“I think there is a fundamental alienation to which we are prone: the search for truth, the search for the absolute, the desire for ultimate stability through the denial of change; the desire that the world should be in the manner that satisfies our desires, and as such and with respect to that, stable. … But how do we act? We invent systems of consensual stability that we claim are absolute truths that must be protected against change because we deem their value to be universal. In their name we deny the individuality of others that live in a different consensus and, without allowing them to disagree, we submerge them in a systematic social abuse that we expect they should accept as legitimate. This is our most frequent alienation: our blindness about the world of relative truths that we create with others, and in which man is the absolute reference, and our immersion in an ideology that justifies this blindness.” (Maturana, 1985, p. 29; author’s original English text, unpublished.)
(via Poerksen’s End of Certainty)