Objective knowledge, value, power and scale

There is no direct relationship between objective knowledge and power. The proper function of objective knowledge is a to contribute to practical problem solving. Practical problems have connection with reality, and objective knowledge provides a description of reality (of properties, objects, processes, structures). Objective descriptions are tools with a rather short cultural lifetime. The kind of knowledge needed for power has much longer lifetime, and from an evolutionary perspective evolved much earlier than the speciation of objective knowledge.

A Christian is not interested in power because she / he already has the kind is looking for. Secular people would like empowerment from objective knowledge (science, rigorous philosophy), which is like planning to fly to Mars with Diptera wings. Scientism, and in general, rationalism are bad exaptations: namely traits adaptive for short and average term problems are used for solving large timescale problems. This kind of problems can be solved only by symbolic and political means. To use scientific descriptions instead means to push for the construction of a fake science and to erode to capability to solve the short and average term problems.

Scale by itself does not provide value, large scale is not more valuable than small scale. The kinds of values themselves depend on processes occurring at certain scales of time and social complexity. Larger scale may provide power, but only when there is a coupling with smaller scale objects and properties. If this power is convergent with values or not is contingent.

Legend: Characteristic time and complexity scale of three bodies of knowledge, and two bottlenecks (3.1, 3.2), for the effective resolution of practical problems. The realm of practical problems can modeled by an institutional framework (with operational choice, collective choice and constitutional choice action arenas). The bottlenecks are that 1) the multi-scale character of nature’s processes is not reflected in the institutionalist framework (this leads to environmental problems), and 2) the symbolic processes (culture and the cultural meaning of nature and man in particular) tend to be reduced to economic thinking (goods and services production processes) (this is partly responsible for cultural maladaptations as racism, progressivism, etc).