult to source supporting quotations and facts. I have to rely on my memory, which is quite good, but not as good as a search engine that allows me to find supporting facts on the Internet and link them into the narrative. In a realtime discussion, I’m also limited by the capacity of the audience for processing what I’m saying in realtime, which is too much of a constraint for my arguments to bear, because in written form I can go far beyond almost anyone’s ability to follow in realtime and count on the audience re-reading the texts for years in order to digest them properly. If I did that in a realtime discussion, I’d lose them entirely, because in a live discussion you win if you can leverage what people think they know, and introduce only as much new information as can be digested in realtime. If one degrades things further from the already low baseline, by introducing opinions that are so divergent as to make any kind of a discussion hard (for instance a physicist and a flat-Earth apologist, or a religious mystic and a militant atheist), you can be sure only that the opponent with most practice in delivering comical soundbites will “win”, but the entire exercise will not be greatly informative.

So what I’m saying is that I like to watch opposing ideas and philosophies and see where they lead when their advocates are allowed to extend them to their logical limits and beyond, in the same way in which I like both hot sauce and ice cream. I just don’t like them mixed together at the same time, because the result is useless.