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Error and the search for truth

30 Mar

The phrase is from the Russian writer Mikhail Saltykov-Tcherdrine, who wrote about the pseudonym M. Nepanov (wrote Contradictions), his phrase: “whoever never sought the truth certainly never made a mistake”, much better than the popular adage: “only whoever never tries is wrong”, because even if it is innocently, something is always tried.

His sentence completes this thought: “There are times when society, seized with panic, deviates from science and seeks salvation in ignorance”, something that seems typical of our time: at first ignoring the pandemic and vaccines, then ignoring the dangers that result from it and finally try to live with it as if the disease were something natural, and the remedy is to vaccinate four, five, … times.

Folly and frivolity seem to be reactions to a crisis that is deepening, in addition to the war, a rise in prices and food shortages are looming, yes what happens for the time being seems to be circumvented and when it is no longer, what would be wise to do, it seems that few care.

I chose to speak of an unknown literary author of the 19th century, he did not live in the period of the Soviet Union, to attest to the ignorance of punishing Russian culture, science and sports, as a punishment for a war, undoubtedly unfair, but of the which the Russian people are also victims.

Even seeing the horrors happening in Ukraine, we cannot ignore the horrors of the West and the warlike escalation that may have in the near future other chapters as painful as the current ones, is an escalation that seems to have no return.

One cannot ignore the mistakes of the second war, the mistakes of the post-war period, the countless interventions in the East, Asia and Africa that caused wars and deaths that were equally reprehensible.

It is necessary to recognize the mistakes, it is necessary to forgive the colonial period, still in progress, and it is necessary to allow peoples to live their culture, their ideals, as developed by Raymond Aron (War and Peace between Nations) and in security, the The author quotes Clausewitz in his book: “War is an act of violence, and there are no limits to the manifestation of this violence” (Aron, p. 69).

It’s a difficult time when we just point out our mistakes to others, without looking at our own.

 

 
 

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