Stand Up for Truth
It is under direct attack from both tribes.
When Donald Trump claimed that his inaugural audience was larger than President Obama’s had been, photographs were quickly paired to show that this was not true, his audience was much smaller. But the discussion went no further, because this was a harmless lie.
Unfortunately, it set, in the first hours of his presidency, what would be a pattern for the next four years, lying about anything and everything. Transparent, obvious and unsubtle lies, ranging from support for his monstrous vanity to denying the pandemic that killed over a million Americans and left many times more with damage and disability. Yet the press took three years to apply the words “lie” and “liar” to this man.
We expect falsehood from the red tribe; their positions are deeply unpopular and so need to be concealed behind the debate-stifling emotionalism of resentment and persecution mania. We are less ready to recognize the same from the blue tribe, but it is there, and almost as prevalent. Extremists on Tribe Blue are as inflexible and as irrational as those on Tribe Red.
Tribe Red has “Trump won” as the signature qualification for admission; Tribe Blue has “A trans woman is a woman.“
The replacement of objective fact with subjective experience is not new but it was formalized in postmodernism:
[Postmodernism] considers "reality" to be a mental construct. Postmodernism rejects the possibility of unmediated reality or objectively-rational knowledge, asserting that all interpretations are contingent on the perspective from which they are made; claims to objective fact are dismissed as naive realism.
Despite widespread ridicule and several embarrassing exposures, postmodernism retains a broad following and forms the foundation of the “gender ideology” movement whose scorn of the very notion of objective reality is not at all hidden.
We are living in dangerous times. Falsehoods that not long ago would have ended careers are now accepted with frightening nonchalance. Every potent issue anyone can think of is riddled with lies and it is nothing short of astonishing how many of them are widely believed. Cutting taxes increases revenue, an armed citizenry makes us safer, nobody under 18 has ever had gender surgery. And absolutely everything is a matter of opinion and is subjective.
The theme of this forum is to resist this formulation, to push back at explanations based on subjectivity, to reject arguments of “who gets to decide,” to stand up for logic, science, and, yes, objectivity.
Welcome.
The usual rules. Try to call bad arguments idiocy instead of calling bad arguers idiots.
In an effort to not create an opus magnum comment I'll write a few. The general theme made me think of this old Scott Adams quote.
"If you see voters as rational, you'll be a terrible politician. People are not wired to be rational. Our brains simply evolved to keep us alive. Brains did not evolve to give us truth. Brains merely give us movies in our minds that keeps us sane and motivated. But none of it is rational or true, except maybe sometimes by coincidence."
Chris, I agree entirely and have highlighted some of this in my own work. I used to believe in notions like there is no such thing as objectivity, but came to realise that this is nihilistic and lazy thinking. It leads to a lack of belief in anything and is meaningless. If you don't believe in anything then you will tolerate anything. Objective reality and scientific fact go hand in hand. In my field of work which was/is writing fiction and non-fiction there is a dominant trend to use 'sensitivity readers.' This is utter hogwash. I was once asked to advise a straight writer who was developing a gay character if I would assess it for it's correctness. I told them that I would do no such thing. I advised them to develop a fully rounded character, warts 'n' all, a real person, not a cipher for political correctness, as you should do with all your main characters. Suffice to say that in the current Woke climate, this did not go down well. There is no such thing as a 'lived gay experience', because shock/horror, we are all individuals, and different and have differing opinions and histories etc. This nonsense leads to straight people being afraid to write gay characters lest they fall foul of the Woke police.