The War on Truth

This is likely to only be a "part one" post since I have a lot to say about this topic and it is still clarifying in my own mind.

However, I want to propose that the War on Truth is the root culture war that we are currently facing. By this I do not just mean that there are people who are lying.  There have always been people who are lying.  What I mean is that for the past few decades there has been a systematic war on the idea that there is anything that actually counts as Truth.  And I would say that without a belief that Truth actually exists, although there are implications in saying that it does that are uncomfortable, we are condemning ourselves to a horrific future if we have a future at all.

So first, why I think it is the root culture war.  Let's take a look at various issues

1. The attack on scientific epistemologies enable the climate catastrophe.  There is no substantive doubt among the sciences or scientists about the reality of the climate crisis or its causes...but that is certainly not apparent thanks to the War on Truth.
2. The War on Women - it is based on lies.  It claims to be about protecting "unborn babies," (or more truthfully embryos and fetuses) but we know how to prevent most abortions...it is the policies that the pro-choice advocates favor.  This is about controlling women and their bodies.  You can trace a lot of other aspects of the War on Women back to systematic undermining of Truth and Truth-telling.
3. The War on Immigrants is based on systematic lies.  The U.S. born population is not reproducing enough to replace itself so we need immigrants in order to thrive.  They commit crimes at a lower rate than our native-born citizens.  They are heavily engaged in society and are not taking jobs from native born people--those places that have depressed economies are about the PLACE, not the population.  If those dying areas in the middle of the country wanted to boost their local economy, they would invite a bunch of recent immigrants to come live with them and would then treat them well so they would invest in their neighborhood.
4. Crime is down and our overpolicing and mass incarceration is not just a human rights violation, it is also just straight up uncalled for.  So, why are people so constantly worried about crime?  This is part of the War on Truth.
5. Any of the lies that make people believe that one group of people inherently radically different than another...we are all more alike than different.  Those definitions shift and change a lot.
6. The Trump administration's War on Statistics  is an incredibly cynical strategy.  This includes changing the model for the poverty line which will just definitionally move people out but not represent any increase in their spending power; changing the model to calculate environmental damage from de-regulation so that it is not sensitive - not that it changes the actual amount of damage that is more accurately predicted by earlier models; undermining the accuracy of the Census and ALL OF THE RESEARCH BUILT ON IT (which is a lot) by adding a citizenship question and then terrifying non-native born people with Gestapo tactics.

All of this is to say that we must become vigilant and call lying what it is.  Call out the War on Truth at every turn.  This is necessary.  Demand that our societal whistleblowers (Fourth Estate, I'm looking at YOU!) do the same.  This is important and we must do it.

So now, some of the uncomfortable stuff.  It is not sufficient to look outside and point our fingers and say that other people are lying.  Part of the attack on Truth is the idea that "everyone is entitled to their opinion."  The thing is...if you take Truth seriously, then no one is entitled to their own opinion.  It is intellectual laziness to stop at opinion because opinion is just ignorance until it is turned into knowledge.  What is deeply uncomfortable (certainly to me) is to realize how much of what I think is actually opinion and not knowledge.  It also means that you have to really, really watch yourself and become cognizant and correct yourself when you speak untruths.  Those can be the little white lies, but they accumulate as a willingness to accept untruth; those times in which your language is careless (this is my biggest challenge); and those times in which you are just wrong and realize it later.  I try, as part of my spiritual practice to catch myself and correct when I have not been truthful.  I think this is a VERY important part of my spiritual practice given my role with Apollon and as a seer.  But it is hard.  And it is sometimes mortifying to realize how careless I can be.  And I think it is important to do this with a sense of forgiveness and recognition of the inherent weakness in we short-lived mortal beings.  It is a practice that is simultaneously humbling and helps me build compassion.

Here is the other really uncomfortable piece, though...and I say this as a political and social Progressive.  I spent a good portion of the 90's arguing with intellectuals who were on my side of the political spectrum but who bought heavily into postmodern thought and I have always been afraid it would inevitably lead to where we are.  Now, I'm not going to reconstruct everything in a blog post.  I'm not even sure that my mind is sharp enough to do it anymore (I do miss having virtually all of my time devoted to thinking big abstract ideas unlike now where I must do it in snatches).  

