{"id":347,"date":"2022-12-18T14:58:26","date_gmt":"2022-12-18T14:58:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theoryofeveryone.net\/?p=347"},"modified":"2023-12-18T17:30:07","modified_gmt":"2023-12-18T17:30:07","slug":"truth-and-stability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theoryofeveryone.net\/index.php\/2022\/12\/18\/truth-and-stability\/","title":{"rendered":"Truth and Stability"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

On January 22, 2017 the libs truth triggered themselves. For those of you who have repressed those horridly chaotic days of the early Trump administration (a totally reasonable response to the barrage of cortisol producing malevolent incompetence spurting from the administration at that time) let me refresh your memory. Following Sean Spicer\u2019s misrepresentation of the attendance figures at President Trump\u2019s inauguration Kellyanne Conway sat down for an interview with Meet the Press in which she coined the now infamous phrase, alternative facts. The left, understandably, went nuts. Lest you think that I\u2019ve confused Kellyanne Conway with some kind of leftist and meant to say that the Trump administration truth triggered the libs, rest assured, dear reader, this blog post has been carefully edited.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As you know I give no quarter to bullshit. The idea of alternative facts is nonsense and using the phrase is akin to coving your eyes and believing you\u2019re hidden from view. Likewise, election denialism, calcified polarization, and information bubbles are a poison in democracies both in my birth country, the United States, and my current home, the United Kingdom.  However, we would be kidding ourselves if we did not recognize the fingerprints of left-leaning academia all over the idea of alternative facts and we would be coving our eyes if we believed problems of polarization and misinformation were a cancer confined to the reactionary right. Eyes open, dear reader.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At issue here is the idea of truth itself (and how it has come to be distorted by relativistic nihilism). Let\u2019s start with the word itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Truth is the series of operating assumptions that undergird our interactions with the world from the most basic to the most complex. Truth means stability. Stability is naturally relative and certain concepts we understand clearly and view as true, gravity, for instance, are quite epistemologically stable while come complex and poorly understood concepts, the reason we dream, for example, are less stable. If we think about these concepts as walking along a balance beam called truth it would take a lot more force to push what we think we know about gravity off the beam as it would to push what we think we know about dreams off. In both cases however we are talking about what we think we know, that knowledge which is most stable. When it comes to truth, certainty is for zealots.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You may be saying to yourself, dear reader, you\u2019ve told me what true isn\u2019t<\/em> but if there\u2019s no uniform definition of truth and clearly defined threshold of stability to hold something as true how do we know what true is<\/em>? The answer is through comparison. Different answers, solutions, theorems and hypotheses have different degrees of stability to offer. This offer, this degree of stability is affected by a number of factors, chief among them is complexity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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AI-Generated Image<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Complexity affects stability in the same way a house of cards grows more wobbly as it grows. Instability is exponential. Like time in Inception<\/em> each successive layer of complexity compounds and magnifies the importance of the assumptions on which it rests thus putting any instability under pressure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That doesn\u2019t mean there aren\u2019t competing claims to stability. Sometimes it is impossible to find one<\/em> truth. When we conceive of God, for instance, we find different epistemological streams running in different directions and we have different currents of thought within the same epistemic fields reaching different conclusions \u2013 \u00e1 la Yahweh or Allah \u2013 with the same degree of stability. That is okay. A healthy society needs room for uncertainty. However, uncertainty isn\u2019t an excuse to fall into nihilistic relativism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We can\u2019t give in to the temptation to throw our hands up. While it is certainly true that knowledge and truth are a social construction. Ideas are mediated by our thought process and social experience. Words mediate our thoughts. We deal in approximations. While it is true, for example, that not exactly<\/em> six million Jews died in the Holocaust that knowledge, however relativistic it may be is not grounds for denialism nor is stating the fact a form denialism in and of itself. The historical fact that the Holocaust took place is cemented, solid, and stable, the exact figures of deaths, less so. That doesn’t mean that the deaths don\u2019t matter, of course they do and the fact that there is no full accounting of the destruction speaks to the monstrousness of the Holocaust itself, it means that that piece of knowledge is less stable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why is stability of knowledge so important in modern discourse?