THE PATH
We can’t prove it
Most of us hold that cruelty is worse than kindness – not as a private taste, the way we prefer one colour to another, but really so. Yet try to prove it. Set down every fact about an act of cruelty the pain it causes, the harm it does – and “so it is worse” still will not follow, until you have already granted that pain and harm are bad. And that was never one of the facts. You brought it with you.
This is the line the programme is built around: better, higher, worse are never in the facts; they are always carried to them. So when it says some things are truly worth more than others, it cannot prove that either – and does not pretend to. It posits the order: commits to it openly, as a starting point, and says plainly that it cannot be proven.
That can sound like surrender. It is the opposite, and the cruelty you just weighed is why. You did not invent that ranking; you cannot shrug it off at will; and you can be wrong about such things – taking the lower for the higher. A standard you can be wrong against is one you answer to, not one you wrote; only a standard outside your creation or control can correct you. A self-authored standard is a bias being quietly confirmed.
So the order is both posited and real at once – which sounds like a contradiction, but isn’t. The two words answer different questions.
Posited answers the question: how do you come by it? By an open commitment, since no proof is to be had. A posit is what you stand on where proof has run out – and every account of anything runs out somewhere. What is unusual here is not that there is such a place, or that the programme occupies it, but that it is named and stood on in the open, rather than slipped in unannounced.
Real answers the question: is it yours? Go back to the cruelty. You could not prove it was worse. Now try it the other way: just decide that cruelty isn’t worse than kindness. Don’t argue it – decide it, the way you might decide that you now prefer a different colour. And of course your preference will not move. You didn’t put it there, and you cannot take it away by deciding to. That is not a proof. It is also not nothing: it is what answering to something feels like from the inside.
One word – posited – is how you hold it; the other – real – is what it is.
And you’ve been standing on these posited values all along. Before this piece, before any of them – and in the first line here, when you posited that cruelty really was worse than kindness, and yet could not prove why.
That is the order of this thing, then: held openly, owned as unprovable, and binding all the same.
That is the end of the path — it dissipates here rather than concluding, which is the point. If you want the ground beneath all of it, the full account is here; and the path is there to wander again.
If you want to dive deeper still – the full order of rank, the dynamics of the leap, the temporal structure drawn all the way out, as we encounter it in our everyday lives, along with a little bit of theory – all that can be found here.