We currently have an incumbent in the White House who has somehow managed to bedazzle a body of hand-picked officials and thereby acquired an astonishing degree of “apparent authority”. His word is now being fully accepted in the US governmental network as “actionable” and “legitimate”. A charmed circle of Yes-men and Yes-women stick closely to the line the incumbent wants. How someone, who is said to have told more than 30,000 lies when he previously served as president, can have brainwashed so many intelligent people into swallowing this kind of “authority”, beggars belief.

So is this apparent “authority” actually genuine authority?  Is there, indeed, such a thing as “genuine authority”?

This is closely related to the question whether something can ever be called ‘The Truth’. Taking the bull by the horns, the incumbent in the White House has named his new online media platform ‘Truth Social’. The word ‘Truth’ here is being brazenly used in a slick sense where it is effectively claiming to be…  the currently “dominant opinion” in today’s US governmental officialwordscape.

This leaves the issue wholly unestablished, whether the opinion in question is true. Can we expect the consequences to follow which would be triggered if the opinion were true? There is also the issue, how long is this extraordinary mesmeric dominance likely to last?

The Concept of Truth used to be underpinned-by, grounded-in, and identified- with, a much admired body of mathematical truths. It was formerly generally agreed that the established truths of maths were patently, timelessly and absolutely certain. Unfortunately, though, in the last 200 years the gurus of maths have systematically tended to “veer towards the exotic”. They seem to have become intoxicated by mazy notions of their own invention, especially ones which looked mind-boggling from a lay point of view. The notion that <<sets larger than infinity exist>> is the most extreme example. It involved swallowing the notion that sets could be bona fide mathematic objects, even when it was known that most of their elements were mathematically indefinable…!

The result has been —whether we like it or not— that the gurus have let fog enter the house of mathematics. When Morris Kline wrote his final book Mathematics, the Uncertain Science (1980) it carried a provocative implication —that some of the claims presently accepted by the mathematic hierarchy were probably invalid.  It should have been regarded as a Moment of Truth… a wake-up call… a Danger Signal… that a corporate U-turn was urgently needed. Unfortunately the gurus of the subject didn’t listen. The subject leadership preferred <<Business as Usual>>. They should have set-up a Working Party —composed of the world’s best mathematicians— to weed out the “dodgy, recognisably questionable” results which were in circulation and compromising the subject’s reputation. But they did nothing: they let this heavily “compromised state of the subject” be.

Charles Peirce had said in the 19^th century that “Truth is the opinion on which the learned are destined eventually to agree”. This is a step forward, because it suggests that a certain convergence of considered opinion is involved.  But the word ‘destined’ leaves the suggestion that full clarity about this may be quite a long way off. We need a more workable formulation… one which puts a manifest —palpable— convergence of disciplined opinion centre stage.  There is also the complication that we need to be sure that those assumed to be “learned” really are.

Now the IT hegemony has acquired much of its operable authority from sales-department hype, not to mention the heartfelt support of those mathematic gurus who are living in denial about their subject’s fog.  The computerists brazenly endorsed the mantra <<Computers have nothing to do with maths>> in the 1960s, an opinion also held by the leading gurus of maths, though for completely different reasons. Whether people who back such whopping lies can be treated as “learned” may be open to doubt.

So it needs to be said that a statement, p, <<is true>> when the evidence unmistakably shows signs of the convergence of serious, learned, disciplined opinion onto p. This formula offers an account of what it means when a scholar claims that p is true… It does not, and cannot, guarantee that p is true: there can be wholly unexpected turns of events which reveal that an appearance of convergence which formerly existed was a chimera.  A good example of such an unexpected truth volte-face is the recent emergence of Anti-Maths. For more than 2,000 years it was accepted as an unquestioned truth that <<there can never be another 100% abstract logos like maths: one quite different from, and not reducible to, mathematics>>.

But all this wishful thinking went up in smoke when it was discovered that Anti-Maths exists, as a logical inquiry about the implications of stable transcient reality.

There is a widely held view that today’s society is grievously short of genuine leadership. The substantive issue is, of course, whether the originators of policies have based them on thoroughly grounded, disciplined visions of how they will work. In particular, how the benefits expected from the projected developments will materialise. But this “leadership” will only be effective if it carries “genuine authority”. So a clarification of what we mean by ‘’leadership’ and ‘genuine authority’ seems to be required.

The answer is fairly obvious.  ‘Genuine Authority’ is invoked when a person in a recognised leadership role issues edicts which are generally perceived to be credible and grounded on a disciplined, rational approach. They need to be based on the truth, or on extrapolations based on true evidence… and especially on a track-record of previous edicts which turned-out well.

It was probably the demoralising effect of perpetual information-manipulation brought about by manic presentation-happy traditional media which first diminished the public’s faith in what they heard and saw on DVUs.

But this is chicken-feed compared with a dangerous new development which has been brought about by over-hyped AI.  A recent example of monstrous AI was that a Norwegian man was baselessly —inexcusably— accused by Chat GPT of murdering his own sons. We know that trigger-happy AI has a tendency to hallucinate. But when it is not hallucinating, it can (viciously) empower deepfakes of many different kinds. (And decades of social instability have led to larger numbers of trigger-minded people in the ordinary population.) These deepfakes are capable of doing an immense amount of damage, because we unconsciously expect a social process of great sensitivity quietly to bloom: but it can’t begin to bloom, when AI is inventing nonsense capable of upsetting any applecart, however secure. The common disinterested cognitive environment is being disturbed in a way which undermines any trend towards a genuine convergency of opinion.

It appears that a dramatic Mass Moral U-turn will be needed if anything like “modern civilisation” is to survive into the later decades of the 21^st century.

YOU CAN COMMENT on themes on this website: email your thoughts to per4group@gmail.com  CHRISTOPHER ORMELL around 1^st April 2025