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Disability is a good lens to examine that question. A large part of the disability experience is looking for stability, something to lean on, something to save your precious energy. A large part of my personal experience with disability and physical therapy has involved trying to expand the things I experience as stable in the physical world. However, even as my physical therapists insisted that I \u201chave to learn to walk on stable ground\u201d they did not begrudge me the option of finding a wall to lean on when I felt unstable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the same token we cannot begrudge those who seek ideological, philosophical, political, or moral stability. We cannot fault those who need an ideological wall to lean on. However unjust the walls leftist academia rails against, and I do agree that there are a great many systemic injustices in the way society is currently constituted, may be they provide stability to a great many people. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It bears mentioning that the ability to recognize these walls and navigate difficult intellectual terrain without them is something that the academy has intentionally cultivated. This achievement is, no doubt, a profound human triumph with incalculable liberatory potential. It is also the result of deliberate training and cultivation of ability. The academy\u2019s success in developing the means of actualizing this ability doesn\u2019t mean that everyone has had the opportunity to benefit from the specific training academia offers and, just as the need to use a walker isn\u2019t pitiful nor a cause for compassionate condescension, we must not look on those who haven\u2019t had the opportunity to develop their ability to navigate without mental walls with pity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Presently, the leftist academy seems to think that because the wall is unjust it is hollow and must be torn down. It seems to think that the next revelation will cause the rotten beams of injustice to give way. That the next paper, the next op ed, TED Talk will cause the wall to collapse under the weight of its self-apparent immorality. But what of the people leaning on the wall. Good people not out to do harm. Good people who are tired, who need mooring, a bit of help with their balance. At best the left will leave them with nothing to lean on. It\u2019s just as likely to leave them buried in the rubble, ideologically unmoored and off balance. Disoriented people looking to quickly find their footing are drawn to dogma and demagoguery. The libs are owning themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thinking about my supports in the physical world, my walls, my walker it is possible to imagine them becoming corrupt in the way that many on the left find the ideological stability mechanisms that underpin the thinking of a segment of society to be morally corrupt. Imagine that my walker were making my scoliosis worse. It would be considered a corrupt support device. However, any medical professional who told me not to use my walker period, the end, sentence finished would be rightfully accused of quackery. Without my walker I would undoubtedly fall causing much greater harm to myself than that which my support device could do regardless of its deficiencies. You would expect any doctor capable of practicing medicine to advise me to stop using my defective walker and provide me with another one. We must demand the same of thought leaders on the left.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If left-leaning academics, thought leaders, and politicians want to tear the wall down they have a responsibility to put something else in its place. This responsibility is magnified by the fact that the knowledge terrain is wholly man made. There are no trees, boulders or ditches, any support that exists in societies collective mental architecture was put there by someone. That means that our mental architecture is human. That means it is flawed. But the fact that it is flawed doesn\u2019t mean we don’t need stability, rather it means we need to accept responsibility for building stability into the though landscape. Corrupt ideas are inherently unstable, they will collapse when poked at. We can\u2019t poke and prod and not take responsibility for constructing something more stable for those who need a wall to lean on. Those who do so are not fit to practice thought leadership. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nobody is as viscerally conscious of the need for stability as the crip community. We, of all people should understand that a desire for intellectual, ideological, political and moral stability is turning the world upside down and recognize that it is a need that can\u2019t be deconstructed. The fact that the crip experience hasn\u2019t been translated into the broader societal context is inexplicable and inexcusable. Those in the crip community, in academia, and on the left need to do better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On January 22, 2017 the libs truth triggered themselves. For those of you who have repressed those horridly chaotic days of the early Trump administration (a totally reasonable response to the barrage of cortisol producing malevolent incompetence spurting from the administration at that time) let me refresh your memory. Following Sean Spicer\u2019s misrepresentation of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":396,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/theoryofeveryone.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/1-4.png?fit=888%2C888&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pafgmM-5B","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":337,"url":"https:\/\/theoryofeveryone.net\/index.php\/2022\/10\/18\/a-note-on-neologisms\/","url_meta":{"origin":347,"position":0},"title":"A Note on Neologisms","author":"Yishai Barth","date":"October 18, 2022","format":false,"excerpt":"AI-Generated Image People often feel a sense of annoyance with neologizing intellectuals. 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