"It is better to will the good than to know the truth"

Posted by Bob on December 09, 2005

In Reply to: "It is better to will the good than to know the truth" posted by Smokey Stover on December 09, 2005

: : What does it mean when someone says, "It is better to will the good than to know the truth"?

: I've never heard those particular words, but you might paraphrase it as, "Let's not waste our time and money investigating the past. Let's just move on (ossia, cut our losses and move on), making sure we don't repeat our mistakes." No, that's not MY logical error. Remember our Fearless Leader saying, "Let's not play the blame game. Let's fix this thing and move on, while blaming the local politicians in Louisiana." However, it's a useful maxim in some circumstances. People obsessed with "finding the truth" are sometimes just looking for someone to blame--like children saying, "It's all your fault!" "No, it's yours!"

You've done well to try to make sense of this, but it's a messy bit of rhetoric to analyze. The two parts are not mutually exclusive. You could easily will the good AND know the truth, or do neither. It just seems like half-baked philosophy that doesn't stand up to scrutiny. (There less to this than meets the eye, as it were.)