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CHAPTER FIVE

ERRORS ABOUT ERRORS

Ignoring them for Aggrandisement is Folly

"You will be making a great mistake if you do that!" rings out an admonitory voice. Why ? It was  because in the priorities in the agent concerned, zeal and checking did not rate highly enough, and profit with ease rated too high.
In the long run this could destroy the business, wreak havoc in the future for those concerned and annoy the recipients of the goods concerned, wasting their time and resources also.

Some like determinism, with everything so gloriously necessary that mistakes do not occur: that is a philosophic fad.

One once told me this: If you go wrong, it is like a machine which has a fault. It is not a mistake. After all, he may have been thinking, a mistake does not sound very deterministic, and it allows one to question decisions and the directions of history, such as we would like to institute in this country by sleight of philosophic hand. It is an easy way. It is difficult to see how he really could have believed it.

In any event, it needed correction. A machine, I indicated, itself does not resemble man in this. Your indicator to remove this consideration from view is mistaken. The machine has no such latitude. If it does not do what one expects or hopes or the manufacturer or inventor had in mind, it is still doing what its physical constitution and constituents in their current combination indicate. It just goes on in its own way.

The mistake which you allege is something entirely different. It is that of the expectation that it would follow the inventor's desired pattern. That is one thing. If it fails to meet due expectations, then that is another. There is indeed a mistake, but ONLY in terms of the PERSONAL. First, there is the good or bad plan, in terms of effectiveness, of the inventor. It may not have covered all the contingencies, and have been caught out in the circumstances which arrived. Again, it may have involved a false application of a concept of mathematics or even a mathematical particular. It may have contained inadequate quality products, which may have worn out early .... and on and on, according to whichever mistake, whether involving deception for gain, or not, by the inventor. It is he or she who made the mistake, if better results for your purpose were guaranteed. The machine however merely follows what it has and is, with whatever hope or pretence in the very distinct background.

Hence error is NOT AT ALL like a machine that breaks down. It is like a product with specifications which it does not meet for good and sufficient reason. The reason is what propels it (the constituents and planning); the error is what disenables it, IN ACCORD with the actualities of the case, and CONTRARY to specifications made by human estimate and expectation, or hope.

Error lies not in the machine but in the thought behind it, relative to the expectation cited. It is personal, inapplicable to the machine, which plods on regardless of human error; and by doing so it exposes (or not) human error, without any error of its own.

To reach ERROR, you need far more than created controls that fail expectations, in the governed agency.

It is its government, design, intelligent background which has failed.

That is very human. It is because man is not material, or crucially governed by necessary forces. Such is the stuff of fiction. If he is on drugs, on scams, on fever, or in weariness, in pretence about his capacities and so on, he may indeed err. Pride may do much the same, anaesthetising him to reality, until he possibly has lost billions. There are areas and grounds for error in the human case, which is of interest to us, since it is our own.

You may have false ideals, governing what you would like to be, though it is not available, and following these may disjoin you from reality, which goes on anyway, while you and your products diverge in this or that way. You may have false ideas, leading to misconception and mistake in what you say or produce. You may use false logic, vandalising the truth, and find yourself an invalid mode of thinking or acting or both. You may have false appetites, deluding you by their very passion, as to what are the possibilities before you; and you may have false concepts about the results of those appetites, leading you to unwise actions, which have true results, contrary to obtuseness about risks or even virtual certainties. You may have false dreams, notions about the universe, the human soul, the nature of man. It is rather hard to estimate when this list would cease, for man's spirit can be as variable as the waters of the sea, and mists can obscure or light reveal, leading to whole galaxies of faults with their mistakes, embraced unfortunately, deliriously, clumsily or weirdly.

This being so, mistakes are in kind, predictable, inflictable, and can be derisible when wrought in the face of folly, squandering capacity and reputation like a falling star. Even one gifted with foreseeing the coming crash site, may proceed amiss, being wilfully oblivious of it. These possibilities as basis extend and extend ... You may even make apparent mistakes to deceive an enemy, so that he will assume you witless to some extent or other, as David did in Gath. These of course are not qualified to be mistakes - but they may be to appear so - being intended, and in actual conformity to purpose. They involve mental directives, evaluation assessments, often loyalty embroilments, perspective inventions and retentions or otherwise, grounds for the same which no amount of matter is ever found to  deploy, though programmatics may force made entities to conform to someone's will, so illustrating the abyss between the material and the personal. The programmatics are only an indirect way of making a little world of your own by mental contrivance, just as you may wish, feel constrained to make, or make idly for a dream's reward. They are merely relatively static personality extensions, variable or fixed, according to the directions of human purpose.

Thus, someone may indeed with point say, If you do that, as we saw, you are making a great mistake.

There is nothing deterministic about it, and it may indeed depend on a rank determination of the will in terms of concepts and imagination, to achieve something quite irrational, though argued for.

In all this, the man is not like the machine: the machine is only one measure of the extent of man's mistake; just as the result is another. Deterministically conceived things cannot do this sort of thing, having no options, so that in that case there can be nothing amiss, there being only an apartheid universe uninvolved in such personal provisions, actions, perspectives, inputs, dreams, hopes, irrationalities. This led to the ludicrous error in some Communist practice or morally condemning people who were deterministically conceived in the first place. How could they  be blamed if the oblivious offscouring of deterministic control ? Only by the exceedingly common practice of retaining suppositions contrary to fact and reason, and then wanting to do some common sense thing in their absence, forgetful of the  same. These combinations do not agree. Hence force is another aspect of the method in such cases. It is of course inclined to be disagreeable, but cannot reconcile the  opposites involved. Amid all this, Stalin allegedly slew tens of millions of persons. The tensions involved when will and antinomian antics clash are very considerable.

Of course, as always, if you want to remove logic itself, and take that step. making it invalid, then at once you cannot consistently debate at all.  You then withdraw. For if you want to feature, focus or push your ideology, you need reason with which to do it. If that then becomes irrelevant, through your own choice of combat position,  being deemed invalid, or inapplicable, then by your own word, you go. Application of your supposition just means that your contribution in its own  terms, is  marked invalid in advance, should you seek to proceed with that from which are now disjoined. Reason cannot be both useless and used, invalid and used to validate. There are always limits to the ridiculous. This is it.

This is just one more irrelevant supposition then, from which it is necessary to secede.

Sites of interest here are It Bubbles... Ch. 9, Repent or Perish Ch. 7, and Ch. 2.