And well they should be. It’s actually very hard for a single person to effectively judge the fitness of their own ideas and actions. And especially when part of what we’re wondering is how well those ideas and actions will operate in a complex society composed of many members, that’s very hard to figure out without input from other people who are proximate to us in that structure. It’s very hard to simply imagine with any detailed accuracy what other people might think or have to say or how they might feel. So we rely on the marketplace to price our ideas and actions, positively and negatively.

The idea that people hold a position simply because they believe it isn’t quite true, because it isn’t complete. Our own sanity and ability to understand and navigate the world isn’t something that just belongs to us, it isn’t some purely self-contained structure. It’s an ecosystem. It’s alive. And it’s in relationship with the rest of the social world to maintain and calibrate itself. The point at which any given behavior or position becomes very costly and an opposing behavior or position becomes significantly beneficial is the point at which large amounts of people will simply change their minds about it.

It’s partly true, perhaps, that they were convinced by some argument. But those arguments likely already existed and have for generations, if anyone was willing to simply apply their mind. The validity of an argument or appeal, and even your ability to consider it, is in a very large part determined by the system for evaluation you are embedded in, the moral-social economy. So it isn’t so much that a new argument arose and was convincing. A new set of conditions arose that made it possible to accept an existing argument as convincing. A framework arose to validate and reward being convinced by the argument, or at least to make it acceptable, and possibly to punish not being convinced. To be sure, in every society, in any possible society, there is always an enormous cost to be borne for not being convinced, regardless of what it is that you’re supposed to be convinced about.

This is the tricky bit about objectivity and subjectivity. We are all subjects, so we are affected by our position as individuals with a particular perspective and as individuals lodged in a particular environment. But we’re also affected by the objective world. It expresses itself to and through our subjectivity. And thought is a kind of negotiation with both, trying to align them.

And a good society, a wise society, is one that is in the best relationship possible to the truth, to objectivity. It has aligned its subjective positions most effectively in relationship to the underlying objective realities. If, for example, your position is that there are no objective realities, only subjective ones, then 1. You’re kidding yourself, you know that’s false from direct experience, and 2. Bad news, I can say for certain that you’re in the wrong relationship to the objective elements of human reality.

Society helps us to align ourselves with what it perceives to be the proper relationship to objective realities. Things we have to work with and accept. They carry a certain kind of force, a demand. They carry inevitable costs if we ignore them, and they carry inherent benefits if we respect and align ourselves to them. And since we want to avoid those costs and secure those benefits for ourselves and for our whole society, society itself sets up social incentives and disincentives for accepting or not accepting certain foundational value propositions.

I say value because if there wasn’t a value element to the objective truth then it wouldn’t have much significance and wouldn’t require social engagement, in part because there would be no actionable consequences to the idea. There are some things we learn that don’t really matter that much to most people. Because they have no relevance, they do not affect any significant question of action. There is no value heirarchy, no better or worse outcome to be realized by aligning ourselves with that bit of knowledge. Value presupposes some sort of meaningful embodiment, that there is some posture that our knowledge with allow us to take to align our relationship to a truth, such that we either avoid negative outcomes or enable positive ones. If there was no possible value element to a given piece of knowledge, then it may still be knowledge, but will not have any moral significance. And so people might be interested in it, but it won’t matter that much to them.

It is the demandingness of objective reality that we recognize as its defining quality. It’s ability to force certain kinds of outcomes on us regardless of our preferences or even awareness. So we want to know about those kinds of things. They matter. And we want to be in alignment to them. And the moral economy of society helps us do that. We rely on the assistance of others to accomplish that task, understanding, interpreting, and evaluating a world of near infinite complexity. And we transfer the force, the fear, the attraction that those objective realities contain to our moral frameworks and moral expressions in the human subjective world. We speak as the voice of God to one another. With the force and the compulsion of a demanding, objective, super-reality.