Why decentralizing authority also means decentralizing truth

This lecture reminds me of another lecture that philosopher Robert Schmidt did back around 1995 on Plato's Same and Other in Berkeley Springs, WV. Interesting thing about Plato though, is that he wrote dialogs.

If you've ever read any of these dialogs, you will notice that Plato never comes out and says directly what he means. He doesn't impose upon himself the position of authority. In his dialogs, Plato decentralized truth by distributing his ideas among all the characters in an attempt to show something that is hiding.

In Greek there's this word "aletheia" which is the word for truth. It literally means "unconcealment". The implied question is "why is truth hidden"? Martin Heidegger who coined this term said that there's a related word "lanthanein" which means to escape notice.

If you're told directly what that thing is, the "sameness" will create a uniformity and continuity that will blind you and you will fail to notice. This is because in order to see truth, it has to stand in dyadic relief, discontinuous and apart from noetic sameness. For this reason, distribution is more effective than centralization for discovering "truth".

Andreas Antonopoulos describes this trap that we fall into when we delegate this responsibility to authority. When we fail to think for ourselves, the important facts begin to go unnoticed. Finally, when "fake news" arrives because the internet decentralized the news agencies, it was not because we finally discovered the truth, but because logic dictates that there must be lies. When we still don't know what is true, this is because we are still delegating that responsibility. The problem with this is that this abrogation of responsibility is the path to centralization and eventual corruption.

It's interesting to see parallels to decentralization happen in so many different areas at the same time. At the founding of the USA back in the late 1700's, this nation was more self sufficient. People had to learn to survive on their own and authority was hard to find. The old west was the epitome of decentralization and the closest in recent times that this country came to anarchy.

When you stop participating, when you delegate your votes, or voting power, how much do you centralize power into the wrong hands? This has implications for the Steem blockchain as well as many other areas. The old system of checks and balances set up in government no longer works and it's as if the British are in control again.

We are soon returning to our 1776 moment. Those of us who are Americans have delegated ourselves into slavery without realizing it. Only the truth can set you free.

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