"It will surprise you when shown the truth thru a simple, natural enlightenment, and you must admit at once that it is THE TRUTH. Always remember this fact: 'Whatever cannot be seen, conceived at once, thru simple reasoning is humbug, and not science!' "--Arnold Ehret, popular raw-food proponent of the early 1900s...
...who among other things maintained that the lungs were
Quote from Arnold Ehret's Mucusless Diet Healing System,
the organs responsible for pumping blood--
atmospheric air pressure--
first published 1922, 16th Ed. (Feb. 1972),
"...there is always an easy solution to every human
problem--neat, plausible, and wrong."
--Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)
A Mencken Chrestomathy, 1949,
in "The Divine Afflatus" (as revised by Mencken).
"God is in the details."
--Ultimate origin unknown, though sometimes attributed
to Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880).
T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S
The "simple truth" might be more complex than you think. Aside from the fact that people often actually don't recognize simplicity when they see it if it's too different from the way they're already used to thinking about things, there are a number of problems and contradictions within the above viewpoint as commonly encountered. The first of which is that clearly, actually, if one observes the ongoing conversations about dietary issues on email lists and web BBS's devoted to dietary ideals like rawism or veganism or any other such foodism, nobody likes to talk so endlessly in detail about food issues as such individuals do. The only real difference is just that much of the time such discussion is characterized by detail other than scientific or research-
Uncertainty is the real issue we have the most difficulties with. In actuality, it's not the complexities that bother people so much as the uncertainties introduced when one goes beyond a simplistic viewpoint. It's the unsettling consideration that "maybe I don't or can't know as much of this for sure as I thought," rather than complexity, that stirs up the actual reactions and reluctance to delve into thinking about many of the types of dietary and health issues that get coverage on sites like this one. Adopting a stance of unbending ideological simplicity, rather than being a tool that cuts through unnecessary or irrelevant complexity, instead functions as a shield against feelings of uncertainty and having to confront those uncertainties directly in oneself.
Uncertainty vs. emotional comfort. Of course--
The flat earth of too-simple views. That the earth goes around the sun or that the earth is round/
Yet at the same time, the ideas that the earth is round and goes around the sun are just about as simple to understand as the opposing ideas. They do, however, introduce complexities in how one is required to view the rest of the solar system and the nature of the universe to make room and account for the new observations. Simplicity on one level, therefore, often goes hand in hand with whatever level of accompanying complexity on another, like yin and yang, or the two sides of
Simplicity, complexity, and the hierarchy of detail. The real world is often not so simple as it first appears. How simple something is, in fact, depends to a considerable degree on what level of the hierarchy of features and details it displays that you look at. If you only look at the surface, or only just beneath it, then things may look very simple. Look harder, more deeply, and you then have to consider what may seem to be inconvenient or pesky details--
Simplicity is thus a function of the perceiver as well as the perceived. Our human minds and their capability for high levels of abstraction enable us to perceive more unified conceptual groupings on one level if we temporarily relax our focus from the complexities at other levels. And as long as we remain aware that hierarchical levels of increasing complexity exist that may end up being just as relevant, such simplification can be a powerful tool in enabling us to grasp unifying principles. That's the upside.
The downside is that we are also capable of manufacturing fictitious simplicities that then have to be supported by unacknowledged or covert complexities at other levels we remain unconscious of. Either way, there is no escaping a certain amount of complexity on one level or another. It's inherent in the structure of things. The real question is whether you are conscious of the processes involved, or remain unaware
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Is complexity itself what
really bothers us so much?
The kind of behavior one can observe around the idea that the truth always should be simple suggests, I think, something different. Often implicit--
(The Hidden Complexity in Simple Dietary Idealism)
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