Truth is the acknowledgment of reality, the recognition of the way things exist. At the bottom of the truth issue, we find the claim of the first law of logic – the law of identity. A=A. A thing is itself and nothing else. Reality is that which exists.
As such, truth has for centuries been a notion at the center of Western tradition. Despite human imperfection, fallibility, and enmity, the value of truth as the reasonable correlation between human judgment and reality has remained vital. Essential fields of human activity such as jurisprudence and science depend on truth and implicitly assume her in their dealings. Beyond these areas, people of good character – in politics, the media, civil society – have persistently appreciated the value of truth. Not least, for the faithful believer, the notion of truth culminates in the Christian proclamation that truth is the path and way of life.
Nevertheless, falsehoods and untruths have perennially been used for personal and political gain and power. Countless examples from all civilizations and political systems – authoritarian, totalitarian, democratic – provide evidence for this claim. And we all know it from personal experience as well.
Therefore, we should not be surprised that all of this is also part of our contemporary times and the ongoing political business. However, no doubt, the distortion of reality and the implanting of unreal ideas in people's consciousness appear to have reached a new and unfortunate peak. Where has the "love for truth" gone? How could, across the polity, have ideological prejudice, the political will to power, personal vanity, and self-importance gained precedence over decency, honesty, fairness, humanness? Do people no longer understand – or perhaps did they never have? – that truthfulness and truth-seeking rest on moral grounds and no human society can survive in the long run without it? Don't they grasp that justice and righteousness and honesty and decency are nothing but the application, the becoming visible of truth, in our social and political lives? I tackled the notion of truth and her moral and intellectual implications in a blog entry called "Truth in Life and Politics" in 2016 (to be found here).
Aside from educational shortcomings that underpin the notion of truth entirely, I will outline two reasons for the amazing and, at the same time, the alarming magnitude of reality distortion we experience in our day and age. One is old as humankind, the second relatively new and utterly pernicious to our civilization. Yet, both conjoin to form the disastrous reality we are confronting now in our daily lives.
First, human malice, evildoing, and wickedness – those timeless traits of human nature – manifest themselves on new planes of magnitude, probably destroying people's lives and livelihoods more than ever before. While human nature has not changed, possibly even gotten vainer and more self-centered, the contemporary means of electronic communication, an abundance of media information, and the presence and use of social media allow for unprecedented levels of manipulation and denigration.
The four years of Mr. Trump's presidency saw unprecedented delusions created and preserved by corrupt politicians, the big media corporations, and tech giants such as Facebook and Twitter. I have depicted in previous blog essays the evilness of the Democratic Party of the United States, without a doubt the most extreme and destructive political force in the nations of the Western hemisphere in our lifetime. Right on their heels are following the RINOs and anti-Trumpers in the Republican Party. They all make the leftist forces in Europe and Latin America look pale by comparison. I commented on this vile bunch of people repeatedly (for example here).
Let us take as a more recent example the misrepresentation of the January 6 Capitol riots. Not only were the storming hordes unarmed, but it also turns out the FBI orchestrated the whole upheaval to malign Trump supporters and coerce Republican politicians into giving up on the idea of challenging election results. Until today, the identity of the security guard who shot the unarmed protester Ashley Babbitt has not been publicized. A Capitol policeman, as it turned out, allegedly killed by a protester with a fire extinguisher, had died of natural causes, as evidenced by his family. Previously, the Russian collusion of the Trump campaign, pushed by the media for months on end, turned out to be bogus. Yet, during his tenure, when Mr. Trump tried to improve relations with Russia and overcome the yearlong Russophobe stance of major political stakeholders in the U.S., they kept badgering him as a Russian agent.
The same fate of derailment awaited the phony attempts to impeach the 45th President on unfounded charges (my take on the impeachment to be found here). While left-wing Antifa and Black Lives Matter thugs have been burning and looting for months, Democrats want to make us believe that right-wing extremism is the primary threat to the nation. Even traditional Christian values, mind you, run meanwhile under the headline of being extremist on the right. Election Integrity Laws are being denigrated as "voter suppression." Mr. Biden just auctioned himself off to the ridiculous remark that voter suppression is the biggest challenge to the country since the Civil War. This absurdity is regurgitated notwithstanding the irregularities and forensic evidence that surfaced in the wake of the November 2020 elections. While the justified concern that the election almost certainly was stolen from Mr. Trump is disparaged as conspiratorial, doubting voter fraud seems rather the monstrous thing to argue.
