"THE TRUTH WILL OUT"

There's little doubt President Donald Trump won his first essential objective, that being to destroy what is called 'the truth'.

But though it's no consolation at the time, that always turns out to be a temporary victory, as Trump's turbulent second term is confirming. His word is no longer trusted.

In the end, a programme of lies can't replace 'truth' because what we call 'the truth' is plural, comprising many differing views. Lies simply take their place among any number of opinions on a topic.

And what emerges from that plurality, that diverse, quarrelsome mix, is people's rough-and-ready consensus on something else entirely: on what they see as right and wrong.

It can take an age to show, many may always deny it and not comply, but everyone's stuck with morality. 

That's what we mean when we say the truth will out. 

Girl, young woman, in a red coat

 

i woke up at 4.30 last night. I wasn't particularly tired, but for once I thought I won't start the day this time or I'll be tired today. So I re-arranged my pillow, snuggled down and eventually fell asleep, I suppose.

We were walking across a large square. We'd just left something, somewhere. It might hVe been an opera, but I can't remember that now. I'm not sure what it was. She was a young woman, walking not together with me, but going the same way, a little distance off. There weren't other people anywhere. She had a bright red coat on, and was very friendly, just chatting away. I heard her voice and what she was saying very clearly and even replied in my own voice. Though it was all very clear, I can't remember anything we said now, writing this. She was so friendly, open, easy and nice and I began to think, how can I ask if we could just meet again? Could I do that without making her think I was creepy or just ridiculous after just this little talk as we walked.

Now I'd moved on from the big open square we were walking across talking and was in a smaller but still open space. There was a young bloke standing facing me across there. The girl had gone, so I naturally knew I had to speak to him. Again, I could hear my voice very clearly as I spoke. I asked him if I could see the girl again. I said I didn't mean anything by it. I was anxious to assure him. it was just that she'd talked so nicely and had been so friendly to me. In any case, at my age, how could I mean anything else? I said. He began to take it in, bbut never got round to making a reply.

At that exact point I woke up. It was 6.46. Every word of this is true and as accurate as I can report it now, not made up or elaborated in any way. I've written it down as I waited to open the gate for Velli at 7.30 in the 'study' bedroom, because I think it must be the strangest thing that's ever happened to me. I had been walking, say, just three or four minutes in that world, I would estimate, walking along with some girl in a red coat I'd never seen before and couldn't make out exactly, somewhere else.

 

As you see, I wrote this piece less than a year before. https://paulwhelanwriting.blogspot.com/2025/10/dreaming-consciousness-and-our-brain.html

(I've posted this two hours later, after adding the link, just as I wrote it, unedited, typing mistakes and all.) 

THE COMMON MISTAKE WITH FASCISM

We must avoid the error of defining fascism by reference to historical figures labelled fascist. If we don't, it's not difficult to show differences between them and the contemporary model. The result is the confusion and uncertainty that fascism thrives on.

It has learned, first of all, that to repeat the past, you must change it. Extremism wears no uniform and insignia now and makes a salute at its peril. Such indulgences are a nasty reminder of what can follow. 

Instead, a down-to-earth, approachable leader flatters by sharing fears. There is a personal engagement with people's ordinariness, their sympathies and prejudices that are all part of their common sense, decency and feelings for fair play. Familiar, honest things. The idea is normality rules here, not a brood of fanatics.

This is more than "populism", as it's usually called: populism is only its method. It is an encompassing style of politics that finds a place in hard times and is calculated to grow on people. Its trade is grievances. It postures as not having legitimate opposition, only devious and corrupt opponents. It works by seizing opportunities thrown up by the issues of the day, welcoming the controversy that keeps it in the news. It is at all times tactical, very strong on what's wrong but elusive on what's right. 

If there's a defence against it, it requires equal calculation, a search of the values behind the plausible rhetoric. We can listen to the words but must also hear any words unspoken: war but not peace, for instance. We must hear words that scorn democratic norms and institutions, show contempt for tolerance, and slyly imply that violence is justice. We must particularly hear words that reserve or deny sympathy for a majority and a minority.

In these times of people power and social media, of the evasions and outright lies of self-serving politicians, we must be all ears. There are striking similarities between "Hitler" and many others who could turn out to be one; they're just dressed up differently for today.