Here, for those who are not in this world, is a hack summary of some of the big picture postmodern critiques.  I want to be clear that this is a hack job and anyone who is a postmodernist would be rightfully mad at how bad a job I am doing...but this is what I can manage in the brief window I have.  The important insight that I think Postmodernism did bring is the realization that the way in which the "western" academy with its roots largely in the Enlightenment was going about its pursuit of knowledge and the search for that which is Essentially True was and is embedded in a social/political/cultural context in which it interrelates with power dynamics.  Now, from WITHIN "Enlightenment" thinking, this could be taken as a corrective.  Like, we may need to go back and re-interrogate certain conclusions that we reached about the nature of Truth because maybe they were distorted based on the fact that the people theorizing were embedded within particular social/cultural/power structures.  So far, I am 100% down with that.  But many of them went further and undermined the idea that there is anything in "reason" other than rationalization of power.  And, in what is a really aggravating trend, the linguistic turn in postmodern philosophy meant that you only had credibility if you got unbelievably self-referential and linguistically impossible to penetrate.  I have really big problems with this and spent about a decade getting into constant arguments about it until I found my way into my little enclave where we don't talk about it.  Maybe I shouldn't have given up the fight...but I was really, really, really poor and couldn't keep going.

Back to ideas...in addition to the fact that I absolutely believe that there is a reality that has essential nature and that our quest for it is complex and challenging but that the mind is capable of using reason to search for it, I think that reducing reason to rationalization of power is just wrong.  I believe I can look at a lot of the sciences, at comparative mysticism, to laws of logic, and to the fact that minds make creative leaps for which the culture of the person having the insight doesn't know what to do with them to answer a lot of the more reductive ideas in postmodernism.  But from a pragmatic/strategic standpoint, here is the reason the postmodern fascination with undermining all truth claims freaked me out.

The people who were most engaged in postmodern thought tended to be on my side of the political spectrum.  We shared a lot of the same values about trying to overcome oppression, the responsibility of humans to the environment, etc. etc.  But my intellectual sparring partners were using the whirling scythes of unchained postmodern skepticism to try to undermine the structures that cause oppression...but were doing it in a way that I was convinced would ultimately cause far more harm than the benefits accrued by short-term gains, in addition to the fact that I was never convinced that they were actually right in their fundamental arguments.  See, the problem is that you can make a critique of structures of oppression, but if you do it in such a way that you are also claiming that reason is just rationalization of power, then you undercut your long-term claims to anything that might be called Justice...because you don't really believe in it.  There is a big difference in saying that Justice is not being realized because of prejudice or that our conceptions of Justice have been overly colored and need to be reinterrogated to better represent the Truth of what Justice is.  But the postmodern critique is essentially that Western concepts of Justice are simply cultural constructions that have no real foundation but exist in order to maintain a particular society and its dominance.  This, by the way, is where you get into extreme cultural relativism.  I am not a cultural relativist.  [I do think there is something morally wrong with female genital mutilation or various cultures killing LGBTQ people.  I also think that our addiction to fossil fuels because we can't tell the difference between comfort and necessity is morally wrong.]  

So, the strategic issue is, of reason is just rationalization of power, why would anyone relinquish power?  Why would they?  Sentiment?  With no ideal of Justice, or Love, or some other BIG IDEAL to motivate them, you are relying on guilt, sentiment, or threats.  Those are evanescent and can get overturned really easily at the first suggestion that if a group that is oppressed now were to get power they would use it for vengeance.  They also don't give any foundation for actual, meaningful change.  I don't want to just rearrange the chairs on the deck.  I want to change our relationship with power, which means changing our vision about what it looks like, what it serves, and how it relates to Truth.

Postmodern philosophy took over the academy in the 80's.  It is losing some ground now...but we have more than two generations of intellectuals, especially progressive intellectuals, being raised with it.  It leads to a type of cynicism that no longer believes there is any Truth.  When we believe that there is no such thing as Truth and it is all rationalization of power, is it any wonder where we end up?  We end up exactly where we are.  With the War on Truth.  With opinion being enshrined in either a hyper-individualistic way (I am entitled to MY opinion) or in a way that leads to ideological purity that can't measure itself against any real question for knowledge and understanding but is, instead, more about aligning identity with particular groups.  

Anyway, I am making a big deal out of the Progressive piece of this because I think that we need to really think through our own thoughts, commitments, and at least be clear with ourselves about what is going on in our own mind.

