Fractal Wrongness

Everyone is fractally wrong to some extent. The following is a framework for understanding where wrongness comes from and how to minimize it.

Fractal wrongness occurs when many incorrect understandings intersect and produce wrong statements on multiple levels for multiple reasons. The concept is deeper than just saying that people are wrong, and it is capable of helping one come to a greater understanding of how so many people can be wrong about so many things. It also provides a framework to sympathize with and relate to those who appear wrong from one’s perspective. Most importantly, it provides a roadmap to minimize one’s own wrongness.

Let’s begin by taking the case of someone who believes the Earth is flat. Objectively, there are many places on Earth where the Earth appears flat. There are also mountainous regions of the Earth, although mountains do not contradict the flat Earth belief, since mountains and valleys average out over large scales. In fact, one can compare the roughness of the Alps to that of the surface of a soccer ball (roughly) when scaled down. These are data points in the flat Earthers’ direct experience. The core reason why flat Earthers exist is due to their disbelief in second-hand evidence. They have never personally seen the curvature of the Earth. Some people have even run experiments in the presence of flat Earthers to show them that the Earth’s curvature exists. They showed in the experiment that a ship on the ocean disappears below the horizon beyond a certain distance from the observer. Then they go into a nearby multistory building at a higher elevation, and they can see the ship again, despite the ship not changing its position relative to the observer. Once presented with this observation, the flat Earther was converted, being an honest interlocutor in the exchange.

Now let’s examine something a little more intimate, namely religion. There are many different religions around the world, with somewhere between 4,000 and 10,000 distinct religions. Of those, approximately 77% fall under Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. About 31% are Christian, 24% are Muslim, 15% are Hindu, and 7% are Buddhist. In each of these religions, there are people with various levels of understanding, which can be thoroughly described with Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory. Each religion is fractally wrong. That is not to say they are completely wrong, just that the truth is tainted by many fractal layers of misinterpretation. It is in the overlap between these religions where one can find a rough approximation of their underlying truths. There are those who take the religious texts literally, others who take them figuratively, and others who take them as guides that point to that which transcends language and concepts. These groups of people are at different levels of development, and all but the highest level of development are wrong, with the higher levels being less wrong than the lower levels.

There is also atheism to consider. It is difficult to determine what percentage of the population is atheist due to their unwillingness to self-identify due to cultural reasons. They are also fractally wrong and generally find themselves at the “rational” level of development. In other words, many, if not most atheists, are beyond literal and figurative interpretations, but they are not at the level of transcendence. Atheists are at an unfortunate developmental level in that most others they interact with cannot meet them where they are at in understanding, considering that they understand more than the lower levels of development. Encountering those at higher levels of development is rather uncommon, given the state of civilizational development. Mystics could guide them to higher levels of development, but most atheists eschew anything religious or adjacent and thereby never encounter the higher truth obscured by lower developmental levels’ misunderstandings. The highest religious truth cannot be spoken, hence the millennia of misinterpretations that continue to this day. Since the focus of this post is on fractal wrongness, I will save the discussion of coming to the highest religious truth for a future post.

Dare I mention the duality of US politics? It must be addressed since a festering wound cannot heal properly unless acknowledged and tended to. There are truths and falsities on both sides. The same can even be said for centrists who pick and choose which arguments they align with. All are fractally wrong, again with those at higher levels of development being less wrong. To even choose to participate is to be wrong at some level. Things should be this way and not that way. The more one doubles down on a position, the stronger the division becomes. The division divides friends, families, counties, states, and ultimately, the country. The division keeps the populace distracted from the psychopaths who are running the show. Those psychopaths who game the system make out like bandits while everyone else gets the short end of the stick. But do not think that things could be other than how they are. Things are exactly as they are supposed to be, and the increased turmoil will lead to a revolution of some kind, if the populace isn’t sufficiently placated. This is an inevitability that the psychopaths want to avoid for as long as possible, hence the rampant proliferation of algorithmic content designed to keep one distracted and the psychopaths’ pockets lined at the expense of the suffering of the populace.

But this is how it must be. To want something other than what is is to suffer. No amount of resisting or arguing will alleviate the suffering, I can guarantee you that. The psychopaths will continue their behavior indefinitely, and marginal change will occur one funeral at a time until either mass extinction or mass liberation. The outcome entirely depends on one’s devotion to absolute truth (not just what one thinks is true at the relative level).

Fractal wrongness ultimately comes down to a lack of information, misinterpretation of information, or misinformation. The trickiest part is that the truth cannot be captured in language, and therefore any time language is invoked, deception occurs at some level. Since information is spread via language, all information is wrong to some degree. The Earth is not flat, nor is it a sphere, nor an oblate spheroid. Its shape cannot be precisely captured in language, only roughly approximated, with the approximations always falling short. The best one can do with language is to use the language to point out its inherent flaws and to point to that which transcends language, which again, cannot be captured by language. So, the only way to minimize one’s fractal wrongness is to stop believing in language and acting like language can capture the truth.