The accuracy of an observation is inversely proportional to the
amount of disagreement it engenders. Cinder blocks (U.K.
breeze blocks) are heavy. Razor blades are sharp. Skunks are
smelly. These are accurate statements because only the farthest
fringe would contest them. They are 'true' if you will. Being
such simple valuations we know that only an unusual mind would
argue these points. If I walked up to someone in Bangalore and
said, "Hey, Skunks are Smelly" the most likely response (other
than "Get away you strange, strange American") would be "Oh? I
wouldnt know". Those are empirical and self evident. Meaning
no pejorative, I'll term that sort of thing "peasant knowledge".
These are the things every peasant knows. The life skills of the
peasantry were, little more than a century ago in the Americas,
encyclopedic with empirical truths. The world in which they
moved, lived, worked, and laughed was one of fact.
It was upon this grounding that the mystical orders laid their
webs of abstraction. Religion, State & Science. All three added
their veneers of philosophy to the truth that the peasantry had
cultivated since before history itself. Writing: First created
to facilitate accounting records; Clocks: Ubiquitous with the
advent of intercontinental trade (one can't accurately measure
longitude without a reliable timepiece) and in every home with
the industrial revolution and the subjugation of the working
class; Agriculture: The 'capital A' variety as only practiced
where populations are dangerously & unnaturally large as in
early city-states.
It's safe to say that you and I, as parties to this text,
support large amounts of abstraction and this abstraction
interferes with our ability to process facts. To the peasantry,
we are dead stupid - and will likely die in a pool of our own
soil. Its cold and I am hungry. I will under-dress for the
weather, get in my car and drive a mile to a convenience store
to buy a frozen pizza made in a factory by slaves (migrant
workers, cows and wage laborers) and bring it home to heat in a
metal box that to all intents, constructions, and purposes is
magic. Others offer reasons why it works but the more you delve
into the physics the less knowable it is. I'll eat this crap
unconsciously while staring at another metal box. Ah. This is
the life! - The peasant will throw some wood on the fire
(they collected fallen branches and trees last week to last a
while longer), go into their root store and grab out a squash
that has just started to turn soft, dice it up and throw it into
the ever-present stew pot where yesterday's rabbit gets more
tender and succulent by the hour. They will eat because they are
eating, later as dusk settles over the fields they will carve a
new pipe or visit an old friend down the lane.
Rustic signs painted in Chinese prisons extol us to 'Simplify'
our lives. We buy shelves full of books on minimalism, we turn
off our televisions, build a tiny-house and move from Twitter to
Mastodon. We say we are becoming more genuine, more in-touch,
more real. Namaste. But we are doing no such thing. We're simply
exchanging one set of abstractions for another.
