When Truth Becomes Truthiness and Worse

Tags

abortion rights, editorial, Election 2012, Romney, truth, truthiness

I’m not sure I know what truth is any more.

Truth: the property (as of a statement) of being in accord with fact or reality.

Fact: a piece of information presented as having objective reality.

Reality: the quality or state of being real.

Real: having objective independent existence.

Got all that? Know what it means now?

Nah, neither to do I.

Worse yet, fully 50% of all that is TRUE NOW, won’t be true in the future. Just think of that. fifty percent of what you believe to be true today will be proven to actually be false sooner or later.

We are awash in a political election cycle that is mired in falsity. Each side claims the other is fraudulently stating the “facts” about X, Y and Z. “Independent” think tanks of various persuasions either corroborate A’s version as portraying reality accurately or expose it as a lie. A growing number of fact-checkers can’t seem to agree and admit that their subjective beliefs interfere with their conclusions.

Truth becomes what is believable because it “sounds” good. A potential voter who has admittedly paid zero attention to the political scene and thus is tabula rasa, claims that she will probably vote for Romney because “he seemed to sound like he knew what he was talking about.”

Truth becomes what is recalled from months and months of repetition heard as one prepared the dinner, sorted the laundry, gathered the trash to put out for pick up. “They keep saying that Obama wants to tax me to pay for deadbeats.”

Truth becomes what we synthesize from our years of social interaction, what seems logical, what jives with our worldview, what agrees with that which would subjectively make our lives better. It is fed by our prejudices, known and hidden behind years of denial. Convenience is the mother of truth. It is more convenient to believe what I think will give me a leg up. It’s easier to disbelieve that which pokes me in my conscience, telling me that I have failed to take care of those less fortunate.

Truth is what absolves me of responsibility for all the things I don’t have time to be responsible for. I have enough trouble being responsible for paying the bills and feeding the dog. I don’t want to have to worry about your health care. That’s your problem.

See how easy it is?

Truth is damn relevant. It’s damn relevant to whatever I need it to be.

But I hold onto it. I caress it, and polish it, and put it up on a pedestal and claim for all the world to know that I support the TRUTH. And if you have a different one on your pedestal then, well by damn and damnation, yours is false and you know it is. You’re mendacious, I’m just a good citizen with patriotism oozing from my pores.

Now I’m not really being relative. Truth is objective to a big extent, and if EVERYONE PAID ATTENTION TO THE SAME DEGREE, AND LISTENED WITH AN OPEN MIND, MOST OF US WOULD AGREE ON WHAT WAS TRUTH. Most of us. But most of us aren’t paying attention.

It is scary as all heck that Willard M. Romney, lied through his teeth (objectively speaking) and won a debate because he “sounded” good. Worse, a bunch of these “sound” good people will probably decide this election, and it depends on what that last impression is before they wander to the polling booth. Right or wrong, it doesn’t matter. It will just be the last “sounding good” thing they remember.

And I know what Churchill meant when he said that Democracy was the worst form of government except for all the rest. And I know what Plato meant when he said that One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”

And it makes me feel depressed.

By the by, William Saletan has a very complete and comprehensive article on the devolution evolution of Willard’s stance on abortion and women’s health issues. Every woman should be fully aware of exactly what they can expect from him. He sure won’t tell you the truth. You have to figure it out.

And by the by, I ran into a great little site with some fun and enjoyable poetry that you might take a look at. It’s called:Poems and Ponderings.

Have a good one, and keep your head down.

Related articles

• Cognitive researchers find truth in Colbert’s ‘truthiness’ (rawstory.com)
• Sophia A. McClennen: Truthiness Is Not a Joke: Lying and Loving It at the NRC (huffingtonpost.com)

 

Memories. . . .like the pages of my mind

Tags

Barack Obama, Faux Noise, Fox News, George Bush, good old days, Media, psychology, truthiness

Once upon a time, in a land just around the bend,(pun intended!!!) a wunderkid named Dubya held the keys to the kingdom of Merika. And he and his counselors put forth a new way of disseminating propaganda–and it was called “talking points” memos. All the land ooh’ed and aah’ed, especially their knuckle-dragging cohorts in a house called Kapital, and among their drooling followers.

