planet 20
logic
Logic nearly brought us to blow up our planet.
This is to be a story about logic, order and the freedom and benefits of chaos.
The following are two snippets which didn’t make it into the final version of The Roots of war but which could be the basis for the story of planet 20.
Co-writers and writers for an actual story on this topic are welcome.
Charlie Alice Raya
7 September 2024
I found myself on a remote beach, just when the tide went out. On a whim, I began to write in the wet sand.
Oh, what a joy! Writing at last! Developing ideas, shaping arguments, playing through scenarios.
I spent some wonderful hours adding thoughts, crossing out others, picking up earlier ideas, dropping the next, dancing between the thoughts and literally stumbling over some.
By the time, the incoming waves washed away my last words, I had made a solid case for a central point: Logic is not reliable.
All warring nations had their justifications for war, a logical case in favour of their actions. I, too, could easily make a logical case for war, so long as I reduced my argument to specific factors.
For example, a nation might justify a war by stating that it is threatened, and therefore it needs to take action to remove the threat. As the argument stands, it is logical: Threat requires action. War is action. Threat requires war.
I can break that logic by factoring in questions like: Is war the only way to remove this threat? Or, would the thread still exist if the threatened nation changed something in their behaviour? Or, will war actually remove the threat?
These questions demonstrate that the simply logic of threat justifies war, has a number of underlying assumptions which can easily be refuted.
Assumption one: the threatened nation is blameless which also implies that the threat is unprovoked. Assumption two: the threatening nation cannot be reasoned with. Assumptions three and four: war is the best and only way to respond to the threat. Assumption five: war can remove the threat. Assumption six: waging war is more important than the welfare of the population. Assumption seven: the destruction of settlements, infrastructure and the environment are a necessary and negligible side effect of war.
In most cases, none of these assumptions hold on closer examination, and as I played through numerous other justifications for war, I found in each case that there is no logic in war — not if all related factors are considered.
(…)
Today, we treat logic with playfulness and as one tool among many others which aids our thinking processes. For one, we have learned that logic is relative and the more factors we include in an argument the closer we get to chaos and multidimensional results rather than one indisputable answer. We also found that in some cases, logic can be applied and still not deliver the best possible solution, let alone the only one.
A consequence of this is that we rely a lot less on numbers, statistics, categories, labels, generalisations and algorithms these days.
I remember a conversation with a painter who is famous for their abstract work, and they told me: ‘In order to create an abstract painting, you need to study the real world, nature, the human body. Once you have mastered this, you can transcend the basics and expand into all directions, abstractions, the unpredictable.’ A musician told us something similar. ‘I spent endless hours practising how the piano should be played and one day, I was finally ready to step out of the known and set my fingers and mind free.
Today, there are many thinkers who view logic in the same way: it is a foundation we can use as a starting point, sometimes as an anchor, always as something to return to for reassurance and even stability. But ultimately there is so much more to us, to nature, to the universe.
Some people argue that we might have gotten into wars because we clung too much to numbers and restrictive logic, and we did that because chaos is something we were afraid of. But once we can embrace chaos and learn to swim in it, we experience a freedom and a peace of mind that is unrivalled.
© Charlie Alice Raya, The end of all wars, planet twenty, logic