Tag: post-truth

Post-Truth

America, Media, Morality, Reason, Society & Culture, Values

Irrespective of religion, one of the bedrocks of human morality and conduct is the rule, “Thou shalt not lie.” On the Decalogue it was worded “Thou shalt not bear false witness” but only the most ardent cynic would argue that the two phrases aren’t equivalent. Begs one to ask, “What is Truth?”. Regrettably, and sadly, today lying in all its forms is so common that Truth is completely obscured.

Truth is reality. Truth is fact. Truth is truth whether one believes it or not, whether all mankind believes it or not. It is eternal. It is immutable. There is no such thing as “my truth” as one political moron once suggested.

Truth doesn’t come in shades, different colors, isn’t nuanced, isn’t relative. It doesn’t have to be subjected to scrutiny or scientific testing. It is possible that there are truths undiscovered. Consider that as late as the 17th century China still believed the Earth was flat. Irrespective of their BELIEF that the Earth is flat, the TRUTH was and is that it is a sphere. So, the Truth of the Earth’s form wasn’t discovered by the Chinese for millennia but it was still Truth!

Lying, on the other hand, comes in many forms: outright falsehood, omission, misrepresentation, incomplete recounting, deception, misdirection, dissembling, extraction without context, “white”, and today’s favorite form – ‘spin’.

EVERYONE is guilty of lying. As with so many things, however, it is a question of degree. And, I would add, it’s a question of perspective.

I submit the Left utilize lying at a rate and in a quantity many times that of the Right. Consciously, with the argument that “the ends justify the means” continuously in mind, the Left lies almost non-stop. As a group, the class of vermin called professional politicians routinely lie, but the Left does so audaciously, consistently and arrogantly. They believe that if they shout and accuse, bludgeon and scream their words, THAT, in and of itself, creates Truth. They believe that if they say things often enough with catchy phraseology, it will become Truth.

And in the minds of the weak, it does.

Add to the propensity for falsehood the age-old psychological disorder called Projection, the amplification and megaphone aspect of the Internet, the sycophant and pandering broadcast and print media and the addictive and intoxicating dystopian impact of Social Media, and the Left wields far more influence than the Right. Like a steamroller, the Left crushes Truth and replaces it with “their” truth…a demented and sick, narcissistic, megalomaniacal and condescending view of the world that has consistently resulted in enslavement and attempts to suppress free will.

Using its finely honed skill at lying, its legions of mouthpieces all voicing the canon, the Left successfully destroyed the integrity of our election process. They’ve been working on it for decades. They almost got away with it in 2016, and they have provisionally gotten away with it in 2020. In terms of societal destruction, they’ve gone into hyper-drive, seeking to complete the “fundamental transformation” of our country and Western society.

It truly has become a world “post-truth”. Not just moral relativism abounds – EVERYTHING is now relative, even gender.

It is madness and while many of us sane people on the Right like to discount the lunacy as transient, to be rectified in 2022 and 2024, the damage being done to our culture and country, even if repaired, will leave scars and doubt for generations to come. It is the pattern of all great civilizations: from struggle for existence to relative peace to conflict of envy to moral decay to economic decline to war to extinction. In America today we’re for the most part watching the death of Good and the rise of Evil as if it were a sitcom…something that’s happening “out there” rather than in our own backyard.

But it IS happening, and part of the Post-Truth era is convincing the weak that the destruction they’re seeing with their own eyes, experiencing in their own lives, is either not really happening or is GOOD for them!

And all of it can be traced back, in large part, to the lies of the Left. From the lies of the 60’s: “Free” love, “Turn On, Tune Out, Drop Out”, “LSD will open your mind man…”, “All you need is love”, to the lies of today: “The crisis at the border is Trump and the Republicans’ fault,” “COVID-19 spontaneously jumped from bats in a wet market to humans”, “Job training (the unions’ welfare plan) equals infrastructure”, “Police are fascists,” etc., the use of high-production-value visuals, music, narrative and clever slogans constitute a tsunami of lies that have successfully brain-washed the weak-minded and elevated the demagogues.

I fear it’s going to take a cataclysmic shock for America to wake up and regain its ability to separate Truth from Lies. Until that time we will continue to live in a Post-Truth, Post-Reality world. Thankfully, mankind has something called “discernment”. If used, along with Free Will, it may yet save itself from a repeat of history.

The Death of Quality

America, Economy, Morality, Reason, Society & Culture, Values

I used to be able to pick up the phone sitting on my desk and 99.9% of the time I’d get a dial tone and be able to call out. Today about three quarters of the time I use my cell phone the call either gets dropped, I can hear him but he can’t hear me (I feel like the guy in the commercial, “Can you hear me now???”), or I get one bar or no bars from the start.

Technology has delivered many conveniences to be sure. But personal attention is certainly not one of them. And reliability (a.k.a. quality) has been a casualty as well. So help me, if I here the words, “It’s software, what do you expect?” one more time I’m liable to scream “arrrrrggggghhhh!” right in the face of whomever uses those words with me!

What happened to craftsmanship? What happened to companies who’d boast about the quality of their products and due to real competition, didn’t charge a highway robber’s take for it?

