Truth applies to things both transient and permanent… like clouds, for example. Obviously they are a true thing, but the truth of how they appear was not known for most of history. It was still true.
SUN, SON
The Sun truly exists. Exactly how it came to be is only well-theorized. (Did you know that ‘theory’ means “words about what God is thinking?”) It is impossible to truly know until we can re-create its formation, and until that day we accept the words of scientists and their wonderful mathematics – a great source of truths all its own.
POLITICAL SCIENCE
Politicians love “science,” but not math so much. They like ‘agreement’ more. As science reveals truths or, better, evidence of truths, the opportunities for more laws and taxes multiply. But when a majority of people agree that something is true politicians can immediately step in front of that large group and claim to have always known the truth of that something in their electable hearts.
Absolute truths make these types very wary, unless, joy of joys, their absoluteness creates unfairness. Agreeable people will always vote to end unfairness wherever it lurks, or to create fairness. Fairness, as opposed to truth, is a poor basis for law. Some will look at a truth that affects everyone equally – as does a law based upon it – as completely “fair.” Equality is a good thing, no?
PRICE OF TRUTH
Money interferes with truth, for some people. If one has less money than some other person, then absolute truth/law can feel unfair, and those feelings build up and up, especially if one is reminded of them daily – or hourly. This is painfully true if the one with more money appears to be having more fun in life despite the absolute truth and the laws it spurs. Then politicians are called upon to level a playing field and eliminate unfairness. This is accomplished by penalizing those with more money and “fairer” taxation is the tool.
Fairness, in a political sense, is inseparable from truth and, like so many issues today, is best described as attempts to deny, or manipulate truth – also known as ‘reality.’
LIARS AND FAIRNESS
Harry Truman described three kinds of liars: “liars, damn liars, and statisticians.” Statistics are, ostensibly, evidences of truths. When certain statistics are used but not all, or if statistics that aren’t really related are placed together, patterns of “unfairness” can be discerned, especially by those who are looking for them. This affects tax theories and governance.
When Barack Hussein Obama was running for president, he stated that he would raise corporate taxes on the basis of simple “fairness.” The consequences to corporations, or to the economy, as well as considerations about whether the federal government “needed” those new revenues, were not part of his thinking. His statement was pure politics, based on perceptions of unfairness that were derived from the belief that corporations had too many tax advantages – or “loopholes” – while poor people (who largely paid no tax) didn’t have those “advantages.”
CAREER FAIRNESS
Obama’s entire career has been based on defining unfairness and getting people organized to put an end to it. It has not been because he cares about any particular social construct’s impact on people’s lives. It has been based, as many liberals’ views are, on the perception of unfairness that may be tapped into and used to incite radical change. Very little “fairness” is ever achieved. And if it is, it comes at a severe cost, often to those whose unfair situations were the spur to identifying the unfairness. Fairness, unlike truth, is malleable, and a destructive basis for laws.
SOCIAL JUSTICE
“Social Justice” has been the motivating buzz-word in the 21st century, and Obama has capitalized on its amorphous unfairness – if socialists can capitalize. Essentially, social justice takes over where “reparations” for the sin of slavery, falter. The concept of reparations disintegrates as the details are examined. Hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers, and millions of dollars (back when a million dollars was a lot of money) were expended to defeat the Confederacy – many thousands of black soldiers included. Millions of people sacrificed to fight to total victory. Who owes who what?
Most claims center on corporations that existed before the Civil War, especially those that existed in the 18th century. The condemnation is that they profited from slavery and that it’s time to “own up” to that tainted past. Apparently, the only way to set things right is to give money to brown-skinned people who were never slaves, themselves.
Monthly Archives: June 2016
TRUTH IN EDUCATION
Truth in education would seem to be a perfect sequitur. That is, educators will naturally be imparting truths to their students… without question. Go to school – society’s best expression of its worth, strength and future – and truth will be your reward. Naturally. But, increasingly it seems, not necessarily.
HISTORY AND TRUTH
What has happened in the past, for example, to the best of our ability to discover and document, provides a body of truth that should be the basis of a History course. In order for our children to know our nation’s origins, our standards of action and cultural “traditions,” we are obligated to convey to them what the facts are and were. We are obligated to tell our children the truth… I think.
Adults – and teachers – sometimes forget that what they show and what they tell their kids is grasped as TRUTH. It can take years for those who have the good fortune or good parenting to unlearn opinions, biases or hatreds, and replace them with “truer” truths. Unless they also have the good fortune to go to most colleges.
COLLEGE LEDUCATION
There they’ll listen to deeper biases, radical anti-Americanism, lists of words that can’t be used any longer, while learning about “trigger” words or concepts that can damage their fellow students… although they won’t be allowed to say “fellow” students. That’s a micro-aggression.
