ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the foundational facts underlying modern societies. Facts about the real world can be placed in two distinct categories: brute and institutional. Brute facts pertain to material aspects of the world that exist, independent of human presence. Institutional facts result from a particular form of human utterances, Declarations, that create reality by assigning powers to material objects: a chess board is merely cardboard on which plastic pieces move according to the [human-declared] rules of the game. Two critical “brute facts” about the world, the mechanistic model first posited by Descartes, and the self-interested human of Adam Smith and others, are actually institutional facts dating back to a time when philosophers’ pronouncements were taken as brute facts. Although under limited circumstances, both may appear true, two other “facts” better describe the world and humans: the world is complex, and humans are caring, not needy, creatures. Confusing the two has created modern institutions and technologies that depart from their intended objectives, creating small and large unintended consequences, for example, climate change. The faulty beliefs can be traced to the dominance of the left; the alternates to the right.
