Taking Stock of Conditions (cont.)
Condition: An extractive disposition of some toward Truth.
Disposition
We discussed earlier insufficient aptitudes. We now move to today’s topic: some citizens’ deficient spiritual disposition toward Truth and Knowing.
If aptitude has to do with (hard) wiring, disposition is software and operating system. It lives closer to the heart than the head. It concerns emotions, defense mechanisms, hunger for validation, and the deep human need for status, security and validation.
Certainly, we could argue that the inability to value Truth as a Good greater than ourselves which is worthy of sacrifice signals a deficiency not of intelligence but of character. A civilization may possess extraordinary technical capacity and yet fail because its people no longer love Truth enough to endure discomfort for the sake of Truth.
As we turn to the question of knowledge and information — epistemology — the reader might reasonably expect a discussion of Orwell, who warned us about Newspeak and the deliberate erosion of meaning. And make no mistake: propaganda remains one of the great threats to civilization. We will return to it when we examine concrete assaults on truth in politics, media, and institutions.
But first, the deeper stage must be set.
What we are witnessing today is not merely an information crisis but a conflict of spiritual outlooks — a struggle between conscience and expediency, between fidelity to what is and submission to what feels necessary, comforting, or advantageous.
Increasingly, personal position (as an authority) matters more than devotion to reality.
Current Conditions
The intellectual class has largely embraced postmodernism — the claim that universal truths cannot be discerned, that all meaning is contingent, constructed, and subjective. (Some would also include the ugly attitude that is now validated: I don’t know it so it just can’t be known. But I digress.) The vacuum left by jettisoning modernism has not remained empty; it has been filled by a crude existentialism in which subjective interpretation becomes Truth itself: my subjective experience defines what is real.
Derivatively, the knowledge establishment has embraced internally inconsistent systems — DEI among them — that appeal powerfully to identity validation but often ignore logical incoherence, or much less acknowledge contradiction. These frameworks are emotionally satisfying and they insulate adherents from the hardships of disciplined thought.
The education establishment is at fault for another reason: Broadly speaking, few of us know what it actually takes to know something. We do not appreciate how deep one must dive, how long one must labor, how often one must fail.
Science, for example, is frequently disparaged by those who have little understanding of the conscientiousness, comprehensiveness, passion, and compulsive replication that real science demands — and still demands, even under contemporary disparagement.
Some of this right-wing rejection of scholarship takes the form of cynicism — a spiritual and intellectual laziness that finds expression in cancel culture, radically subjective religion, and constant grasps at shortcuts to authority — or as a way of validation by feeling “on top of things.” I can’t relate to that researcher’s sacrifice and devotion to discovery (her intrinsic motivation): must be something in it for her.
As an aside, this cancelling (dismissing) also relates to our need for the world to be simple. I am on top of things if I can see the world through easy realities: cynicism, neoliberalism (market fundamentalism), tribalism, might-makes-right or a dozen other prevailing mindless mindsets.
Footnote: It should be said that authoritarianism (deference to explanations of “authoritative” leaders) becomes appealing not only because it simplifies reality, but because it offers the comforting abandonment of personal responsibility to learn and understand on one’s own.
Validation, Pharisees, and Authority
Would-be authorities — “Pharisees,” to borrow the ancient term — exploit the modern pathology of reckless abandonment to validation-seeking. Hyper-Western culture treats the individual as the endpoint of meaning: I cannot admit uncertainty — even to myself — because I am my own moral universe.
What we often forget about Pharisees is that they themselves did not truly understand what they claimed to defend. They did not know — and more importantly, did not know what it takes to know. Their authority masked spiritual deficiency and conceptual shallowness. The same is true in modern-day priests and professors.
Yes, this post has lots of religious analogy. That is because much of our crisis of truth is internal: emotional, spiritual, religious, cosmological. Contemporary forms of faith often reinforce this disorder by centering God’s role around blessing me. (E.g., cognitive) discomfort becomes intolerable — whether from news, literary works, negative feedback, or complex subjects. This causes pain. After all, I am the focal point of divine attention and affection. Why should truth discomfort me?
Worse still, our faith systems increasingly permit — even encourage — ends-justify-the-means reasoning. Truth is sacrificed in the service of “righteous” causes. Incidentally, the contradiction is revealing: those righteous ends-justify-the-means operators implicitly confess that their God is not big enough to achieve His purposes without human lying. If one’s mind maintains that that the Divine requires broken rules, it is not God who is small.
And while we’re at it: it should be said that the same is true not just for Truth, but for Justice, Privacy, Rules of Engagement, Transparency, Fairness — all aspects of Uprightness.
And it may all stem from an incapacity to even just fathom (ethical) transcendence.
Displacement and the Fragility of Truth
All of these traits are ancient. But they collide with something specific to our time: we may be living in another historical period of displacement.
We have been here before. Galileo displaced humanity from the center of the cosmos. Darwin displaced us from the center of creation. The discovery of DNA challenged our sense of moral and psychological autonomy. Quantum physics is just plain nuts from perspective of my classical (mechanical) training. Climate science tells us, bluntly, that creation was not assembled merely for human convenience.
Each of these displacements diminishes our imagined centrality — our belief that the universe exists for us, answers to us, and yields easily to our intuition. For cultures untrained in humility (insufficiency), such revelations do not inspire awe; they provoke resentment.
Overlay these social and scientific dislocations with our spiritual and emotional fragilities, and we get a combustible mix. We could elaborate on this, but it may suffice to say that it possibly results in inability to call out grift, corruption, and incompetence — particularly when such flawed figures satisfy our craving for authority and comfort.
Closing
We could go on cataloguing the current cultural conditions in which Truth is denatured. But this post aims only to name a few conditions contributing to the collapse of Truth in our time.
The next post will examine how the disregard of Truth erodes the very first principles that hold societies together. For fun, we’ll touch on everything from journalistic ethics and information integrity -to- busybodies (reputation parasites and ambitious tattletales.)