Perhaps I will write more later.  Now I need to get going to the next thing.

Public Figures, Celebrity and Private Citizens

There are some things that we need to disaggregate here.  In the United States we have conflated Public Figures and Celebrity.

First, one of the great problems in our democracy is that the populace is busy evaluating public figures using the same metrics they use to evaluate celebrities...namely their "likability."  So, I would like to draw a line here and talk about function.

Public figures are those people who have willing put themselves into positions in which they speak with the authority of the voice of the citizenry.  In other words, these are elected officials, those who are choosing to run for public office, and some leaders in the professional arm of government who are of a high enough position that they should be personally responsible to the citizens for whom they work - often these are also political appointees in the executive branch and/or appointed or elected justices, district attorneys, leadership in police forces.

The key point here is that public figures have CHOSEN roles in which they act for the public citizenry and in so doing they do not have the same rights anymore as a private citizen.  A private citizen, such as you or me, have certain appropriate expectations of privacy.  A public figure...which means someone who is in leadership or an elected position, sacrifices many of those protections of privacy.  In particular, a public figure sacrifices the rights to privacy around any personal information that might shape their decisions when they are acting as the voice of the people.

I'll use myself as an example.  If I were ever to run for public office on any level, it is my duty to disclose information that my potential constituents would need in order to evaluate whether or not I was going to serve them well.  What that would mean is that I would need to disclose my financials, including my debt, any potential conflict of interest I might have, and any other information that they might need to understand my fitness for office.  If I were to win, I would need to keep high transparency.  So, for example, one of the things that my constituents would need to know about me is that at the age of 50, I still have federal student debt.  Now, I might make that part of my platform and talk about the personal and societal effects of our current policies.  I can guarantee you that I have a lot to say about that from a sociological perspective.  However, if I went forward and then fought for universal forgiveness of student loans, the public should be keeping an eye on me because I would personally benefit from that kind of a law.  The public needs to be sure that what I propose is truly for the good of the society, and not just self-dealing.  In order to do that, it is not just the public's RIGHT to know about my personal finances in a way that would be invasive if I were not running for/occuping public office, it is the public's RESPONSIBILITY to demand it so that they can do THEIR DUTY AS CITIZENS in holding me accountable.  And this is ethically appropriate because no one is compelled to serve as a public figure.  You have to seek it.  You seek  it, you sacrifice large parts of your rights to privacy as a private citizen.  If you aren't willing to do that, you are fundamentally unworthy of public office.

Now, celebrities who are not public officials are private citizens.  They just, for whatever reason, are famous.  I have no right to know anything about Robert Downey Jr. other than what he chooses to share.  People who follow celebrities or pry into their lives are violating their rights.  Whether or not I like Robert Downey Jr. is a perfectly acceptable metric for whether I think he should be popular.  It may influence whether or not I am willing to spend money to support/partake in his art, his products, whatever.  But there is nothing in his celebrity that makes him more or less qualified for public office than other people.  The appropriate metrics for whether someone is an appropriate public figure are a combination of competence, integrity, and a variety of indicators that demonstrate good critical decision making.

The second a celebrity becomes a public figure (and we have had numerous) they give up their private citizen rights.  They don't get to fall back on those the second they run for office (or take a high enough post in government).

We are in the society of the spectacle.  We need to get clarity on the role of public figures, the metrics we should be measuring them by, and how they sacrifice the rights of privacy of private citizens...AND we need to understand what rights of privacy should be defended for private citizens (including celebrities) so that we don't end up losing those ourselves.

Now - for the magically inclined:
People who are public figures also, in my opinion, do not have the same rules as when you are dealing with private citizens.  Because they are in public office and speaking in my voice and in yours, I don't think we need personal permission to do work to hold them to account for integrity - on magical or mundane levels.  In fact, if I am a citizen who has magical abilities, I think that is part of my responsibility.  I do not have any problem calling for any elected official to be held to their oaths.  I also don't think I need to get personal permission from RBG to do work to support her healing (for example), or from any of them to do some personal protection work.  That is a wholly different thing than if I were dealing with a celebrity who is a private citizens.  I think it would be a gross violation for me to do healing work for an actor who has not put out a call inviting it, for example.  If there was a call put out, I take that as permission.  Celebrities who are not public figures should be under the same ethical protections as any other private citizen.