Technology is what happened. Benefits gave way to features. Reliability gave way to creature comforts. Stuff that would last forever gave way to planned obsolescence. In short, an honest profit gave way to greed and Good Housekeeping seals of approval gave way to “5 Star Comments” on Amazon, honest or not!

I have a personal example. About 30 years ago I bought a Black and Decker Workmate portable workbench. It folds up nicely, flexibly adjusts, and is made of solid steel and wood, the screw mechanism that adjusts the vice having many threads. It still serves me as well today as the day I bought it.

Wandering around Home Depot the other day, I saw my Workmate’s 2020 version. It was, to put it succinctly, a piece of, well you know what, compared to mine and cost in today’s dollars, roughly twice as much.

Another example. Over 40 (yes 40) years ago I bought a fun kid’s sled made by a Norwegian company called a Sno-kart for my own children. It was made of steel tubing and high density polyethylene plastic with strongly welded joints. My grandchildren still gleefully use it today.

I checked, and the company still exists but their sleds now are made of cheap plastic throughout. I can’t imagine they’d survive my grandson’s first run down the hill!

Another thing that technology has caused is a decline in honesty. Doctors will tell you, “Everybody lies about their health.” That may be true, but the phenomenon was, until the last twenty years or so ago, largely restricted to the medical field. Today, it seems everybody lies about everything! I don’t just mean blatant, with a straight face bald-faced lying. I also mean lying by omission, lying by “creative misrepresentation”, or “lying for the greater good.”

In other words, there has been a serious decline in the quality of truthfulness, of probity, of ethics, of morals…one could even say a decline in the quality of reality!

Quality being almost completely dead, a renaissance is needed.

I have re-committed myself to giving 100% to everything I do, of restoring quality to my everyday tasks and professional endeavors. I have also re-committed myself to be not just truthful and honest, but to being forthright as well.

The other side of this coin is that I will continue to throw the yellow or red BS flags on the field whenever I see they’re warranted. I will refuse to abide or tolerate dishonesty of all kinds in my interactions with vendors, agents, advisors and most definitely with politicians!

I sincerely hope and pray I’ll be successful and may be able to influence others to join in the fight to restore quality to everything we have and do.

Truth Matters

Reason, Society & Culture

In 2016 the Oxford English Dictionary’s “Word of the Year” was post-truth, suggesting that truth is dead, and objective facts no longer have any meaning. Really? Have we become so poisoned with relativism that standards no longer exist and the individual is the sole arbiter of right and wrong, fact and fiction, truth or lies and, by way of conclusion, “anything goes?”

“What is truth?” is one of the central questions of philosophy. Is Corey Booker correct to suggest that we must all live “our truth”? Plato, Aristotle, Socrates and Corey Booker can debate the answer. Here’s one truth, however, that should but probably won’t be universally accepted. It is that there is a difference between truth and belief.

What is or should be of great concern is how falsehood, what a business school course once called “creative misrepresentation” and fiction are used to persuade or judge everyday matters. And of paramount concern is how lies have been weaponized so as to cause belief to be to pushed and accepted as truth. By way of example, that the Benghazi disaster was the result of an anti-muslim video was proclaimed so loudly and assertively, it brainwashed many.

It’s also true that not everything is black or white. Grey is the predominant color in debate. But has the questioning of norms and rules gone so far overboard that it attacks the very idea of having any rules at all as Victor Davis Hanson suggested in his 2014 essay “The Poison of Postmodern Lying“? As he so starkly points out, “Without notions of objective truth, there can never be lies, just competing narratives and discourses. Stories that supposedly serve the noble majority are true; those that supposedly don’t become lies — the facts are irrelevant.”

So it seems nowadays that truth is in the hands of he or she who has the bigger megaphone, or who can more cleverly devise a phrase or seven second soundbite that tugs at a heartstring or “sounds right.”

The antidote?

Critical Thinking…something that is sorely lacking in our population today. Or, how about, at least, healthy skepticism?

Not all news is fake news, but a lot of it consists of selective truth, or facts taken out of context. Not all advertising is nonsense, though healthy skepticism should cause us to consider whether ground-up peach pits will cure cancer, or whether an actress’s proclamation that vaccinations cause autism should be accepted as truth.

If you hear a talking head say, “Let me be clear,” or “Make no mistake”, or “The truth of the matter is”, or, my favorite…”It goes without saying,” immediately turn on your skeptic’s filter.

Separating fact from fiction, truth from lies, involves work. It is the work of seeking out, validating and judging evidence. In an era of information overload, (I like the analogy of trying to take a drink from a firehose), sounding plausible or looking, in the case of websites or television, as if it’s plausible does not mean it’s true. We used to say, “Don’t believe everything your read.” Now we have to add “hear” and “see” to the list. Today you can’t even believe your own eyes thanks to the wonders of PhotoShop.

Besides applying the principle of critical thinking we can resolve to tell the truth ourselves, teach our children and grandchildren the difference between truth and a lie (remember George Washington and the cherry tree?) and remind ourselves not to be swayed by the herd, by popular opinion, by peer pressure and by what tugs at the heart while bypassing our brains.

The truth matters.

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