Learn to Disrespect What Cost You the Most to Learn

Some of what I have learned I still respect. It gave me tools, and it improved how I think.

Other things I learned were rubbish, and I spent years on them.

The discipline I want to argue for is this: learn something at great cost, recognise that it is worthless, and admit it. This is much harder than it sounds, and almost nobody does it.

Theology as the Clean Case

You can study theology for years. Dissertations, examinations, a serious literature, genuinely intelligent supervisors.

And it remains not a field. There is no right and wrong in it, no way to settle a dispute, no result that anyone has ever had to abandon because it turned out to be false. It is not about real things; it is about what men have imagined.

A university could offer a full degree in the works of Tolkien — with rigorous scholarship, careful textual analysis, and genuine expertise — and that would not make it a science, or make its findings knowledge about anything outside the books.

Having passed the examinations, the honest move is to say: this is nonsense, it took me a long time, and what I gained was the knowledge that it is nonsense. That is the accomplishment available, and it is a real one.

Philosophy as the Personal Case

A hundred courses or more. Kant, Mill, Rousseau, Plato. Dozens of books, over many years.

The conclusion I reached is that philosophy is mostly useless. Philosophy of science remains interesting and can genuinely loosen your thinking. The rest is so riddled with holes that I no longer count it as thought.

That took a very long time to arrive at, and I want to be clear about why it took so long: the people teaching it are intelligent. That is what makes a bad field hard to detect. If the practitioners were obviously foolish you would leave in a week. They are not, and so you assume the difficulty is yours.

The Negative Result Is a Real Result

Here is what saves the years from being wasted.

The reasons philosophy fails are more valuable than philosophy. Understanding why a field is useless is genuine knowledge — about method, about what makes a question answerable, about how sophistication can accumulate around an empty centre. I could not have learned that without doing the reading.

What is missing is that nobody teaches it in this register. No course on Plato opens with: we will study Plato, and what you will really learn is why he was wrong — especially in political philosophy, where he understood nothing about politics or human nature. Instead you get "one of the greatest," and "all philosophy is a footnote to Plato."

We need courses built around why Plato was wrong.

The Logical Point That Makes This Severe

One false statement kills an entire proof. Not a majority of false statements — one.

So what is a treatise worth when the great bulk of its assumptions are wrong? The Republic is more wrong than right, and its errors are not decorative; they are load-bearing. Under any standard we would apply to a mathematical argument, it is simply void.

We do not apply that standard, because the tradition is old and the prose is good.

What Survives the Test

Not everything fails. If everything I had studied turned out to be rubbish, that would be suspicious — it would amount to saying that learning is pointless, which is not my view.

Mathematics stayed with me. Differential calculus, and more importantly the mathematical way of thinking, in which I have found no flaw.

It is limited, and I want to state the limitation honestly. We can only reason rigorously about simple systems, so it does not transfer directly to economics or politics, where there are no precise premises and no exact laws. It will not tell you what is true in those domains.

But it will show you when a conclusion follows from its premises, and that is enough to see the holes in other people's arguments and — much more usefully — in your own. That is worth a great deal, and it is the thing I actually use.

Why Almost Nobody Does This

Very few philosophy graduates ever look back and say the subject was empty.

It requires admitting that the reading, the essays, the examinations, and the years were largely wasted — and that you were the one who chose to spend them. That is a real cost to your self-image, and most people will pay a great deal to avoid it, including the cost of continuing to defend something they have privately stopped believing.

Disrespecting what others revere, and what you yourself paid for, is a form of growth, and it is rarer than it should be. The test of whether you learned anything from a bad field is whether you can say it was bad.