The truth is never more than a story. When this story is adopted by authorities, it becomes definitive. For a variety of reasons, in a variety of ways, these definitive stories can be partially or entirely wrong. In societies that don't stifle free speech, stories that are wrong can be publicly challenged and sometimes even corrected. Unfortunately, our society appears increasingly comfortable stifling free speech.
From an off-Guardian editorial by Colin Todhunter:
In the US, Fauci presented himself as 'the science.' In New Zealand, Ardern's government was 'the truth.' It was similar in countries across the world – different figures but the same approach. When anyone in power or any institution lays claim to 'the truth,' history shows we are on a slippery slope to silencing thought and dissent that we disagree with. Like other political leaders, during COVID, Ardern clamped down on civil liberties with the full force of state violence on hand to ensure compliance with 'the truth.' Clearly, Ardern is not alone here. Trudeau, Biden and others display Orwellian undertones as they talk of the need to challenge 'misinformation' and those who question 'the truth.' The thin end of a very wide authoritarian wedge.
Setting aside the important fact that curtailing freedom harms individuals, developments like these fuel disastrous outcomes. In extreme cases, some of which we've seen with the official response to the pandemic, the truth itself becomes a lie. Today, two years into this nonsense, I still hear people parroting the lie that vaccines stop the spread of the virus; that getting vaccinated protects others. In fact, the vaccines weren't designed for this. They were only designed to prevent serious illness in the event of infection. So when the vaccinated started spreading the virus at similar rates as the unvaccinated, society was presented with a hard choice: Believe the lie despite evidence contradicting it, or admit that the truth was unlike the story we were being forced by our control regime to support.
There's grave danger in this choice. If the authoritative view is exposed as a lie, it calls into question the basic legitimacy of the power structure. And if free speech is stifled by the regime that's lost legitimacy, the result is classic tyranny, such as we saw in Canada when the bank accounts of protesters were frozen for demonstrating against a vaccine mandate.
The danger here isn't confined to the policy level, or to broad social trends. The gravest danger is individual and psychological. When observable reality conflicts with the stories presented to us about reality, the whole world becomes less trustworthy. Experiences of everyday life are no longer validated by once-trusted sources. Uncertainty replaces confidence and relationships can come under strain.
There are countless people dealing with stuff like this right now. I chat with some of them at the coffee shop, and hear them grappling with the entire concept of the truth in these strange times. I'm not sure how useful my contributions to these conversations are. I try to focus on epistemology and ontology, but they mostly just want to know what to believe now that the entire world has been revealed to be bullshit.
Most of what I was taught growing up turned out to be true only in a conditional sense, if it was true at all. Much of what I believed in my early twenties also turned out to be hogwash. And there are definitely things that I currently believe which will prove false over time. I see truth as something like a snapshot of where my sense-making process is in a given moment. Not everyone is so flexible.
Some people need to feel like their world is grounded in objective facts that everyone believes. Post-covid, with our collective psyche fractured, people like this are on every side of every argument, trying to force their views on others. Every top-down attempt to stop misinformation is an example of such arguments playing out. So are grassroots attempts to silence people with offensive perspectives or personal histories. The truth is nowhere in all of this. Nowhere but in our minds.
(Feature image from Pixabay.)
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