KLDO · 19.93 · The Spectrum · essay · October 13, 2026

Many Peaks

Sam Harris's moral landscape, the question my husband asked about the last post, and the test that replaces sincerity.

Last month I published a piece called "Everybody Is Right," about Ken Wilber and the rule I took from him: when a smart person seems wrong, ask what they're the true account of. Aldo, my husband of thirty-three years, read it and said, "That's not true, really. You think ##### is in any way right?" He named a name. Fill in your own. He had a point, and this post is me exploring it. The short version: there is more than one good way to live, and that is pluralism. There are also real valleys, and pretending there aren't is relativism. The rule I kept from Wilber was built for the first sentence. Aldo was asking about the second.

What I meant

Wilber's rule was built for a room full of experts who disagree. Freud and the Zen masters were both reporting accurately from different floors of the same building, and the job was cartography. I still hold that. The rule leaks when it leaves the seminar room and gets applied to everyone, about everything. Then "everybody is right" starts to sound like "nobody is wrong," and Aldo is correct that nobody is wrong is false.

Here is how the two come apart. Everyone runs a model of the world, and everyone's experience is a real output of that model. That part of the old post I'm keeping, because charity about what it's like to be someone is non-negotiable. But a model is only as good as its correction against the world, and models vary enormously in how well they're corrected. So people can be wrong. They can be wrong while meaning every word, and a whole crowd can be wrong together. Sincerity settles nothing, because everyone is sincere from inside their own model. Sincerity is cheap. Calibration is the virtue.

So far I've been using right to mean correct. Aldo's question was also about right as in good, and the old post had nothing to say about that at all. Wilber's map tells you where a thinker is standing. It doesn't tell you whether a way of living is good. For that I went back to Sam Harris. I've devoured everything he's written, every podcast, his whole meditation course. I admire his intellect, and I admire his wife Annaka for her own.

The landscape

Sam Harris's The Moral Landscape makes one claim and spends the book defending it: moral questions are questions about the well-being of conscious creatures. Well-being depends on facts about brains and societies. So the moral landscape has a real shape, peaks where creatures flourish and valleys where they suffer, even where nobody can yet measure the altitude, and even where the measuring will never be finished. There are many peaks. More than one culture, more than one aesthetic, more than one kind of life can stand on genuine high ground. Most of the terrain is slope and valley.

Harris's analogy is medicine. Nobody can define health to everyone's satisfaction, and nobody concludes from that that there's no difference between sick and well. I'd add food. There are many healthy diets, and there is still such a thing as poison. "Everybody Is Right" was a post about diets. Aldo was asking whether the rule had anything to say about poison.

The soft spot in the book is the jump from facts about well-being to the word ought. Hume pointed out that gap a long time ago, and the critics have been standing in it since the book came out. Harris's answer is to start from one claim: the worst possible misery for everyone is bad. If you won't grant him that, the conversation is over. I'm fine with that. Every system starts from something it can't prove, and I'm happy to start there.

Harris wrote another book two years later, Free Will, and it's hard determinism from the first page. Systems do what they are structured to do, in his words rather than mine. So I'm not borrowing from a rival framework here. I'm reuniting two rooms of the same house. A conscious system is a prediction engine whose felt states track how things are going for it. Suffering and flourishing are facts about those systems. That's the ground, and it doesn't need a god to hold it up. It also needs no intentions. A society structured against the well-being of the people in it produces suffering whatever it says it wants, the way any system produces what it's built to produce.

The test

Now the part that's new, at least to me. Both tests I was raised on fail. Sincerity fails, for the reason above. Being right at the moment fails too, because I'll be wrong again, and so will you, and the people I've trusted most have been wrong in good company. What's left is structure. The question isn't whether someone holds a wrong model. Everyone does, sometimes. The question is what their structure does with correction: welcomes it, or punishes it.

That gives me a way to answer Aldo without arguing over any single claim. A person, a movement, or a company that fires its correctors, sues its auditors, and exiles its dissenters has made itself structurally unable to be right except by accident. It can still land on a true belief. It can't tell that one from the false ones, because telling them apart was the job of the channel it cut, so the true ones stay true by luck and get lost the same way. You don't need to weigh what it says. What it has done to its error channel tells you what you need to know. Systems do not do what we want. They do what they are structured to do, and a belief system structured without correction drifts into falsehood with everyone inside it functioning as designed.

The same test runs on the landscape. A society that can hear that it's causing suffering, and change, can climb. One that has arranged itself so that the news never arrives, or arrives and is punished, has fixed its altitude. It may be standing on a peak today, but it has given up the means of staying there.

The criterion is content-neutral, and I mean that. Any community that verifies by mutual confirmation instead of by error correction fails it, whatever it believes and whichever way it votes. Mine included. From inside, I can't tell whether my own model is self-confirming. Nobody can. That's the reason the argument lands on structure rather than on confidence. Keep the error channels open, and marry someone who uses them.

There's a corollary with moral weight. The brain decides how much to trust each signal, and when a signal is weak the prior wins. In public life that weakness can be manufactured. Flood the zone, discredit every source, call everything fake, and every citizen's channel to the world degrades until the tribal prior is all that's left. Degrading other people's signal is an act, and it belongs on the landscape, down in a valley.

The error channel

Which brings me back to the man who inspired this post. Aldo takes nothing for free. He pushes back on everything. He's been my standing high-precision error signal for thirty-three years, and it's why this post exists. A marriage that only confirmed would drift. One with a live error channel stays calibrated. The friction is one of love's load-bearing forms.

So I'll keep Wilber's rule in the room where it belongs, among the thinkers, and I'll keep the charity. Everybody holds a piece. Nobody holds the whole. And the measure of a person, or a movement, or a marriage is what it does when the correction comes.

The dervish on my wall has one hand open to the sky and one turned to the earth. Conviction in one hand, correction in the other. That's the posture.