Perfect Circles

The readers have been howling. In the post entitled "The Nature of Evidence" it is stated that speed bumps breed on their own. In the one entitled "The Reason We Bother" it states that speed bumps are made of short people stuck together and covered in concrete and tar. "Inconsistent" you cry. "Inconsistent equals untrue" you imply.

There is no inconsistency here. It all depends on the soil underneath. Even if the bumps are not in direct contact with the ground the road was built on the quality of the soil still effects what is built there. Acidic soil corrodes the human matter above and new short people need to be found to form new bumps. Alkaline soil enhances the human matter and the short people in the bumps breed regardless of gender. Small bumps are incubated by larger bumps until they get too big and have to crawl under the surface of the road to find an appropriate space of their own. If you expect me to spend half of The Reason We Bother going into these questions you have something seriously wrong with you.

It is a great delusion to believe that inconsistency equals untruth. It is the sort of argument lawyers use to try and win cases. If there are apparent inconsistencies in someone's evidence they claim that witness is unreliable. Yet for some reason they continue to claim their fees. If they are serving justice as they are obliged to do as court officers they should both argue the same case. If the court finds against a lawyer they have clearly behaved unjustly for arguing something which is untrue. Why therefore should they be paid or allowed to continue practising? Apparently one inconsistency equals untruth but another is an essential component of the actual process of truth itself.

The inconsistency goes further. Every so often we hear of cases of police corruption. Officers who wilfully manufacture evidence or take bribes are hauled up before the judges and subjected to waves of public horror. If we have corrupt policemen The System is rotten to the core we say. Rightly so. Strange how no one understands the corollary of this. If policemen lie and lawyers tell the truth about it we think there is something seriously wrong. If policemen tell the truth but lawyers lie we do not bat an eyelid. In fact we regard it as the true state of affairs. What accord has light with darkness? Inconsistency has not only been tolerated but sanctified if it comes out of the right mouth.

Such inconsistencies of truth abound. Bumble bees cannot fly with those heavy bodies and light wings but they do. Stones do not hit the ground when they fall because they first have to fall half the distance then half the distance again ad infinitum so they never fall the whole way. "People" and "from Walsall" are mutually exclusive terms. Truth is still present despite inconsistencies. We only perceive an inconsistency because our understandings are imperfect. Everything in Creation actually makes sense. It is just that we do not understand how as we cannot see the missing links between the different modes of thought through which we interpret the world.

This brings us to the fundamental inconsistent truth. When children get to a certain age they no longer see themselves as children. They are something bigger and dream of being older. They desperately want to enter the world of adults. What happens when they get there? After a few short years they do everything they can to cling to their remaining youth. It is said that Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Whoever said this had clearly never tried to guess someone's age. Most people over 30 and plenty younger than that either disguise their age or lie about it. Usually this is accompanied by melancholic recollections of what they did when they were younger. If you speculate on what their age might be however and suggest they might be older than they actually are you are greeted with a fearsome sight. Redfaced spluttering and toxic glares combine with loud and indignant denials that such a gross calumny could ever be even imagined by a fellow human being. Maybe you think they are 40 when they are 38. You will never hear the end of this. But surely they always wanted to be older? So why are they complaining now? And what does it matter anyway? A person's true age stalks someone through all their untruths of how they actually behave or look at the world. The truth however is not their age. It is that they will always pretend to be an age they are not even if their appearance and conduct are consistent with their true age. The coils of inconsistency become ever more serpentine the deeper one goes.

The more we care about something the more we fail to live up to the standards we set of ourselves and others. The more truth we have the more inconsistent we become. This is inevitable for one reason. If truth and consistency were the same thing nothing would ever change. Consistently saying the same thing would only be always right if the world itself never changed. If the world never changed nothing could ever improve. If nothing ever improved we would have to live in perpetual misery. Just one problem. Truth is truth and is in itself absolute. It is what we make of it that changes. It is therefore very disturbing to realise that on the basis of all the above evidence the truth is Paris Hilton. After so many milennia we come to this. Remember it next time you make the effort to get out of bed in the morning.