From error to ignorance

In our current political climate, “winning” an argument has become synonymous with achieving a consensus. We poll the public, we count the “likes”, and we treat the resulting majority as a proxy for what is right. But this approach ignores a fundamental rule of the road: consensus can only ever exist over matters of opinion. It has no jurisdiction over the truth. To fix our discourse, we don’t necessarily need more facts; we need a better understanding of what it means to be wrong. The Socratic Threshold Most of our modern disagreements aren’t actually between people who know the truth and people who are lying. They are disagreements between people who are in a state of Error. Socrates demonstrated that Error is the state of holding a wrong opinion while believing it to be knowledge. It is the most dangerous state of mind because it is closed to inquiry. If you believe you already possess the truth, you have no reason to look for it. The goal of any meaningful conversation shouldn’t…