The Truth in an Easter Egg

Easter is just around the corner and it reminds me that one of the great traditions connected to that event is the Easter egg hunt. I have a suggestion: let’s all write our congressional representatives and senators and invite them to an Easter Egg Hunt on the Washington Mall. The purpose would be to condition them to actually look for an answer instead of assuming they already have one. Somehow they all seem to have lost their way to the truth and have lost the capacity to actually discover it. Since the truth is often hiding in the tall grass of doubt, maybe the Mall is not such a good place because the grass is too short to make the search an adventure. Maybe we need to move it out of town to some neutral ground where green blades of grass outnumber greenbacks. Maybe some farm in West Virginia could host the event. It could be a kind of Woodstock event for congress.

In any case, we need to encourage both Republican and Democratic congressmen and senators to cast off their cloaks of certainty and re-learn the scientific method of searching for truth they supposedly learned in high school. The scientific method, for the most part, is based on trial and error. You set up an experiment; you try out a hypothesis; it works or does not; and then you make adjustments and try again.
Right now both sides are approaching problem-solving entirely wrong. The Democrats come up with social programs and then sit on them like brooding hens, regardless of whether or not they will hatch some real results. The Republicans, rather than proposing fixes, simply want to burn down what they see as hen houses of brooding Democrats sitting on rotten eggs. Neither side continues to tinker, to experiment, to improve, to progress.

The whole process is a false binary in which conflict is supposed to result in the production of truth, when, in fact, the process always leads to merely a temporary victory for one side that will soon be reversed when the other side obtains a majority. Majority rule does not result in truth. The majority is almost never right no matter which side wins. Consensus is the only process that leads to truth because consensus is the only way a body of people can actually get there. Here’s why.
Back in 1906, an in-law of Charles Darwin named Francis Galton, the coiner of the term eugenics, of all things, went to a fair in western England where he tabulated the guesses by the participants in a guess-the-weight-of-the-ox-carcass contest. When all 800 of the contestants had finished guessing, none had come very close to the actual weight. When Galton calculated the mean of the guesses, the contestants as a body had come within a pound of the actual weight: 1,198 pounds. The mean was 1,197 pounds. Ironically, the guy who believed in eugenics had actually shown that a large body of regular folks could actually ascertain the truth while none of them could do so alone.

Would it not be a wonderful development if our elected representatives put away their one-sided certainty and actually did their own thinking, worked as a body, and reached consensus? We’d all be so much better off in developing and improving successful government programs rather than sitting on failures or throwing out the whole idea of government programs as a waste of money. Right now it’s a lose-lose deadlock.

There is too much emphasis on conflict in American culture and therefore in government as well. Our justice system is meant to operate on the principle that out of a fair and thorough conflict between prosecution and defense will result a fair verdict. However, we all know that the side able to afford the best lawyers has a better chance of winning regardless of the truth. We also know that the lobbyists with the most money have greater influence over congress than do the regular folks. If we could somehow find a way to elect politicians who can and will think for themselves and not be influenced by big money and party line then we have a chance of getting ourselves governed well rather than governed least or big, a Morton’s Fork at best. If we truly want to move away from adversarial thinking, we need to stop electing so many lawyers and start electing more scientists. Science is the most uncertain discipline where theories don’t pass for fact. That’s why there is considerable humility among scientists who seldom argue their case by ignoring evidence in order to maintain a belief.

The Easter egg hunt is a good place to start. Those congressmen who collect the most eggs get to lead the discussion and present their best legislation for consideration. It would be a far better system than the one we have now.