A news agency, named Fox, which was really Faux, for no such thing as actual news crossed its camera lens, watched in rapt attention and learned about “talking points.” Eager to help the boy wonder regent, they received their marching orders from the talking points heads, and dutifully regurgitated the phrase of the day through eight long and dark years.

Suddenly, the sun broke forth, and a sheriff was hired. He threw out all the propagandists and returned the kingdom to some sense of normalcy. Faux Noise, was distraught. How to keep their minions in line when actual governing was going on!

But wait, they had learned the fine ability to doublespeak and babble. “Just give ’em what we want to be truth, and they will know no better,” Rupert crowed. “These minions are barely sentient and surely can’t read or research our bucket of goo.”

So Faux started their own brand of “talking points” though they were careful to keep them oral, so no black hearted liberal might hack their emails and discover the fix was in. Suddenly the airwaves were filled with faux news–of birthers, and death panels, and other such fluffery. It seemed to work, but of course, we knew it would. Fox followers are not known to be able to do more than basic breathing.

One week the crew of the various scrabble shows decided that they would tell their minions, whose brains don’t take to actual thinking or recall, that the “good old days” were in jeopardy. It seems the sheriff, according to them, was about the business of “destroying the way of life they had all enjoyed as youngsters.”

Sean said it, and he was probably a child of the 70’s, and Billy said it, and he was a child of the 40’s. And Glenn said it and he was a child of Satan, and well, they all said it, and they used the same words and the same phrasing, so you know it must be true.

Then one of the Sheriff’s deputies (deputy in the sense of having a working mind), did a bit of research. Were all those memories of the “good old days”  actually true?  Deputy Comedy meister, Jon “Of Jersey” Stewart, reported that a fair examination of the various decades preceding, showed not a lot of “good” though there was plenty of “old.” There were nasty wars, depressions, economic downturns, oil crises, hostage taking, and the like in each and every one. Women were discriminated against, and so were people of color. It was hard to find much “good” on the national or international scene.

After all, it seemed to be that the “good old days” didn’t really exist at all. Each decade no doubt had plenty of personal happiness, but overall, we suffered from a number of malaise that we would not like to revisit today. The Stewart and his sidekick The Oliver, found that most people, (those who thought at least) didn’t remember the years of their growing up as glowing examples of perfection that the Faux Noise talking heads so effervescently approved of.

It was, alas, all a ploy to continue maligning the sheriff who was doing a pretty good job in actuality against very big odds. It turns out the boys of Faux were just pissy cuz nobody wanted to talk to them from the sheriff’s office any more. They had to stand at the back of the crowd and were seldom given a tidbit that they could get their teeth into. They were not “special” any more.

You see, it’s evolutionary that we have a strong capacity to “see” the best in the past. It keeps us going. But the best we see is personal, and not national. When we remember the world we lived in, we are glad to have survived at all! And the Faux fools knew that of course, but they also knew that appeals to the “glorious past” S O U N D true, and that’s all that matters in the world of Faux.

So our hats are off to Deputy Stewart and his crew for helping us to remember the truth. If the sheriff is about the business of trying to destroy the world we grew up in as kids (which there of course is no real evidence of anyway) that probably wouldn’t be such a bad thing, if it means that we are pushing for freedom for all, education for all, equality for all, and inclusion for all. But perhaps the Faux boys mean that their world was grand in those “olden” days. For they were white and male, and I guess, perhaps, they did see the world as arrayed at their feet as so many pearl filled oysters to pluck.

So maybe, they were just meanin’ that heck, they just wanted to be the fat, white, rich males in charge of everything again. Yeah, I bet they were. But that means we (all the rest of us) well, you probably have that figured out by now huh?

Just sayin’.