First Principles: To Develop Courage of Your Convictions

When I label something “first principles,” I intend it to lay down firm foundations you can use to develop a courage of your convictions, to help you get through life’s difficulties and emerge the better for it.

I got the term “first principles” while taking a graduate level physics course in electromagnetism given by Val Fitch, a professor in Princeton’s Physics Department, who later was awarded a Nobel Prize in physics. He would say from time to time that he liked to proceed from “first principles.”

I interpret that to mean that experts specialize in ever-narrower fields of study, making simplification after simplification until narrowly-focused, specific problems can be solved, but when good solutions can’t be found because the situation goes outside the box of the narrow specialty, we have to go back to the original, foundational facts of the matter to broaden our thinking and fact-finding.

That doesn’t happen in public debate today. 

So much of what passes for public debate and news is really a long series of segues, baits and switches, and assorted unfounded assertions built solely on what various public people choose to say for their own self-interest. They can be very plausible and very convincing. Yet they diverge very far from a healthy reality.

Once you go back to first principles and foundational realities, and then logically work out the consequences of them, you can be amazed at how different reality is from the illusional “narratives” being spread about. This is really life-altering, yet simple, stuff; simple to see once you focus on it; but hard to keep in focus because of all the “spin” and other diversions and distractions.  It is profound, nevertheless, and evergreen. 

For example:

The scourge of sexually transmitted diseases is utterly ignored by every media outlet I see, except for the very rare report that enables them to say they “covered” it. 

Yet if major public attention were focused on preventing sexually transmitted diseases, by using condoms and other methods, women’s—and men’s—health would definitely be improved, and the number of abortions would drop.

Relevant to that, more black women in NYC between 2012 and 2016 aborted their pregnancies than carried them to live births (Jason Riley, Wall Street Journal, July 10, 2018, summarizing NYC Health Dept. data).

In other words, it is entirely within the logic of the situation that abortion in America can be safe, legal, and realistically rare, by choice, due to health considerations.

For those who genuinely oppose abortions, I observe that trying to abolish all abortions is trying to play God, and that is doomed to fail; as it has. There will always be some abortions, but discouraging abortions on grounds of good health choices, as would be with an emphasis on avoiding STDs, would be part of a solution that everyone of good faith could accept.