WHAT'S THE PROBLEM WITH REALITY?

If there are waves and fields, if there is the electromagnetic spectrum, as Einstein reminded colleagues there is, and nuclear forces and gravity, then waves and fields, the spectrum, nuclear forces and gravity are real. 

That produces a problem, and a problem produces knowledge of the problem that leads to many theories and speculations.

It also leads to work on the problem.

We may get closer to an understanding, even an explanation, one day. That idea is real too - part of the problem.

Meanwhile, some will go on tackling the problem and others will go on theorising and speculating about it. Both and both together.

You've got to accept and allow for the fact there's the problem and there's us, intertwined, indissoluble.

That's the reality.

Is the 'hard question' - our consciousness - really so hard?

There are a great many things to say about human nature, but one feature stands out at all times: we enjoy nothing more than a mystery: if there isn't one, we'll make one. We're wide open to the latest conspiracy theory and the paradox, some contradiction in terms.

It's plainest to see on social media these days. People who insist the Moon landings were faked believe aliens land on Earth in flying saucers. They'll say it's impossible the Universe created itself from nothing, but that a Supreme Being did it is no problem. This Supreme Being is allowed to be eternal, though the Universe must be sensible.  The Universe must have a Beginning and End, like everything else.

It's a mystery we manage to think all this at the same time. But then are we really here, leading a life among trees, mountains, other people and cities, or do we only imagine we are? We say we're conscious of everything and, the biggest mystery of all, of our self. What is a self? What do we mean by being 'conscious'? What is this thing, consciousness?

Well, let's consider. First, it's not a 'thing'. It's a physical process by which not only we, but anything alive, interacts with its environment, modelling and adapting to it and therefore persisting.

We must assume many forms of life do this without being self-aware; we cannot know for sure if a sunflower is figuring it out as it turns with the sun, or if a dolphin has a sense of destiny. What we know is homo sapiens is always trying to find what being self-aware is and advancing many different theories and speculations about it. Often this leads to complicating rather than clarifying matters.

One current idea, for instance, is that consciousness dissolves any distinction between the observer and what's observed, and that goes to show that our consciousness is not a separate 'thing' in us but a sharing of some ultimate pervasive metaphysical essence.

Yet that's just what a physical process would produce in an individual organism or in a group as a body. An adaptive, persisting life form on Earth, or anywhere else it may exist, will be a natural, acting occupant in and of the surrounding Universe, not some puzzle apart.

How democracy works. And may yet disappoint Nigel Farage.

How can people best show their disapproval of their government? Get something done? Get change?

No secret. Under democracy, it's by voting. By their vote. Not the guy's next door. Not someone else. Everyone. Individually.

It doesn't help not to vote. A non-vote says nothing and can affect nothing unless it's a vote withheld from what you usually vote or voted last time. And even then that's not decisive. It can be explained away by 'low turnout'.

So the answer is to vote for someone who will frighten the life out of government, drive or force them into action.

And who else would that be in the UK right now but Reform?

Mr Farage may - stress, may - be counting chickens before they're hatched. And getting rid of Mr Starmer for someone else may turn out to be another (and big) mistake.

If Starmer's so bad, Mr Farage should logically want him to keep going.

Take nothing for granted under democracy. That's why it's the best form of government.

All things considered.

 

Mr Starmer v Mr Robbins

 

Isn't "the truth" - if "truth" has any meaning whatever in political life - that Mr Starmer (and No 10) wanted Mr Mandelson in place asap for political reasons, and that Mr Robbins, new in the post, flinched from delivering the bad news about the security situation, having technical authority not to disclose any news that prejudices or runs counter to the will and decision of the executive branch?

No wonder sophistry is having a field day. No power on earth or in heaven could cut this legal and moral Gordian Knot.

THE MADNESS OF KING DONALD

 

Trump's ambition is perfectly clear by now: to cajole and coerce into the hard right not just the US but the world, to put an end to the decadent times of "bleeding heart liberalism", as the neo-fascists see the years before and after 1989 when the enviable USSR fell apart.

That's what Kings do: exercise power as they see fit. To Trump, a deeply reactionary Monarch, that means making America great again, as in his mind it was once upon a time. It means turning the clock back.

