While I don’t necessarily agree that Man needs lies, Terry Pratchett made a very good argument for it in Hogfather:
Death: Yes. As practice, you have to start out learning to believe the little lies.
Susan: So we can believe the big ones?
Death: Yes. Justice, mercy, duty. That sort of thing.
Susan: They’re not the same at all.
Death: You think so? Then take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder, and sieve it through the finest sieve, and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet, you try to act as if there is some ideal order in the world. As if there is some, some rightness in the universe, by which it may be judged.
Susan: But people have got to believe that, or what’s the point?
Death: You need to believe in things that aren’t true. How else can they become?
I can’t agree that it’s a good argument. Pratchett, through the character of Death, conflates the problem of constructing absolute standards with the ‘problem’ of finding material representations of complex concepts through isolating basic parts.
It’s the sort of alchemical thinking that should have been discarded with, well, alchemists. Of course you can’t grind down reality and find mercy. Can you smash a computer and find the essence of the computations it was carrying out? The very act of taking the computer apart and reducing it destroys the relationships it embodied.
Of course, you can find computation in atoms… just not the ones the computer was doing.
No, I don’t think that Death is conflating them at all. He is saying that Mercy, Justice and the like are human constructs and are not an inherent part of the universe. In this he is completely correct.
Where he goes wrong is in having only two categories “Truth” which seems to include only that which is inherent to the universe and “Lies” which he uses to hold everything else. There is no room in this philosophy for conjecture, goals, hopes, dreams, and the like.
Sadly, I have met folks who, while perhaps not as extreme in their classifications as this, nevertheless have no place in their personal philosophies for unproven conjectures, potentially true statements, partially supported beliefs, and the like. They are not comfortable with areas of gray between what they know is true and what they know is false.
I think the statements of Death are couched to appeal more to their philosophy than ours, but perhaps that is because Pratchett thinks such people more in need of the instruction.
While I don’t necessarily agree that Man needs lies, Terry Pratchett made a very good argument for it in Hogfather:
Death: Yes. As practice, you have to start out learning to believe the little lies.
Susan: So we can believe the big ones?
Death: Yes. Justice, mercy, duty. That sort of thing.
Susan: They’re not the same at all.
Death: You think so? Then take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder, and sieve it through the finest sieve, and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet, you try to act as if there is some ideal order in the world. As if there is some, some rightness in the universe, by which it may be judged.
Susan: But people have got to believe that, or what’s the point?
Death: You need to believe in things that aren’t true. How else can they become?
See Angry Atoms. Systems can have properties inapplicable to their components. This is not a lie.
I can’t agree that it’s a good argument. Pratchett, through the character of Death, conflates the problem of constructing absolute standards with the ‘problem’ of finding material representations of complex concepts through isolating basic parts.
It’s the sort of alchemical thinking that should have been discarded with, well, alchemists. Of course you can’t grind down reality and find mercy. Can you smash a computer and find the essence of the computations it was carrying out? The very act of taking the computer apart and reducing it destroys the relationships it embodied.
Of course, you can find computation in atoms… just not the ones the computer was doing.
No, I don’t think that Death is conflating them at all. He is saying that Mercy, Justice and the like are human constructs and are not an inherent part of the universe. In this he is completely correct.
Where he goes wrong is in having only two categories “Truth” which seems to include only that which is inherent to the universe and “Lies” which he uses to hold everything else. There is no room in this philosophy for conjecture, goals, hopes, dreams, and the like.
Sadly, I have met folks who, while perhaps not as extreme in their classifications as this, nevertheless have no place in their personal philosophies for unproven conjectures, potentially true statements, partially supported beliefs, and the like. They are not comfortable with areas of gray between what they know is true and what they know is false.
I think the statements of Death are couched to appeal more to their philosophy than ours, but perhaps that is because Pratchett thinks such people more in need of the instruction.