David Breeden is speaking all week about Naive Optimism

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden and the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, and this is Coffee and Wisdom. But starting a new week this week and our theme is Naive Optimism and Stone Walls. The question this week is the nature of truths, the nature of optimism, the nature of naiveté and where we run up against reality. So the first thing I want to kick off with is considering this. This is a phrase that you’re going to see everywhere if you start looking at the models for universities and even on the right, the CIA. And that is “veritas liberabit vos”. “The truth shall set you free.” Now, this comes from the Gospel of John in the Bible, and it is attributed as a saying of Jesus who said, “and ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free”. In Latin, in the Roman Catholic Bible tradition, “veritas”, truth, “liberabit” that would be “liberate”. And “vos”, us, you. And so there you have the general idea of what’s going on. Now, what would a university and their idea of truth have to do with this nice badge from the U.S. CIA, which you notice tries to make it a little more of an English syntax, but the same Latin pertains. So let’s think for a moment about this, because there are some assumptions built into even something as short, but as big as “the truth shall set you free.”

We can ask just the opposite question. Would it be just as true to say “You shall know an illusion and an illusion will set you free”? What’s freedom? What’s illusion? What’s truth? These are fairly large ideas, and the point and the answer maybe isn’t quite as easy as it might at first appear. That’s what we need to think about because, you know, I mean, what about a big lie? Can a big lie also set you free? Why wouldn’t it? Why would it? Good question, I think. So, one of the books to look at here is an old one. This comes from 1951, “The True Believer” by Eric Hoffer. This book is often referred to and it’s often thought of, as it says on the little blurb here, that it’s probably one of the best thoughts in terms of politics and social ideas since Machiavelli’s “The Prince”, because it’s really trying to get at boiled down to absolute ideas of how we deal with social interactions in politics. I have one question there for you is what is what does Eisenhower and Hillary Clinton have in common? And both of them often quoted Eric Hoffer’s “The True Believer”. Within that book, Hoffer says this, “We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand.” Oh, wait a minute. What could that possibly mean? “We can be absolutely certain about only about things we do not understand.”

Well, that’s a good question, and I think he might be right about that. And that is that absolutely, absolute conviction and absolute truth are maybe not the same thing. And maybe often conviction about something that I know this is true is driven by actually the doubt behind it. This is what Hoffer claims anyway, and that’s why his book is still around. Even though it was published in 1951, it’s never been out of print. There have been thousands of different editions printed over time because it’s very intriguing what he has to say about politics and social movements. Well, let’s go to the full context. Let’s go back to the Bible. So let’s see what Jesus was actually talking about here. “Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on him”,