A hopeless project, others will judge, except it seems possible in the gilded world of wealthy courtiers and impressionable subjects, backed with a powerful means to achieve it these days, the worldwide internet. Tweet your royal fantasies into reality for millions of people at a click. It works. Really. Proselytise, propagandise, pull the wool over eyes. Lie as required, to order.

After all, if Mars is to be under the American flag in 15 years or so, as Mr Musk predicts, why not the same on Earth? The biggest ships, the most advanced warplanes, the impregnable Golden Dome show Trump is unstoppable. "No other king and country in the world could do it". 

It's been coming for some time, though. The slow realisation, a growing unease, that it's too much to ask of the whole Stars and Stripes. 

It's not possible - not doable. It's not affordable. It's not ..."right".

Ordinary people always get in the way.

TRUMP'S LOSING SECOND TERM

The outline (I note the new buzzword is "contour(s)") of Trump's strategy in his second term is perfectly clear by now: to convert not just the US but the world to the hard right, to put an end to the decadent times of "bleeding heart liberalism", as the neo-fascists see the years to have been since WWII.

That's what Kings do: exercise power as they see fit. To Trump, a deeply reactionary King, that means making America great again - as it appears to him it was in the past. Amassing money. Needing no outsiders and keeping intruders out. In general, turning the clock back.

A hopeless project, many can see, except it seems possible in the royal world of wealthy courtiers and zealous subjects, backed with a means to bring it off, the worldwide internet. Tweet your fantasies into reality for millions of people at a click. It works. Really. Proselytise, propagandise, pull the wool over eyes. Lie as required, to order.

After all, if Mars is to be under the American flag in 15 years or so, as Mr Musk says, why not the same on Earth? The biggest ships, the most advanced warplanes, the impregnable Golden Dome show Trump is unstoppable. "No other country in the world could do it". 

It's been coming for some time, though. The slow realisation, a growing unease, that it's too much to ask even of the mighty Stars and Stripes. 

It's not possible - not doable. It's not affordable. It seems "wrong"...

Other people always get in the way.

What's wrong with Flat Earthers?

My internet comment: 'Flat Earthing' is about what most of us do a great deal of the time about a great many things - trust gossip, "common sense", hearsay and false reasoning, rather than keep an open mind, question what we're told and think for ourselves.

Rob's internet reply: That's what they say about us...

My reply to Rob: Absolutely. And the immediate cause of that is that our "Reason" - reasoning - can be employed to support things that are incorrect, whereas we all take it for granted that "reasoning" leads only to the correct conclusion. It simply does not. That, I believe, is obvious. 

The more interesting question then becomes why different people reach different conclusions in their "reasoning".

What is the nature of that difference and its causes? It can be cultural - who we "mix" with - but it appears to be also something genetic.

Rob's internet reply: Personally I think it's a mix of lack of education (for obvious seasons) and an anti-establishment attitude. When you are kind of 'angry' or jealous of people who in your opinion 'made it', you just attack their standpoints. Who cares about knowledge or truth?

Another thing is social acceptance for loners. I saw a documentary where shy people without social skills and friends gained respect in a group of flat-earthers (not online, they arranged large meetings) and even ended up on stage, addressing the public. And the same here: no-one really cared if earth was flat or diamond-shaped, they just enjoyed being together.

Science and Magic today

Magic is the way humans, from the start, explained agency. It was there eons before Science came along, the go-to explanation for events much longer than Science. 

Hardly surprising, then, that magic beats Science in the explanatory stakes still. What are quantum mechanics but the contemporary form of magic - there, but inexplicable? Invisible particles passing through walls. Effects without causes. People, like old-time wizards, able to change Reality. Wonders ...

So magic has another advantage it will never lose as long as we are what we are.

It's all of a piece with the human capacity to imagine, to marvel, and in that respect, is useful and beautiful. It takes imagination to see humanity as moving out into the infinite Universe. It takes a flight of Magic that leaves Science limping dully behind.

WHAT IS THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER?

Look up a dictionary. Oh dear. 

It says it's Conformity to fact or actuality. Reality. 

But today we're told there is no 'Reality'. There is nothing 'out there' or, if there is, it's virtual.

Another definition: 'A statement proven to be or accepted as true.' In other words, the truth is what's true. How does that help?

