Censorship, Subjective Reality, and the Truth of Truth
If you believe in censoring information for adults, you don't believe in objective truth.
If you believed in objective truth, you would believe that truth will fight for itself. As long as truth is exposed and not hidden, it will always prove lies to be false.
But if you believe the only truth is power, then you think that power allows you to dictate truth.
You rightly see the ability to speak as power in itself, but that only inspires you want to deny that power to your enemies while hoarding it for yourself.
Because you see truth as such a malleable thing that can only be properly controlled by the powerful. And then, not simply the powerful, but only the powerful who acknowledge that truth doesn't exist until they speak it into existence.
"Cognito-hazard". You see ideas not as rational arguments but as psychic diseases. Words don't exist to communicate truth, but as vectors for viral infection. You use words to infect and inoculate others against the infections you hate.
Simply hearing an evil argument is enough to turn someone evil, simply associating with an evil person is infectious. You have to cut out of your life anyone who exposes themselves to evil. You have to run away at the merest risk of hearing the other side.
Because you don't see human beings as rational actors, but as beasts driven entirely by the most charismatic speakers. No one can change the mind of a crowd by revealing the truth to them, only by stoking their passions the most effectively.
You know, because you are driven entirely by your passions. Your envy, your fear, your hatred. Therefore, no one turns against you unless they fear or hate you the most, or they covet what you possess. There are no "reasons".
Therefore you justify censorship by deriding the masses as idiots who cannot understand truth. Unworthy to wield power, unfit to criticize those who dictate truth to them.
That never applies to you, of course, no matter how powerless and oppressed you feel. You ALWAYS have the right to criticize, and the right to take power. Especially from anyone who claims truth is objective and can be clearly seen by everyone.
Anyone who tries to expose objective reality to you, you hate and must destroy. You call their words violence against you.
Anyone who tries to ignore your subjective reality, you hate and must destroy. You call their silence violence against you.
Because you think there is no Truth but Power, and you cannot abide a bootheel on your neck from anyone but those who agree. Because even if that tyrant doesn't love you, the both of you can hate the same people just as violently.
And your master might even let you eat the scraps that fall from the table.
There is one other possibility to explain the oddity of the Enlightenment thinkers ending up so prominently in the firing line of our era. And that is this: The European Enlightenments were the greatest leap forward for the concept of objective truth. The project that Hume and others worked away on was to ground an understanding of the world in verifiable fact. Miracles and other phenomena that had been a normal part of the world of ideas before their era suddenly lost all their footholds. The age of reason did not produce the age of Aquarius, but it put claims that were ungrounded in fact on the back foot for the best part of two centuries.
By contrast, what has been worked away at in recent years has been a project in which verifiable truth is cast out. In its place comes that great Oprah-ism: “my truth.” The idea that I have “my truth” and you have yours makes the very idea of objective truth redundant. It says that a thing becomes so because I feel it to be so or say that it is so. At its most extreme, it is a reversion to a form of magical thinking. Precisely the thinking that the Enlightenment thinkers chased out.
And perhaps that is why the Enlightenment thinkers have become such a focus for assault. Because the system they set up is antithetical to the system that is being constructed today: a system entirely opposed to the idea of rationalism and objective truth; a system dedicated to sweeping away everyone from the past as well as the present who does not bow down to the great god of the present: “me.”
-- Douglas Murray, “The War on the West”
In the pre-Enlightenment times, the Word of God was authoritative. How he could know was through divine wisdom, inaccessible to no one. God knew everything, and his word was not to be questioned or doubted.
As we lurch towards the risk of a post-Enlightenment era, the Word of Me becomes authoritative. How “Me” could know is through “lived experience,” inaccessible to no one else. The subjective is the way to know everything, and “my truth” is not to be questioned or doubted.
People who hyperfocus on "objective truth" and "facts" are the ones most easily duped by the framing of the issue.
The logic for them is: "If the person is correct in their statements, then they have accurately described reality."
The word ‘hyperfocus’ is doing a lot of work here. It is undeniably true that if people only focus on objective truth and facts, they will often miss the point. This is because we are human beings and, as such, we often care more about how people are experiencing a thing than the facts of the matter.
For example, if a friend had suffered a stillbirth, few of us would visit her and inform her that about 1 in 200 births are stillbirths and that this is most often to do with problems with the placenta. This simply would not be the reality that we care about or she cares about. What we would most want to establish is how she and her partner are coping and what we can do to help her/them deal with the sense of grief and loss. In such a situation where somebody we care about has experienced something awful, the reality that matters is their feelings, and those feelings are very much real.
If this is the kind of thing the individual who made the above statement is referring to, then he is undoubtedly correct. However, it is unlikely that even the people most dedicated to discovering objective truth and facts - e.g., scientists - would respond to a friend or family member in need of emotional support following a traumatic experience by coldly providing them in this situation. This is because they are human too and have empathy and compassion as well as a dedication to objective truth, and, ideally, they know which of these needs to be prioritised in which setting.