The list of lies, distortions, intentional falsehoods, and attempts to suppress the truth could go on almost endlessly. One fact, however, emerged clearly out of the political and social on-goings of the past few years. The bulk of the polity, the media, and the security apparatus have turned into machines of lie-production. They now represent ideologically subverted institutions that shy no unlawful and immoral transgressions to push through the left's progressive agenda.
The second reason standing in the way of truth and acknowledging reality is probably even more dangerous. It pertains to the constant and ever-increasing delusion over existential facts and realities driven by human hubris. I am talking about the unprecedented magnitude of anthropocentrism that dictates our contemporary understanding of what the human species can achieve, which supports the buildup of the fake realities dominating and eventually destroying our lives. No longer, for many, is the decisive task of truth to find out what nature dictates to man – grasping the actual reality in which we live – and what limits she sets for him and how the recognition translates best into meaningful prescriptions for human coexistence. It is now rather about overcoming the boundaries and limitations of natural conditions. Social constructivism is creating bogus realities and an environment of fake authenticity.
Man misunderstands himself as "Creator" and refuses to acknowledge a "natural order" of things. In the attempt to free himself from all social, cultural, religious, and biological conditions, western man strives to create his realities, guided by individual hedonism and personal gratification. Claims for a new "anthropology" aim at new identity designs for individuals and interest groups. These attempts also create new power structures and radically alter our societies.
Gender-Mainstreaming efforts terminate the natural binary gender code and with it dismiss the exclusivity of traditional marriage. The rare albeit genuine sexual ambiguity some people feel about their sex does not constitute a third (or fourth, or fifth, or umpteenth sex). Sex is binary and primary biologically determined and will remain so despite hormone treatments and sex-change operations. Recent studies have shown that even these interventions cannot change the gender code formed in the individual by creation. But wherever hard science does not fit the ideological agenda, the absurd distortion of reality continues. For example, when we speak no longer of mothers but of "birthing people" and in certificates replace father and mother with parent one and parent two.
Thus, the social ethics of Christendom that reigned for two millennia in acknowledgment of the ontological realities of human existence are now considered a threat and disparaged as extremist. "Anthropotechnical blasphemy" is the term the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk coined to depict the insanity of what is going on.
The contemporary climate hysteria is another area in which anthropocentrism stands in the way of truth. While nobody doubts climate change as a perennial natural phenomenon, the anthropocentricity of the left overestimates human influence to turn climate change into the defining issue of our time and an existential threat for humanity. With this hysteria generated (known to the older generations from the 1970s and 1980s, i.e., the Club of Rome), politicians can justify massive economic, social, and financial policy interventions.
Wherever we look, we see inversions of truth transpiring, absurd reality patterns arise.
Today, the convenient self-interpretations of man are supposed to give him his identity. And yet, identity does not stem from wishful thinking. On the contrary, it evolves from a proper recognition of reality and the true nature of things. Identity only belongs to the truth. Once again: "A=A."
As our western societies – particularly here in the U.S. – become ever more divided and at the same time amorphous as standards for right and wrong, good and evil disappear, our culture loses all dignity. Cultural authoritarianism and vulgar relativism spreads like wildfire.
Yet, equally terrifying is the complacency and contentment of conservative politicians and citizens in the U.S. and the Western world. Instead of carrying out a united backlash against the irresponsible leftist policies that reject law and order and the dictate of nature, conservative forces appear divided and self-contradictory.
The moral inertia of humankind throughout western civilization is shocking. The ongoing "Cultural Revolution" violates human dignity and the elementary foundations of humanity and natural law. The latter presenting the invisible reality and timeless criteria for ethics and legal regulation as they pertain to human nature universally.
Those people who have navigated unscathed through the rough sea of postmodern deconstructivism and nihilism, hopefully preserving their moral character and the power of healthy intuition and judgment, ask themselves only one question: How long will our societies survive the realities we build on falsehoods before they break apart?
