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While the truth is never out of style, in the last few decades, it has taken a back seat, if not suffered a complete beat down. The old saw about telling a politician is lying by his lips moving has been true for longer than that, but the amount of lies pushed by the media has now reached Orwellian proportions.
Nonetheless, something has changed. Truth is making a comeback. By 2016 most thinking Americans could see that the mainstream media was nearly allergic to telling the truth. Before Trump, the conventional political wisdom held that the media could make or break you, so you don’t ever want to call them out. You can peg Trump’s rise as a candidate to the moment he called out the fake news. He has said a lot more since but you could say he had us at fake news.
A hushed silence fell over the land as we waited for the other shoe to drop. When Trump beat sixteen other seasoned politicians and swept the primary in a party that did everything it could to stop him, the spell was broken. Truths that we all knew could be spoken out loud. The suicide bombers are Islamic terrorists. Men are not women. And the media are prone to lie. Just like that, the truth was back.
How ironic that Trump is attacked and chastised for telling too many lies. While he can brag with the best of them, and exaggerates almost as often as he breathes, on the big and important stuff he gets it right. Like the one-eyed man in the land of the blind, Trump dared to say what he thinks and sees when no one else would. That made him king. And that may be what lies behind Trump Derangement Syndrome. It’s either that or rabies.
What is truth? The absolute truth topic has stumped philosophers down through the ages. The only absolute is that there is no absolute, at least in this universe. Like science and measurement, the best we can hope for is a close approximation.
What’s true for you is what you have observed. Viewpoint, education, perception, and focus, all play their part. This is why eyewitness testimony varies so widely. Higher truths like beauty and honor depend a lot on agreements and culture. Take group mores. What is good and right for one group may be wrong and unacceptable to another.
This might seem a bit sloppy and entirely too complex. In human society, it certainly can be. But it does not mean there are no facts. Facts are observable, measurable, and in essence provable within a clearly defined framework. On the other hand, when anything goes and two plus two equals whatever you say it does, the slippery slope goes straight down. Moral relativism opens a dark chasm that can easily swallow everything in its path.
The flip side of complete moral relativism is God-defined truth. While a lot better than mob rule, totalitarian rule, or the wild jungle of no rule at all, the God answer brings with it another whole set of problems. Whose God sets the rules to define truth? On this planet there are quite a few. Who speaks for God? Who gets to interpret the rules, to define the truth? When men are left to collectively regulate the truth it becomes a Tower of Babel disaster. You can see that in our broken government system that turned the Constitution on its head. Is God available to adjudicate disputes? Currently, we have only the Supreme Court or the Pope and neither one is getting it done.
It certainly doesn’t hurt to recognize a higher creative spiritual power than our own. Whether we call that God or Nature or the Great Googli-Moogli is not the point here. Do we really need to have any authority define truth?
Take murder, theft, lying, infidelity, and betrayal of trust--common transgressions found in most religions, and unfortunately present in all cultures and for all times. These are ideas that find easy agreement among men. Teaching about them is good. The question is, do we need an authority to know these are wrong? Each of us should be able to look for ourselves and determine the truth. Take gravity. Men can argue over its exact nature or how it works, but any child can know the truth of gravity in a short time without any outside help whatsoever.
The left today is all about your truth, my truth, someone else’s truth. What I call Truthism is a modern Tower of Babel. The other day I heard a supposedly intelligent person say in conversation, “Those are your facts, I have my own.” That is the road to oblivion. You can call that light in the tunnel anything you want right up to the point the train runs you over. Then the discussion is over. There are truths because they are, well, true.
The assault on truth reached a crescendo with transgenderism, a perfect example of truthism run amok. Despite the known facts that are right in front of our eyes, the gender brigade espouses dozens of genders. I can’t deny the creativity any more than I can deny the absurdity of things like furries or gender fluidity. Although a tiny number of anomalies occur in all gene pools, the human genome consists of only two genders, a truth everyone knows.
Whether one accepts truth or not is another story. There have always been people who deny agreed-upon truths. Some are telling the truth. Galileo was jailed for saying the earth goes around the sun. Others refuse to accept the truth. The Flat Earth Society is an actual society. There was a time when those denying the obvious were called insane. Now they are celebrated as folk heroes.
Despite the recent trends, one thing about truth never changes. As Winston Churchill once said, “Truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.” Lies are told, sometimes very convincingly, and if repeated enough can bury the truth and momentarily win the day. You can run from the truth, but it is never far behind. Eventually, truth finds a way. There it is.
