Some Truth About Right and Wrong
Oops! I should have put this up on my blogs. I think it is pretty good. I just forgot to do it. It is a bit metaphysical, about the dysfunctional ideas about the nature of truth which are so harmful to human society.
It is also a bit too simplistic but I did not and do not have the time to go deeper into this complicated subject. There is such a thing as uncertainty. I am certain of that. However, almost everything said in present day political “discourse” by all sides, is nonsense and flat wrong.
Well, I think it’s time to lay another of my pearls of wisdom in Caitoz’ comments box. The issue this time is in her article of December 12, found at https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/12/12/yet-another-major-escalation-in-establishment-internet-censorship/
The salient sentences are; “People are allowed to be wrong. A free society allows people the right to voice wrong beliefs because the only alternative is creating a monolithic Ministry of Truth which has authority over what the right and wrong beliefs are.”
Caitoz is one of the brighter bulbs in internet land but is still hampered by the old liberal conception of how right and wrong work. This trope is at the heart of the Truth Crisis in western society. People keep getting crazier and splitting into more extreme and antagonistic ideologies because; “people are allowed to be wrong.”
No.
No one is allowed to be wrong. In pretty much anything resembling a real democracy, from Ancient Athens to the New England town hall, you shoot your mouth off in public and you had better be prepared to substantiate what you say.
In real democracies, the penalties for seeking to misinform and misdirect, or just wasting everyone else’s time due to your egotism, can be stern. I believe in Ancient Athens they risked getting a hot pepper shoved up their asses. In Ye Olde New England Towne halls, they might get dunce capped or even put in stocks.
We might find solutions more appropriate to our times, but to sanction bullshitters and blatherers is not to start a slippery slope to a “Monolithic Ministry of Truth”. It is to actually value democracy.
What most people do not realize about Liberalism is that it is antagonistic to democracy. A true Liberal does not want to have to deal with those they regard as ignorant or beneath them. They tend to want to live in their private worlds.
Thus they do not want a monolithic state ruling over them, even though it might still be committed to a secure and provident existence for its people. They also do not want any sort of democracy, no matter how much lip service they pay to the ideal. What they are most comfortable with is an oligarchy.
An oligarchy is always a weak government. It is weak because it is always full of factions within factions which do not want anyone leading them and imposing their “Truth” on “My Truth.” It keeps the subordinated classes disempowered by keeping them confused and divided by multiple truths.
So you have two basic methods of keeping the untermenchen neutralized. They are not exactly about “narrative control” as in Caitoz’s favorite trope. There is the totalitarian “one big truth” and there is the liberal “many small and contradictory truths”.
Of course, in those times in history where something like a real democracy has broken out, it is governed by simple truth. The rules of thought prevail, as taught from Aristotle through Descartes to Bertrand Russell; a thing is true or it is false, nothing is true and false at the same time, and a thing is true when its contrary is false.
This tends to really flip out people with a liberal frame of mind. People are saying that a thing is either right or it’s wrong. They are denying that there can be many truths and many realities. Oh, dear!
However, there is no way that any human association can function adequately together unless there is a consensus among them about what is true. That is as true for a whole society as for the staff of a pizza joint.
If you dropped a group of people down in a wilderness within which they would have to figure out among themselves how to survive and find their way out, they would quickly decide what the one truth is about the situation, and what is the one right way to deal with it. If they do not, the buzzards will soon be picking their bones.
So, either the Ministry of Truth or the absolute right to be wrong in public; this is a false dichotomy. Either way is arrogance imposing on normal human relationships, impeding the necessary seeking of the truth, the real, the right way, about things.
There is no freedom of speech. There is no right to be wrong. Nothing good comes from these ideas. They are intensely driven in through the educational and other cultural institutions by people who would rather be on top of a dysfunctional society than be nothing special in a healthy one.
The first rule of a really free society is; If you don’t know what you’re talking about, keep your mouth shut.