We live in an age of processes. From the grinding gears of modern montitary policy to the sterile hum of modern medicine, from the axiomatic elegance of mathematics to the postilated laws of physics, we’ve built towering edifices of rationality atop foundations we rarely question. Process is our god, and we’re its dutiful priests tinkering with the downstream details, debating the minutiae, while the root causes, the first sparks, sit shrouded in shadow. What if the foundations we lean on are arbitrary, unexplainable, or simply made up? What if the stories we tell ourselves our noble lies are just that: lies we’ve agreed to stop interrogating?
Let’s start with a story. Imagine a void nothingness so pure it hurts to think about. Then, in a flash, bang everything. All matter, energy, and the laws that govern them erupt into being, unbidden, uncaused, for no reason at all. Terence McKenna, that wild-haired prophet of the psychedelic frontier, once quipped, “Give us one free miracle, and physics can explain the rest.”
It’s a hell of a deal, isn’t it? One inexplicable ignition, one cosmic sleight of hand, and suddenly we’ve got quarks, galaxies, and the laws of thermodynamics ticking along like clockwork. From there, the process takes over equations cascade, particles dance, and we convince ourselves we’ve got it all figured out. But that first miracle? That’s the crack in the facade we don’t talk about. It’s the unprovable hunch, the arbitrary leap, the foundational myth we’ve buried under layers of rational scaffolding.
This isn’t a new game. Plato knew it well. In The Republic, he spins the idea of the “noble lie” a myth crafted to bind a society together, to give it cohesion and purpose. He imagined a tale of metals in the soul gold for the rulers, silver for the guardians, bronze for the rest to justify a hierarchy that keeps the polis humming. It’s not true, not in any literal sense, but it works. The mystics have always understood this: rationality alone doesn’t hold us together. We need a story, a first cause, even if it’s a fiction. The catch? Once the lie takes root, once the process it births starts churning, we stop asking whether it’s true. We just keep polishing the machine.
Take mathematics, the supposed bedrock of rationality. We marvel at its symmetry, its self-evident truths two plus two is four, a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. The medieval trivium logic, grammar, rhetoric rests on this, a tripod of reason that promises clarity. But dig deeper. Why does symmetry work? Why do these axioms hold? Euclid didn’t prove them; he assumed them. They’re intuitive, sure, but intuition isn’t proof it’s a feeling dressed up as certainty. Mathematicians build castles on these sands, and we call it truth because the process that follows is so damn elegant. Yet the foundation? Incompleteness and ambiguity. A noble lie of numbers.
Now pivot to physics. McKenna’s “one free miracle” isn’t just a stoner’s riff it’s the dirty secret of cosmology. The Big Bang is our creation myth, complete with its own priests in lab coats. We’ve mapped the expansion of the universe, traced the cosmic microwave background, and pinned down the Higgs boson. The process is breathtaking. But why did it happen? What lit the fuse? “We don’t know,” the physicists shrug, “but look at these equations!” And so we do, dazzled by the downstream dance, while the first cause stays a blank check we’ve cashed without reading.
Jump to modern governance. G. Edward Griffin’s The Creature from Jekyll Island pulls back the curtain on the Federal Reserve and central banking more generally, that shadowy engine of monetary alchemy. Money, value itself, conjured out of thin air, backed not by gold or sweat but by faith in the process. Central banks print, credit flows, and economies hum along, all resting on a foundation no less arbitrary than Plato’s metals or McKenna’s miracle. It’s a collective hallucination: we agree this paper matters, this debt is real, because the system says so. Question why fiat currency? Why this structure?—and you’re a heretic. The process has become the point; its origin, a footnote.
Medicine’s no different. Suzanne Humphries, in Dissolving Illusions, dismantles the West’s blind devotion to allopathic medicine. Vaccines, antibiotics, surgery we’ve enshrined these as triumphs of reason, a process so refined we’ve stopped asking hard questions. Smallpox vanished, sure, but was it the needle or sanitation? Polio faded, but what about the pesticides? Humphries argues we’ve mythologized the method, ignoring messy data that doesn’t fit. The foundation germ theory, the supremacy of intervention, goes unchallenged because the process delivers results. Or seems to. Faith in the downstream blinds us to the upstream rot.
Here’s the thread tying it all together: when a process gets dogmatic, we stop seeing the cracks. Mathematics, physics, money, medicine they’re self-referential systems now, machines we tweak without peering under the hood. The first cause, the noble lie, the arbitrary leap it fades into irrelevance. We argue about interest rates, not why fiat money exists. We debate drug trials, not why we’re so sick. We refine equations, not the axioms they ride on. The process becomes a closed loop, a dogma that demands loyalty over curiosity.
This is dangerous. It’s a slide from first principles into authoritarian thought a mental trap where we process reality through a prescribed lens, not raw inquiry. Critical thinking withers when we fetishize the machine and forget the mystery. We’re not reasoning from the ground up; we’re tinkering with someone else’s blueprint. And when that blueprint fails, when markets crash, when treatments falter, when the equations don’t add up, we’re left scrambling, unable to trace the fault back to its root because we’ve stopped looking there.
Contrast this with the East. Sogyal Rinpoche, in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, offers a different lens. Tibetan Buddhism doesn’t shy from the big questions life, death, consciousness, purpose. It’s not about perfecting a process; it’s about piercing the veil. Rinpoche writes of Westerners as intellectual giants, masters of systems and details, yet spiritually adrift, dodging the perennial mysteries. We’re so busy mapping the cosmos that we forget to ask why it’s here or why we are. Eastern traditions root themselves in the unexplainable, embracing it as a starting point, not a glitch to paper over.
The West’s obsession with process has given us wonders bridges that span rivers, medicines that cheat death, and theories that predict the stars. But it’s also left us hollow, tethered to machines we don’t fully understand, built on foundations we’ve agreed to ignore. Plato’s noble lie worked until it didn’t; Rome fell when the myth lost its grip. Our modern myths rationality’s supremacy, progress’s inevitability might be next. The danger isn’t just collapse; it’s complacency. When we stop questioning the root, we’re ripe for tyranny, not just of governments, but of thought itself, a tyranny of process that chokes out wonder.
So what’s the way out? It’s not about torching the systems, math still builds bridges, and medicine still saves lives. It’s about balance. Hold the process lightly, but dig into the mystery. Ask why the Big Bang banged, why money matters, why symmetry sings. Embrace McKenna’s miracle as a koan, not a cop-out. Let Plato’s lie remind us that stories matter, but they’re not sacred. Rinpoche’s wisdom nudges us to face the void, and find ourselves within it not just fill it with equations.
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