Bias

We all carry our biases. I am an American of English, anglo-Saxon, Norman, and French extraction, raised Catholic but cognitively and psychologically aligned with the Whigs, Tories, Episcopalians, and Church of England. I was raised in the Puritan and Aristocratic traditions in an educated middle-class family, one side of which was rather privileged. And in that tradition, like the Founders, a Classical Liberal or Anglo Libertarian – not to be confused with the Jewish libertarians such as Rand, Rothbard and their javelina ideologies. Among the founders, there were two factions – the British that was skeptical of man, whose archetype was John Adams, and the French optimism of man, whose American archetype was Jefferson. As in most of life, I was optimistically Jeffersonian when young, and with the experience of life developed the skepticism of Adams if not the extreme skepticism of Hobbes or Schmidt. As an intellectual I consider myself completing the early 20th-century project of Hayek, Popper, Bridgman, Brower, Hilbert, which was overwhelmed by postwar pseudoscience, just as the British empirical revolution was somewhat overwhelmed by French (Rousseau) and German (Kant) sophistry. A condition from which I among others have sought to recover our civilization from this new reformation of mysticism.  In that sense, all three archetypes of that enlightenment among our Founders were skeptical of man but sought different means of ameliorating our baser instincts.

Voice

Every author must decide which voice he will use for his purposes:

• The voice of Authority: The General, the Judge, the Statesman;
• The voice of Mentor: The Scientist, Philosopher, The Professor, The Advisor;
• The voice of Entertainer: The Narrator, the ( … )
• The voice of Friendship and Care:  ( … )
• The voice of Comfort and Apology:  ( … )

This book is a work of logic, science, and law. As such I struggle to maintain the voice of the mentor despite that this book is a work composed in the vocabulary, grammar, and logic, and with the intentions of kings, generals, judges, and those few statesmen among our politicians who still endeavor to speak the truth. So accept my apologies in advance if I state what are now logical and scientific truths with certainty and conviction that is uncomfortable. And it’s uncomfortable because it means paying the cost of adapting our thought and values such that they no are no longer false and harmful.

Testimony

Writing in Testimony Will sound much more like I’m speaking as a prosecutor than a philosopher or scientist. That’s because philosophers advise, scientists describe, and the law decides. So the law doesn’t – and I don’t, prevaricate with comforting or polite words open to interpretation. The law does, and I do, prosecute claims, and judge the evidence. And we aren’t always addressing subjects that promote cheerful or comforting discourse, but matters of conflict, moment, and passion.