It is easy to say that the dogma of yesterday was incorrect or deficient. More than easy; it is routine, practically a cultural default.
We smugly bury the dogma of yesterday while replacing it with the new, correct dogma, just as yesterday we buried the dogma of last week while replacing it with the dogma of yesterday. Last week we buried the dogma of last month while replacing it with the dogma of last week.
It's what we do. It's what we have always done.
And yet, we will be shocked when the dogma of today is defeated by the dogma of tomorrow. Impossible! Who could have foreseen such a thing?
Then tomorrow's dogma will be struck down by next week's dogma, and we will be surprised again.
It's what we do.
We laugh when we see others do this while rarely recognizing when we do it ourselves. We're trapped inside the story.
The price of denigrating a position no longer held is minimal. By definition you no longer hold it, so what is there to lose?
Recognizing this pattern of replacement and accepting that your current position will likely see the same fate is another matter. You believe what you believe for a reason and accepting that you can be wrong now is rather different than accepting that you were wrong then. Today Man doesn't care about Yesterday Man at all as much as he cares for himself. Yesterday Man has no pull.
While we do it to ourselves other people & institutions are happy to do it as well. Adhering to today's dogma is an important part of social control. Take Global Warming for an example. It has had any number of revisions great and small and yet its proponents, who have followed each of those revisions closely, will take rabid affront to anyone who does not adhere to Today's version. The man who believes in the Global Cooling model of the 70s is of no value. The man who disbelieves today's model knowing it will be replaced tomorrow just as it replaced yesterday's is of no value.
It is the lock-step motion itself that is of value.
So what do we do about it?
As Jesus said, "Where a man's treasure is, there will his heart be also." The more we need to believe something the harder it is to let go. Taking care to prioritize the things that do not change will go a ways to limiting your need to hold on. Humility and an acquaintance with human frailty throughout history will help. Some lessons can only be learned with time.
The seed for this article came from a recent conversation with Boothe about the efficacy of doctors. I said that the recent Covid theater had damaged my trust in doctors. He responded with an anecdote about a medical worker in a position to know who said to avoid doctors entirely. Even though I had already come a ways to that point I failed to see that I was on a trajectory, not a destination.
"It was the old-timey doctors who harmed their patients, see? They didn't know what we know now."
The idea that we also know nothing, or near-to-nothing, had not occurred to me. I was trapped inside the story.
Where else is this true?
If you're not learning humility, you're not learning.
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