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Spiritual enlightenment is not about mysticism or happiness, although the latter might follow from the former. It is not about the “true self” but about the non-self; about radical questioning and truth seeking that ditches all putative certainties; about watching the unfolding of life with joy and interest; about accepting contradictions.
Nils Bohr chose
Contraria Sunt Complementa
as motto for his coat of arms. According to his son and others, Bohr distinguished between the logical properties of trivialities on the one hand and profound truths on the other:
The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. [Unsourced]
There are two sorts of truth: Profound truths recognized by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth, in contrast to trivialities where opposites are obviously absurd. [Quoted by Hans Bohr]
It is the hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep truth. [Quoted by Max Delbrück]
In the New Yorker, Caleb Crain reviews the case. It’s a difficult case to make if most voters are uninformed.
Jamming the stub of the Greek word for “knowledge” into the Greek word for “rule,” Estlund coined the word “epistocracy,” meaning “government by the knowledgeable.” It’s an idea that “advocates of democracy, and other enemies of despotism, will want to resist,” he wrote, and he counted himself among the resisters. As a purely philosophical matter, however, he saw only three valid objections.
First, one could deny that truth was a suitable standard for measuring political judgment. This sounds extreme, but it’s a fairly common move in political philosophy. After all, in debates over contentious issues, such as when human life begins or whether human activity is warming the planet, appeals to the truth tend to be incendiary. Truth “peremptorily claims to be acknowledged and precludes debate,” Hannah Arendt pointed out in this magazine, in 1967, “and debate constitutes the very essence of political life.” Estlund wasn’t a relativist, however; he agreed that politicians should refrain from appealing to absolute truth, but he didn’t think a political theorist could avoid doing so.
The second argument against epistocracy would be to deny that some citizens know more about good government than others. Estlund simply didn’t find this plausible (maybe a political philosopher is professionally disinclined to). The third and final option: deny that knowing more imparts political authority. As Estlund put it, “You might be right, but who made you boss?”