Thought really, they are the same god.

Like I have mentioned before, I have a very strong drive towards the truth. It goes far deeper than a preference or a liking and is more like an overwhelming passion that, at times, borders on obsession and even madness. It drives me on and is the basic deep engine of my constant thirst for knowledge and understanding. I always want to learn new things and then process that information, refining it and eliminating all but the vital essence of it, and then fit that precious piece of the puzzle into the larger understanding of the world that is, in many ways, my life’s work.

Compared to this deep mission, everything else comes second in my life. Material things can be great, and I enjoy my books and my video games and my snacks and such. And I certainly would love to have more money so I could have more fun. But when it comes down to it, everything material is of strictly temporary and functional interest to me. Material objects are merely instances of the objects of my obsession. It is the patterns underneath it all which interest me. I burn with the desire to know, but even more to that, I want to understand. All knowledge, to me, is merely the gateway to the understanding I seek.

I am no rationalist or idealist though. The shape of my devotion to my ideal of understanding permits absolutely no shortcuts such as the assumptions that you can deduce everything from pure reason^[1] or that reality is entirely composed of that which we imagine it to be. My dedication to my own search for the truth of things demands the absolute minimum of assumptions at all times. It also demands extremely rigorous standards of logic and a mind that can handle all that work. Luckily, the precision engineering pays off by resulting in a mind that is extremely efficient and precise at its task.

But not terribly good at dealing with all those details of life. The price of having a mind like a telescope is, inevitably, a serious case of farsightedness.

The other god I serve is, basically, an extension of the first : pragmatism. If my drive to the truth is drive by the question What is true? then my drive towards pragmatism is driven by the question What works? What gets results? What is effective? What best unites intent and effect?

To me, results are all that matter. I don’t care about schools of thought, aesthetic preferences, what people would prefer to think or to do, or anything else. It’s all at best secondary and at worse an actual barrier to making things better. To me, any considerations outside those which fall under pragmatism are madness. Doing what you set out to do, to me, is the most beautiful thing.

This is not, of course, a directly moral imperative. That’s a different issue. Whether or not what you are trying to do is the right thing is a moral question. Whether you are going about it the right way or not, whether you are sufficiently focused on the goal or whether you are distracted and side-tracked by things which do not matter, that’s another thing entirely.

That said, to me, it is incumbent on those who wish to effect change in the world to do so my the most effective method possible, without consideration of ego or pride or intellectual habit. To me, if you are unwilling to do what it takes in the service of your ideals and goals, you don’t really believe in them. Or at the very least, they are not the highest priority in your life.

All of this pragmatism and truth-seeking is very harsh, undemanding, and unforgiving, and that is why I call them, rhetorically speaking, my gods. Everything about me is subservient to them and my humanism (a third god? that’s for another article), and the combination of all these factors leads to my dedication to ethics as an intellectual and spiritual pursuit.

It also leads to a certain amount of friction between my pursuit and my general easygoing and affable personality. On a basic level, I just want to get along with people and be a nice fellow, but this deep and ruthless dedication to the truth of things sometimes interferes. I can easily see how others of the same basic intellectual makeup find it easiest to affect a cool, efficient, distant demeanor.

But I just can’t do that. It would be too mean! And boring.