More Powerful Than a Nuclear Weapon: Truth

The Pharaoh Index and the architecture of distributed trust.

There is something almost absurd about the image.

One man stands before an enormous crowd.

Everyone surrounding him appears to believe the same thing.

“Yes. You are all wrong.”

At first glance, this looks like arrogance.

Sometimes it is. A person can be spectacularly wrong while being spectacularly confident.

But human history contains the opposite possibility too.

Sometimes the single person really is right.

Einstein famously said, when challenged regarding the his general theory of relativity – “Why 100, if I was wrong, 1 would have been enough”.

The 1931 collection titled Hundert Autoren gegen Einstein (“One Hundred Authors Against Einstein”) compiled various essays and critiques against his theory of relativity. Part of this was due to the Nazi Movement and was therefore what was then labelled “Jewish Physics”. People still have this tendency today of labelling God’s creation by hurtful names – such as “children are terrorists” , “Gaza’s children are terrorists”. We would be well minded to remember not to use such language, when one of the great Jewish Scientists, who had to run away to Britain was himself subject to it at one point in time.

And everyone around him really is wrong. We almost have a sense of DeJaVu with certain humanitarian crises today where children are killed. Everybody who argues otherwise, knows deep down, from the offset, that they are really wrong. The harder you have to shout, the more wrong you usually are. Truth whispers quietly. It has no need to shout.

The Qur’an repeatedly places prophets in precisely this position.

Noah (alayhis salaam) before his people.

Abraham (alayhis salaam) before an inherited civilisation of idols.

Moses (alayhis salaam) before Pharaoh.

Muhammad ﷺ before Quraysh.

Each confrontation looks radically asymmetrical.

the state, the tribe, inherited customs, economic interests, armies, priests, prestige and numbers.

a human being carrying a proposition.

That may be why truth is ultimately more powerful than a nuclear weapon.

A nuclear weapon can destroy a city.

It cannot make two plus two equal five.

It can kill the person speaking the truth.

It cannot kill the truth he spoke.

And perhaps the most important political question of our century is therefore not merely:

Who has the most powerful weapons?

How do we construct societies in which truth can still reach us before our power destroys us?

That requires something I would call an infrastructure of trust.

The prophets were epistemic minorities

He speaks publicly and privately, by day and by night. His people do something psychologically revealing:

“Whenever I called them so You may forgive them, they pressed their fingers into their ears, covered themselves with their garments, persisted, and acted arrogantly.”

They do not defeat the truth.

They attempt not to hear it.

Then Abraham asks his society the forbidden question:

“What are these statues to which you are so devoted?”

They answered, “We found our forefathers worshipping them.”

Their defence is not evidence.

Everyone before us believed this.

Abraham refuses to outsource reality to consensus.

Moses confronts something more formidable still.

Pharaoh possesses not merely an opinion but the machinery of a state.

He eventually declares:

“I am your lord, the most high.”

Yet the Qur’an offers an extraordinary diagnosis:

“They rejected them, although their souls were convinced of them, out of injustice and arrogance.”

وَجَحَدُوا بِهَا وَاسْتَيْقَنَتْهَا أَنفُسُهُمْ

They denied while inwardly knowing.

The problem is no longer information.

The evidence has arrived.

The problem is what accepting the evidence would cost.

But being alone does not make you right

This distinction is crucial.

The prophetic model should never be reduced to:

“Everyone disagrees with me, therefore I must be a courageous truth-teller.”

History contains countless solitary people who were simply wrong.

Minority status is not evidence.

Neither is majority status.

And science gives us spectacular examples.

Copernicus did not prove that the world was round; educated Europeans had known the Earth was spherical for many centuries.

His revolution was more profound.

The........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)