When people complain about others not valuing objective truth and facts enough, it is almost never because they have offered sympathy rather than information in such a situation. It is almost always because they are focusing on experience, subjective perception and feelings in a situation where objective truth and facts are needed. To continue the example, the organisation, Sands, which exists to support research into:
the causes of stillbirths and neonatal deaths
better ways of identifying and monitoring babies at increased risk of dying
would not be very effective in its aims if it focused only on how people feel following a stillbirth.
This example should also make it clear that there is no contradiction between caring about how people experience things and gathering objective truth and facts about the thing. In fact, they are complementary. Somebody who has experienced a stillbirth is likely to be amongst those most motivated to support scientific research which hyperfocuses on discovering more facts about it in order to aid the effort for fewer people to experience the grief that they did.
The problem, then, is not that some people focus too much on objective truth and facts and some too little but that some people focus too much on the wrong one in any situation. While there must be some examples of people focusing too much on objective truth and facts when listening to experiences and feelings is what is needed, most of us who argue for the need for greater respect for objective truth and facts are concerned that the opposite is becoming too much of a norm. That is, we are concerned that too much of a focus on how (certain) people experience or perceive something can take precedence over establishing the objective truth of the situation. That matters because we cannot possibly hope to remedy any social ill without having an empirically substantiated understanding of the reality of the situation.
The context in which this perceived conflict between objective truth and subjective perception is most often raised in the circles within which the tweeter (who is a sociologist) and I move is in relation to society and culture and the “Culture Wars.” The conflict arises between Critical Social Justice scholars and activists and liberal empiricists with the former wanting us to focus more on the lived experience of marginalised groups and the latter wanting to focus more on empirical data that might explain why imbalances continue to exist, whether this indicates a social problem to exist and, if so, how to remedy it. It is important to note that both groups seek the same end: a just society in which nobody is marginalised and discriminated against because of their identity.
The problem as I, a liberal empiricist, see it, is that the tendency of CSJ scholars and activists to attribute all societal imbalances to things like ‘white supremacy,’ ‘patriarchy,’ ‘cis/heteronormativity’ and to attribute these entirely to socialised attitudes and dominant discourses that must be dismantled using things like unconscious bias training is simplistic, implausible, unfalsifiable and thus unlikely to work. If something doesn’t work, there is good cause to be sceptical of the hypothesis underlying it and strong grounds for instead gathering data about the genuine cause of imbalances and what will work to address those that need addressing.
Subjective perception is simply not a good tool for discovering the reality of complex social phenomena, especially when they vary so much by individual and Critical Social Justice activists only regard as authentic the perceptions of those members of groups seen as marginalised who agree with them. Ta-Nehisi Coates and Candace Owens cannot both be right about the experience of black Americans and the prevalence of white supremacy in the US at the same time (although they could both be wrong). It is simply not good enough to go with the perception of the one you already agree with. A truth exists and must be examined rigorously to understand reality and remedy any racial injustice. Just as the fact that polling among Britons revealed that they believed, on average, that 22% of Brits would be Muslim by 2020 did not make their perception correct. We cannot go by their subjective perception (or lived experience) and act as if this were true. The actual figure is estimated anywhere between 5% and 7%. Knowing the objective facts of the religious demographics of the UK is useful for many reasons but this does not mean that the subjective perception does not matter, particularly when it is so spectacularly wrong. We need to understand the cause of that too.
I doubt the hypothesis that “People who hyperfocus on "objective truth" and "facts" are the ones most easily duped by the framing of the issue.” I suspect that a larger cause of error and misframing of reality is too strong a reliance on subjective perception. However, the biggest error is the belief that we need to choose between facts and feelings or prioritise one exclusively when the reality is that, as humans, we naturally care about both. The important thing is to try to get the optimal balance for the context.
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Imagine getting mad at an indifferent, objective reality.
A thought-provoking visual exploration of perspective and subjective reality. This image illustrates the philosophical concept that heroes and villains are defined by point of view - one person's hero can be another's villain, and what we believe to be truth may be perceived as lies by others. Perfect for content about moral relativism, different perspectives, philosophical thinking, cognitive bias, and understanding multiple viewpoints. The design captures the duality of human perception and the complexity of truth in our interconnected world. Ideal for social media posts, blog articles about critical thinking, educational content on philosophy, or discussions about empathy and seeing situations from different angles.
It Is All the Self - Subjective Truth Expanding into Absolute Truth
Dorothy Rowe conducts an energy healing to expand subjective truth into absolute, or objective truth. The presentation was part of an energy healing webinar held on September 21, 2019. Live Webinars with Dorothy Rowe: https://www.distanceenergywork.com
If you want to learn to heal yourself through energy healing, then you have come to the right place. Dorothy offers free energy healing for concerns in all areas of life, physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual, along with clear descriptions of the mechanics of the process. It is Dorothy's goal to give you the resources to heal yourself.
