The Wright Perspective: On Truth
My latest column, with a shiny new graphic, is up at EveryJoe.
http://www.everyjoe.com/2014/06/18/politics/leftists-think-truth-is-not-true/
It is crucial to the worldview and self esteem of the Left that they regard themselves, despite all evidence to the contrary, as being morally and intellectually superior to their honorable opposition on the Right. A century long nightmare of the mass deaths, wars, broken lives, mass thefts, mass addiction to lying propaganda, and spiritual chaos spread by this political neurosis makes the act of total mental dishonesty needed to maintain this stance of presumptive intellectual superiority both difficult and comical to maintain, yet by heroic effort the Left manages to do so.
It is because they sacrifice everything else on this altar. Their self esteem, or, to call it by its right name, the Sin of Pride, absorbs all their attention and overthrows all other scruples, hesitations and sentiments. They are desperate to maintain their illusory and inflated self-image. Because they are desperate, they are shameless.
The prime evidence of their shamelessness is in the attitude, present in all writings of the Left that venture into philosophical areas, of disdain and dismissal toward the truth. I do not mean that they are untruthful. They are, but that is a side effect. I mean that on a fundamental and philosophical level, there is no place in their worldview for the concept that truth is objective.
In the bleary and psychedelic and flaccid mental world of the Left, truth is a matter of consensus, like the rules of grammar, or a matter of personal preference, like your taste in ice cream.
For them, truth is not true.
Read the rest here: http://www.everyjoe.com/2014/06/18/politics/leftists-think-truth-is-not-true/
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
