Axioms and Interests: When Truth Bows to Utility

Axioms and Interests: When Truth Bows to Utility

If geometric axioms were to clash with people’s interests, they would deny them.

For “the people,” when spoken of in the abstract, dissolve into the mass — their diversity swallowed by number, and reason’s balance lost in the noise of advantage.

Axioms cannot be refuted by experience, nor can intuition deny them. Yet, they may still bend before the will of utility, for interest holds a subtle power to shape both acceptance and rejection.

To place scientific axioms against interest is not to belittle them, but to acknowledge the latter’s dominance — and to remind us of the need for wisdom that sees human suffering as clearly as it sees equations. Life, though built on reason, is ruled by sentiment and necessity, and often, it rejects truth simply because truth is inconvenient.

History offers countless examples of ideas born noble that turned into chains upon their believers once they lost the capacity to adapt. In such moments, interest triumphs over clarity, and faith in reason gives way to loyalty toward obsolete convictions.

This is history’s cunning: humanity’s insistence on worshiping ideas long after they have ceased to serve either people or their time.

Interest wears many masks, and most of them contradict what is self-evident — whether in geometry, ethics, or politics. It emerges when thought stops growing, when dogma replaces curiosity, and when the foolish take control of the mind’s destiny. Then, progress halts, and freedom itself becomes suspect.

Yet hope remains in the idea that reconciles reason with interest — that keeps truth alive while recognizing life’s demands. Democracy, in its most profound meaning, is precisely this: a constant effort to limit the tyranny of a single idea, to restrain the arrogance of leaders, and to cure the blindness of fanaticism.

It makes the welfare of society itself — not the gains of its factions — the highest axiom, and reminds us that no idea deserves to rule life alone, and no leader possesses the whole truth.