The only reality seems to be that it's impossible to say what the truth is.

Where's the 'truth' if I say the 'fact' is this way and you say it's another way? And if someone else disagrees with both our 'facts'? The truth, reality or the 'fact' then is that it's actually several, maybe many, different views of what the 'fact' is.

That's not relativism, as the soothsayers say: it's pluralism. But we miss the point by always arguing about the 'truth' when what we should see is we are arguing about our knowledge and why we have it.

The 'truth' is a word for the position or opinion each of us adopts on a subject and that is contradicted by others who have a different view.

We're not, then, in some grand search for something eternal. We're only in a permanent struggle to persuade one another in the moment. 

And from there, what emerges are things many of us find we can agree with, given time.

 

WHY YOU CAN'T COUNT ON OPINION POLLS

 

GB News is no more a news channel than Mrs Browns Boys is a comedy show  (Social media comment)

Politicians of all parties are always careful to flatter everyone by saying "the people" are not fools.

When I read the social media, it seems to me some people are foolish and some aren't. Some of "the people" are extremely sharp.

So, in one way, polls are right. In a democracy, you've got to count. Getting good government in a democracy is a question of numbers.

The trouble is polls count what people say, not what people are.

Our consciousness, brain and dreaming

(Once or twice recently I've used this blog like a journal, an aide memoire, to note something that I'd realised, concluded or decided on after a lot of thought. What, after all, does anyone write anything for but that, and in the hope that publishing it might in some way be useful to others? This piece is one more instance of it.)

I am convinced that our consciousness - the "hard question" - is the sole product of our brain, a material organ of baffling complexity that has a life of its own inside our head, as you might say the human heart or lungs have lives of their own in our body, working over lifetimes with no volition from "us", from whom "we" are.

The evidence is dreams, in which dilemmas, people, incidents, crises and whole worlds exist with a reality that can only be explained by the brain, from its genetic and bio-chemical composition, ambient culture and vast store of the individual's lived experiences and learning, creating a universe it controls and makes sense of in its own way. 

When "we" dream, we often recognise familiar content, maybe a lot, in the brain's story, but it's the brain storytelling. Like any other story we think we invent.

Humans or gods?

If the Universe is infinite, which can never be ruled out, it must contain infinite possibilities, in which case the emergence of oceans or a black hole, of a galaxy or mountains, or of a peanut or ant, isn't inexplicable but only an event.

From there to insist the emergence of a leg or of an eye, or of an entire living person, is inexplicable - that it defies the vast mathematical odds against it - ceases to be coherent.

It simply shows people as yet know too little of themselves, or perhaps believe too much in themselves, not that human beings are impossible.

From Lord Heseltine, Patron European Movement UK

Dear Paul,

Yesterday, I told the Conservative Party Conference in Manchester that we must not abandon the shared laws of Europe.

We cannot afford to forget the lessons of history. The rise of fascism across Europe, and even in our own streets, was only stopped by visionaries such as Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman and Winston Churchill, who worked to create a united Europe - an alliance based on cooperation, not empire.

Today, we face new challenges. The economic collapse of 2008, the Covid crisis, and the rise of populism across Europe and America have eroded confidence in governments. As I told BBC Newsnight last night, extremists are back on the march and are using immigration as a scapegoat. Yet the overwhelming majority seeking refuge are simply fleeing persecution and seeking to share in our standards of living.

Britain’s future lies in Europe, not apart from it. Our companies, our defence, our research, and our influence thrive through cooperation. Only together can we tackle global warming, defend freedom, and protect our economy. The young electorate also understands this: less than 20% of those under 50 think leaving Europe was right, and the tide is turning.

The European Movement has always stood for a Britain that is confident, prosperous, and influential within Europe. 

Both your membership and recent donation are making a real difference, Paul, thank you. Together, we’ve kept the flame of European cooperation alive at a time when populism and division threaten it.

History demands action - and this is our moment to act.