The “Education Industry” used to open minds to new ideas, challenge them with opposing views, teach them to embrace exploration for ever greater and purer TRUTHS. That is a habit that serves American citizens and other humans, for their entire lives.
TRUE HATE
How did higher educators become sources of so much hatred? Inordinate amounts of effort are expended teaching students whom they ought to hate, largely by accusing their targets of being haters! No debate seems to affect this process. Then they demand campus cultures that protect their charges from hearing hateful opposing views. Often this includes agitating to prevent certain people – some quite accomplished – from speaking on their “safe” campus.
WAR ON TRUTH
The college war on TRUTH includes cleansing courses of books written by white people that have been judged by today’s irrelevant attitudes to have been hateful, regardless of truths they may have understood or discovered. There are, apparently, no reasons to learn about truths discovered or described by people we no longer approve of. The entire basis of the United States, going back 500 years, is now rejected as distasteful and properly hated by our delicate “students.” One wonders if they are students if their areas of exploration keep shrinking.
The Constitution and its intellectual premises are well documented, forming a certain body of truth worthy of study (“worthy” is an opinion). At least, one would hope that raising new citizens would include truths about their own country.
TRUTH – On the Road
[Part A] TRUTH IN PAVING
Truths with hard, empirical evidence are best, since all concerned see, or know, the same information, the same fact(s). Laws may be enforced based on empirical evidence. Consider directions, or geometric dimensions. They are often expressed as related to right or left hands. Roads are an example: they have length and width, width described as the left side and right side of the road. As soon as more than one person desired to travel on a road, some sort of custom, and later, law, was needed to prevent collisions.
TWO SIDES TO EVERY TRUTH
Since it was – and is – absolutely true that the road had a left and right half – or sides – then a law that directed travelers or drivers to “keep to the right,” as they were facing, prevented collisions to every traveler’s benefit. Truth is a good basis for laws.
Nowhere are people who have lost their right hands excused from obeying the “right-hand” law. The loss of a hand doesn’t change the truth.
DIRECTIONAL OPPRESSION
Now, let’s imagine some travelers, or drivers, feeling oppressed by the right-hand restriction. These are they who feel compelled to drive in a different lane than the right-hand one. This leads them to drive on the left side, which poses serious risks to themselves and others. Mature, elected leaders, never at loss for a pander, rather than tell those differently-compelled drivers that they must drive on the right, instead tell cities, towns and states to hurry up and create a third lane down the middle so that the differently-compelled can drive in a lane that’s not the right-hand lane.
THREE DIRECTIONS… FOUR
No sooner is the third lane completed, striped and the road landscaped, but a problem crops up with other differently-compelled drivers going the other way, who also want to drive in the center lane. No problem to political types: everyone will simply cough up the taxes to build a fourth lane to accommodate both directions of differently-compelled drivers. Problem solved… maybe.
PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE TRUTH BEHIND THE CURTAIN
Unfortunately, many differently-compelled drivers can’t set aside the urge to drive on the left side, and actually feel discriminated against to be forced to use the middle lane(s). Politicians feel their pain right away. A new law is created that requires all right-hand-adhering drivers to make way whenever some differently-compelled driver feels compelled to use the left lane. Old-law-abiding drivers are given the option to drive in the middle lanes or, if they think it’s safer, to pull off the road and wait until a differently-compelled driver goes by. It interferes with all the non-differently-compelled drivers’ travel, but, none of the differently-compelled drivers feel oppressed any longer. That is legally important above all other concerns – even truth.
A TRUTH TO FIT EVERYONE
Eventually, though, non-differently-compelled drivers find that when traffic builds up, it saves a lot of time to take the center lanes or even the left lane. Police pull them over because they look like Non- Differently-Compelled drivers, and not like differently-compelled ones. Amazingly, every driver pulled over for driving on the wrong side of the street turns out to feel compelled to drive in other than the right lanes!
Oppression is either more widespread than originally known, or it’s contagious. Traffic cops would now be in a tough spot since the oppressed, non-oppressed and temporarily-oppressed all look alike. Perhaps the oppressed could wear different hats… or something.
Truth, Belief, Spirituality, Life, Death, Freedom
THE BIG SIX.
It feels as though all the “old” ways are under assault at once. The arguments against what is and how it came to be, are endless. Overpopulation is an argument that’s so old it’s become new again. The reasons to limit – even reduce – population change with the winds of politics, but they’re certainly heating up again, now. Mankind has no clear basis for determining when population is “over,” or just larger, but there are plenty of worries… and theories – same things, sometimes.
TRUE SEX
Another, relatively new argument is about sexuality. The closer we can get to pure animalism the better, according to some. Animals, themselves, exercise better ethics about sex than do humans who want to act like animals. Even Federal and state governments are de-regulating sex, mostly by coercing straight people, who are the vast majority. Why it is a government problem is hard to compute.
