This information is not meant to besmirch any researchers who have sought the truth. It is intended only to assist the seeker in their navigation of the various obstacles and challenges that lie ahead. It is intended also to provide more than mere theory or opinion. As recognized by John Dewey in his Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education:
“In its honorable sense, knowledge is distinguished from opinion, guesswork, speculation, and mere tradition. In knowledge, things are ascertained; they are so and not dubiously otherwise. But experience makes us aware that there is difference between intellectual certainty of subject matter and our certainty. We are made, so to speak, for belief; credulity is natural. The undisciplined mind is averse to suspense and intellectual hesitation; it is prone to assertion. It likes things undisturbed, settled, and treats them as such without due warrant. Familiarity, common repute, and congeniality to desire are readily made measuring rods of truth. Ignorance gives way to opinionated and current error, — a greater foe to learning than ignorance itself.” (Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education, at 162)
Also acknowledged by Dewey is the “predilection for premature acceptance” on which Dewey provides:
“Our predilection for premature acceptance and assertion, our aversion to suspended judgment, are signs that we tend naturally to cut short the process of testing. We are satisfied with superficial and immediate short visioned applications. If these work out with moderate satisfactoriness, we are content to suppose that our assumptions have been confirmed. Even in the case of failure, we are inclined to put the blame not on the inadequacy and incorrectness of our data and thoughts, but upon our hard luck and the hostility of circumstance. We charge the evil consequence not to the error of our schemes and our incomplete inquiry into conditions (thereby getting material for revising the former and stimulus for extending the latter) but to untoward fate. We even plume ourselves upon our firmness in clinging to our conceptions in spite of the way in
which they work out.” (Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education, at162-163)
John Steward Mills, in his work On Liberty recognized a similar tendency within our habit of acquiring information. But Mills went just a bit further when he explained:
“[W]hen we turn to subjects infinitely more complicated, to morals, religion, politics, social relations, and the business of life, three fourths of the arguments for every disputed opinion consist in dispelling the appearances which favour some opinion different from it. The greatest orator, save one, of antiquity, has left it on record that he always studied his adversary’s case with as great, if not still greater, intensity than even his own. What Cicero practised as the means of forensic success requires to be imitated by all who study any subject in order to arrive at the truth. He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment, and unless he contents himself with that, he is either led by authority, or adopts, like the generality of the world, the side to which he feels most inclination. Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form; he must feel the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter and dispose of; else he will never really possess himself of the portion of truth which meets and removes that difficulty.
“Ninety-nine in a hundred of what are called educated men are in this condition; even of those who can argue fluently for their opinions. Their conclusion may be true, but it might be false for anything they know: they have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them, and considered what such persons may have to say; and consequently they do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves profess. They do not know those parts of it which explain and justify the remainder; the considerations
which show that a fact which seemingly conflicts with another is reconcilable with it, or that, of two apparently strong reasons, one and not the other ought to be preferred. All that part of the truth which turns the scale, and decides the judgment of a completely informed mind, they are strangers to; nor is it ever really known, but to those who have attended equally and impartially to both sides, and endeavored to see the reasons of both in the strongest light. So essential is this discipline to a real understanding of moral and human subjects, that if opponents of all important truths do not exist, it is indispensable to imagine them, and supply them with the strongest arguments which the most skillful devil’s advocate can conjure up.” (On Liberty, at 42-43)
Many readers may have mothers, fathers, grandmothers, or grandfathers who garden. Many readers may be gardeners themselves. It is a fair bet that everyone is aware of weeds, and the undesirability most weeds have. This is largely due to the weed being so pervasive that desirable plant growth is stunted.
The myths that persist regarding the estate, and what the various documents we have been given are, and which we will explore in this Part One, are very similar to weeds. They take the explorer into shadow and stunt their growth or prevent their growth in many ways.
Similarly, sometimes we may plant a seed expecting we will like a certain plant in our garden. But we overlook or fail to recognize that the seed we plant will become much more invasive to other parts of our garden than we originally may have suspected; or far more than we knew, simply because we chose to look past an aspect we should have been more mindful of.
Like pulling weeds from a garden allows for the desired growth to occur, by dispelling these myths it is the hope of this author that the reader will be able to grow toward a more perfect comprehension. Additionally, just as we at times choose to plant a seed we later learn is a bad choice, some of the acts we have taken by our believing some myth can also be fixed by simply learning where the truth may lay, and removing the weed. Fortunately once we learn what we have overlooked, clarity and correction comes quickly. We can adopt the new data, and harmonize our perspective.