Truth has always been accompanied by a
doubled-mindedness. It is something that people claim to want, but few can
bear. Socrates searched for it. Jesus bore witness to it, and Pilate answered,
albeit rhetorically, “What is truth?”
Truth is seeing things as they really are
and ascribing to them their appropriate valuations. It is an identity that
rises above mere opinion and affirmatively corresponds to a reality that
transcends itself. Jack Nicholson says that we can’t handle it, while the Son
of Man holds that it sets us free. Truth is a lot like virtue -- in that most
everyone claims to desire it, but the general consensus deep down is that they
would rather have pie.
Yes, people do not always welcome it,
when, like a Jehovah’s Witness, it comes knocking at their doors. For much of
humanity, self-deception holds a more soothing comfort: for illusions are fuzzy
and forgiving like jogging pants. Some people never look in the mirror because
of truth and tests are constructed in order to determine if we know what people
say it is. And if you are standing before a judge or fighting a war, it would
seem a very good thing to have truth on your side -- or an M-16.
The ancients equated it with wisdom. The
Enlightenment valued it as a tool of emancipation from a world it was trying to
bury. The postmoderns, beginning with Nietzsche, however, denied its ultimate
existence and brashly claimed that the whole historical veneration of truth was
merely a cynical means to secure power. Their legacy to us, one that is even now
being chipped away, is that truth is perspectival -- one man’s truth is another
man’s false narrative.
And so, it is against this backdrop that
the current outrage du jour is so illuminating. Indeed, the
American political elite’s “firestorm in a thimble” is the abomination of “Fake
News” and how it has set the teeth of the unwashed against the benevolence of
their Masters. The current drumbeat of the Democratic Party: a most emotionally
demonstrative group reduced to hysteria by the impending coronation of “Dr.
Evil,” is that old saw -- “we wuz robbed.” And like all conspiratorial
machinations, its fetid roots go deep down into places both fantastic and
unexpected. Having been embarrassed by the nests of cockroaches that Jill
Stein’s recount uncovered when the antiseptic light of truth was switched on,
Dem operatives have scurried into more promising trashcans. As I write, the
Russkies (and I believe King Nimrod) have been implicated for the heinous act
of helping to overturn an election that was bought and paid for, fair and
square.
Now, after eight years of enduring the
Obama administration’s forced transformation of America, I would be less than
truthful if I didn’t confess to finding this whole melodrama as satisfying as
watching Anthony Wiener being frog-marched out the front door of a
Chuck-E-Cheese. The Left’s self-evisceration -- their wailing, renting of
garments, and gnashing of teeth, appeals as schadenfreude to whatever
wickedness resides inside me. Moreover, the drubbing administered to our Ministries
of Agitprop is as a sweet and savory offering to that fickle Goddess of
Comeuppance. But I digress.
Yet, there is something perhaps more
intellectually interesting afoot here. The current infatuation with “fake news”
carries with it the unspoken notion that there must then be a genuine news, and
for those political postmoderns (primarily of the Left) for whom truth is akin
to a Golden Corral buffet, this presents an epistemic contradiction.
In fact,
these termites -- who have been tearing down the institutions and metaphysics
of those who embrace the existence of objective necessary truths -- are now
showing their true colors. Indeed, men for whom the ratchet of history can only
swing left must now face a double-bladed quandary if they care enough to be
consistent.
But such consistency is only a niggling
irritant for those who would remake the earth. Even so, reactionaries,
revolutionaries, and jealous housewives with rolling pins realize that in the
workaday world, there are at least two sides to every story. And so, in our age
of disinformational white noise, one group’s heresy is another’s gospel until
the aggressive and expansive state decides it must stamp its “good housekeeping
seal” to ensure an atmosphere of serene orthodoxy. Moreover, if the latest
Zuckerbergian miracle can accomplish quietly what used to take thugs with iron
bars smashing printing presses, then no auto de fe is needed for the future’s
velvet-lined Stalinism.
Which brings us to this. The United
Nations, that rational fountain of light that never met a tyrant it wouldn’t
throw a cocktail party for, would love nothing more than to license journalists
and control the dissemination of information via the interwebs. Those toothless
jackals, fancying themselves as the Guardian Council of Oa, have been itching
for the opportunity to sink their talons into the messy anarchy that fueled the
Trump and Brexit populist coups, and nip these shenanigans in the bud. The
American Left is of the same accord, and would be ecstatic if it could succeed
in wiring the jaws of those rabble rousers planting IEDs on their road to El
Dorado.
Fortunately, the Right’s “Fake News” counteroffensive has been highly
successful in exploiting and ridiculing the
Left’s glass pyramid of lies and
distortions. And nothing is more infuriating to the Devil, posing as an angel
of light, than to be laughed at with his underpants pulled down around his
ankles.
No worldly reservoir of power can ever
claim to be in full possession of the truth, and given the self-interest that oozes
freely from our fallen natures, only a state of tentative certitude is
conducive to the preservation of ordered liberty. Humility has ever been in
short supply in the salons and thinkatoriums where a bodyguard of lies must be
called upon to help pave the way for the sterile City of Man. On this side of
Heaven, any society that abandons its once raucous conversation for a tidy
Oriental monologue prepares its own sepulcher; and like Pilate, washes its
hands of truth in its pursuit of a peace, that is no peace at all.
Glenn Fairman writes from Highland, Ca. He
can be contacted at arete5000@dslextreme.com and
followed at www.stubbornthings.org.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/12/what_is_truth.html#ixzz4TOpZCSAg
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