Reconfiguring sex brings up issues like Freedom, Social Cohesion, Law, Justice and the Regulatory State. The social – and sexual – roles of males and females are shifting, and have been for a century, to the point they no longer have legal definition. Their denial is where legality matters. The original feminist rebellion, allegorized in the Garden of Eden story, is playing out to unintended results, all around us.
HOT TRUTH
Climate Change – measurable in less than half a lifetime – is a wonderfully heavy political tool for leftist, controlling types. Too many people on the planet is the source of it, of course, as we are the source for everything unpleasant, even, now, earthquakes and volcanoes. The chief agitators about climate change are the same who want to sunder sexuality, disrupt business, cut law free from its moorings and render education into government pigeon-holing.
COLD TRUTH
Religious institutions are being de-legitimized, despite Constitutional protection of religious freedom, but religion, itself – as in spirituality – is being lost at the same time, as if it were never more than decoration. The spirituality of life is dismissed as inconvenience, as millions of abortions are committed around the world, so strongly advocated by those who deny fatherhood and motherhood as oppressive.
Science, to socialist controllers, is the new religion. It’s technology, really, that provides cover for the erasing of tradition… and of spirit. Science somehow justifies top-down regulation; freedom, religious and otherwise, is its impediment.
FORMULA SIX
All areas of human testing, failure and success derive from the following elements of the formulae for Humanity:
1) Truth; 2) Belief; 3) Spirituality; 4) Life; 5) Death; and, 6) Freedom.
I have tried to identify another “root” or “end” to improve this sextet, but these encompass everything, I think. All other topics of debate, argument, war and peace, including those heated and cold, are “means” to these “ends.” My contention is that it is possible to devise governance that prevents the means from thwarting the ends for all… and for every individual, family, extended group or nation. So, in turn:
TRUTH is absolute, illimitable, pure. It bumps into beliefs – or the other way around – constantly, but it can’t be changed with a new truth (opinion) to take its place, and lies may stick to it only temporarily. Truth is the reason for experiment, discovery, curiosity and science, but it can’t be limited by any of those – it simply is.
TREWTH
Many of mankind’s troubles stem from attempts to define or re-define truth, as though different opinions represented differing sets of truths. Obviously that is impossible; there are only differing sets of beliefs or, corrosively, attitudes.
Truth may be described through evidence, but evidence, itself, requires constant, scientific (defined as examination and testing free of the pollution of beliefs) distillation. There are as many truths as there are atomic particles, all potentially discoverable, but true regardless. Humans are concerned with a tiny fraction of them.
PERSONAL TRUTH
Our greatest literature is about the revelation of truth, or about truths that conflict based on unequal beliefs about them. Often, unable to reveal absolute truth, literature will draw moral lessons from its obvious existence, even if imperfectly known, and present those as a form of proof of absolutes. Such are easily disregarded by skeptics, who insist that they are entitled to irrefutable proof of absolute truth if they are to respond to it in any way. Otherwise, their comfortable beliefs will suffice for this lifetime.
JUDGMENT
Legal battles are one forge for isolating absolute truth, hopefully stripped of all misunderstanding. Oddly, mere opposing “views” of what is true are the essence of “proof” that will convict or acquit a suspect. Recognizing that absolute proof of absolute truth is imperfectly achievable by humans, we invest judges and juries with the power to “rate” the quality of opposing views of truth, in order to convict or acquit. Neither outcome establishes “truth,” although one may come close. Whose opinion of what is true, is most plausible?
Even confessions must be proven, as individuals are known to admit to acts not performed for various reasons.
TRUTH IN POLITICS
Controlling types, politicians and others, find that controlling access to truth – thereby defining truth for the controlled – yields immense power. Science is their umbrella, and education, glorious, indoctrinating, “public” education, is their most effective tool.
The monopolistic ability to control the beliefs of most of the population, and therefore how that population grants power democratically, enables teachers – controlled through licensure and unionization – to define “truth” for their students. “Science,” then is more free to pursue the “truths” it wishes to discover and to ignore those it wishes to obscure – or, as happens, doesn’t believe in.
Truth controlled by politics is a dangerous, dangerous weapon.
TRUE LIES
The existence of truth spawns lies… some unintended. Lying, when on purpose, is purely human. There is no inherent requirement for lying that must be met to live well. Lying is easy in its simplest applications; many are harmless, even beneficial for the “ly-ee.”
“Do I look stupid?” The asker probably thinks he or she DOES look stupid in some situation, but usually receives an answer like, “Of course not!” Which might be a lie. “Do these clothes make me look fat?”
Of course not.
[Additional Truthiness to follow]