9/5/2024

Do we know or care-truth from falsehood any more?

“Who can tell truth from falsehood any more?
I say it, and you feel it in your hearts:
no man or woman on this big small earth.
How should our sages miss the mark of life,
and our most skillful players lose the game?
your hearts will tell you, as my heart has told me:
because all know, and no one understands.”
― E.E. Cummings

Harvey Cox, The Market as God. As everything in what used to be called creation becomes a commodity, human beings begin to look at one another, and at themselves, in a funny way, and they see price tags. There was a time when people spoke, at least occasionally, of 'inherent worth'— if not of things, then at least of persons." 

The lie reigns, and there is no citizenship for the truth. You have experienced seeing with what brazenness the mainstream has delivered propaganda on behalf of the pandemic narrative, any narrative, censuring every discordant voice; and today those who are not in agreement with the System are not only derided and discredited but are even criminalized, pointed out as public enemies, and passed off as madmen on whom compulsory health treatment should be imposed. These are the means that every totalitarian regime has used to deal with political and religious adversaries. Everything is repeating itself, right before our eyes, in a much more subtle and slimy way. Conversely, those who bow down to the tyranny and offer it their fidelity are publicly praised, seen on all the television programs, and pointed out as an authoritative reference. Morning in America. Or America in mourning. “When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.” — Neil Postman.

In 2016, "Nature" published the results of a Survey which revealed that over 1,500 scientists had failed to reproduce the data obtained from colleagues.  The same problem had been encountered in 2011 by Dr.  Glenn Bagley, at the time director of the oncology department of the multinational Amgen, who before investing several million euros in a research project for a new drug, had decided to replicate the 53 experiments on which their strategy of development of a new drug: only 11% managed to replicate it.  Paradoxically, science is never facing a deep crisis of credibility as today as regards the reliability of the data it produces and the truthfulness of the statements.  Despite this, it seems almost impossible to bring out both at the level of public opinion and at the level of academic opinions, hypotheses and results other than those that are universally recognized as "scientific truths".  Truths on the basis of which political and economic decisions are also often made. 

 Here it can be seen first hand that the problem of truth is not an abstract philosophical problem, but something extremely concrete, which determines the life of human beings in a consistent way.  As far as scientific truth is concerned, Thomas Kuhn, in a now famous book, had already shown that the paradigm that is dominant every time in a scientific community is not necessarily the truest, but simply the one that is able to obtain the greatest number. of followers.  But this is also true outside of scientific truth.  Humanity is entering a phase of its history in which truth is reduced to a moment in the movement of the false - or, more precisely, in the omnipervasive unfolding of a language that no longer contains within itself any criteria that allow to distinguish what it is true from what is false.  True is that speech which is declared as such and which must be kept as true even if its untruth is proved.  But, ultimately, essential for the system is that any distinction between the true and the false should be broken.  Hence the growing confusion between conflicting news spread by the same official bodies.  In this way it is language itself as the place for the manifestation of truth that is questioned.  But what happens in a society that has renounced the truth and in which men can only silently observe the multiform and contradictory movement of lies?  To stop this movement, everyone must have the courage to ask the only question that matters without compromise: what is a true word?  

There are no conditions to which a person cannot grow accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.” (Leo Tolstoy, ‘Anna Karenina’)