With determination,

Lord Heseltine

Patron, European Movement UK

My article just two days after the Brexit vote 

The Nature of the Universe

 

I can see myself still, 17 or 18, walking on to the school playground from 'the field' - the boys' football pitch alongside the girls' hockey pitch with a square between the two for cricket in the summer - reading Fred Hoyle's The Nature of the Universe; feel still my naive surprise at all the galaxies and millions of stars there were, knowing nothing of cosmology let alone about the Big Bang v Steady State dispute Hoyle had instigated. I even seem to remember thinking his Steady State Universe was the more likely, everything being kept in place by 'spontaneous creation' - after all, why not? 

When I say all these years later if God did not create the Universe, then the Universe created itself, I mean to mock the idea of either creating itself. Which leaves an eternal Universe no less possible, probable or certain than a Creator God.

To me now, what the Universe 'comes from' is whatever it was and is. I don't believe human beings can make sense of anything other than 'the Universe' is just that - all there is and always was, existing as whatever it is and may change from, to. We have been made part of it, not the other way round.

All these years later, I do not see how what I mean can ever be clarified beyond these words I did not have then.

 

How on earth can time not exist?

 

There’s even a famous song about it existing, from the movie Casablanca, and everyone knows the movie Casablanca.

We humans know that ‘time goes by’, time moves on, and space is where we park the car and hang our clothes. We see time and space as separate ‘things’. Always did.

Modern Physics suggests there is no such thing as Time and no such thing as Space separately like that, but only the-two-together as spacetime.

Can we really understand spacetime without getting into other mysteries of maths and geometry? Perhaps, if we don’t make the same mistake twice.

We need to think of spacetime as not some thing ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ something else, something we call the Universe, but of Time-and-Space together as a property of the Universe.

Now instead of getting all technical (as if I would or could!), Einstein is said to have got the idea for Special Relativity while going down in a lift somewhere.

Inside the lift, he intuited that if you were falling inside a lift that was falling, there would be no Space and Time anymore. Can we all imagine that happening? Just going on and on? Maybe we can, but not on Earth. Where then could it happen?

Only where there is no up and down, no left and right, no backwards and forwards. In spacetime infinite Universe. Where there is no Space and there is no Time.

 

How to understand why you're here, instead of making something up

 

Around 1620, a genius called Rene Descartes reasoned, 'I think, therefore I am'. He may have said it in French, 'Je pense, donc Je suis'. We know it famously in Latin, 'Cogito ergo sum'. But M Descartes would not say that today. Today, he would say, 'I am, therefore I think'.

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth" - Sherlock Holmes, 1890

*****

You can actually figure out the answer to this biggest question of all, from this simple experiment at home. 

Imagine you have 50 coins. You lay them all down 'heads'. (Easy enough to imagine. You don't actually have to do it.)

Now, toss each coin, one by one, carefully, in your mind. They won't all come down heads again, will they? You know that. You don't know how you know it, and you don't know how many will come down heads again. Or tails. But you know they won't all be heads again.

Now instead of with 50, you could do that experiment with 500 or 500,000 or 5 million coins. Imagine you do. You know the answer will be the same: not all heads (or tails), but of course not the actual numbers.

Okay. Now. After many, many experiments, experiment gives you not a definite number or 'answer' but a statistical probability. It's not a definite figure and it's definitely not 'true'. A statistical probability, by definition, is never certain.

And the really extraordinary thing that you know is that you know, in spite of however many experiments you do, it's still possible all the coins could come down heads again. You simply can't deny it. Whether 50 or 50 million. You know. You know that it's not absolutely and completely out of all possibility. You understand that it's not impossible.

That's Science. It's not certain. It's not the truth. But it's not making things up.

And it shows how and why you are here. There was some probability you’d be, in the Universe.

"In heaven's name, why on earth are we here?"

It's our call. There it is. If Heaven isn't the answer, we've got to find it on Earth. What have we got?

Three things are clear. The first is that you have a body and are 'here'. 

The second is we don't know how we got 'here'. No one does for sure.

The third is that we make things up. Ideas, theories and prophecies are what we come up with because we don't know something for sure. When we don't know something for sure, we make something up. Like we eat and breathe and walk and talk, we try to understand.

It's one of the things being here means. Trying to understand.

Then there's the deeply puzzling fourth thing: the 'here' outside our body. We'll never understand that. The best guess is that there's always been a 'here' outside our body, simply because no other idea, theory or prophecy is ever for sure. 

Here must have always been there.

It was just us that was missing.