Liberals Long Ago Abandoned the Idea that “Truth is Truth”

At the end of 2016—and as they themselves declared, much in response to the election of Donald Trump as POTUS—Oxford Dictionaries named “post-truth” as its 2016 “word of the year.” In other words, because Donald Trump had ascended to the White House, the largest university press in the world decided that much of the American electorate had simply abandoned the truth. Like-minded liberals the world over have decided that we who elected Mr. Trump must be taught a lesson.

Such efforts demonstrate a particularly rich hypocrisy and blind ignorance of their own condition, for in their lust to rule their own world, modern liberals long ago decided to cast aside the fundamental axioms that comprise absolute truth. For such liberals, the age-old quest for “what is truth” has been abandoned or become a foolish and fruitless exercise where “relativism” rules the day.

This is particularly true for liberals in politics, media, and academia—i.e., those leading the charge in trying to reverse the results of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. As Ravi Zacharias noted is his column addressing Oxford’s “post-truth” conclusions,

"These two bastions of values, the academy and the media—where relativism flows in their veins—have become the town criers of this new word. Castigating the politicians, they untruthfully predicted the destination of the untruthful. Excoriating an electorate gone amuck, they wondered how people could be duped into a lie. Having themselves swallowed a camel, they were now straining at a gnat. They are the primary carriers of manipulation with words and repeating distortions often enough to make them into truths. They are the origin of this reality of caring not for truth but for impact and for the manipulation of all thinking. Their victory is pyrrhic."

To paraphrase Dennis Prager, liberals defines morality as what feels good is good, what feels bad is bad, and you should follow your heart/feelings. For conservatives, morality is following the rules, with the main rules being religiously derived and political laws being secondary.

This means that liberals can use their feelings as a measure of right and wrong regardless of the law. Who is right? Who should get what they want? That goes to whoever seems more hurt / oppressed / offended. The person who cries the loudest gets out of the punishment over one who is stoic, the whiny narcissist gets what they want because it pulls on the heart strings more than a rational policy wonk, the hysterical nut triggers the liberal lynch mob because others assume their emotions are an appropriate response.

Facts that are contrary to one’s emotionally invested narrative become “hate facts”. You’re telling me I’m wrong, that hurts me, so you must hate me and the words that hurt me are hate speech.

Liberals have to deal with the fact that there are conflicting demands within their own group. Instead of having a hierarchy of rights like life, liberty, property, they created a hierarchy of WHO is more right. This is the pyramid of oppression. The woman is more oppressed than the man, the homosexual more oppressed than the heterosexual, etc. In a dispute, the supposed victim is more right than others. Intersectionality can be understood as claiming multiple checkboxes to try to out-do others in the moral realm so that they win the argument. The reasoning, the facts, are irrelevant. Who hits the most check boxes in the oppression olympics. When there isn’t a clear answer, the default goes to the most exotic. However, when you’ve reverted back to tribalism (identity politics), the individual’s rights don’t matter, only the group, because in a competition, you can only be safe in a tribe.

Multi-culturalism says you can’t have one common culture - that’s oppression. Identity politics says that each group cannot really understand the other, and they never will because they’re all competing for dominance. This opens the door to saying each group has its own equally valid world view and facts that are contrary to that vision are blasphemy. Show data that killings by cops aren’t racially motivated, no they aren’t hunting down black kids on the streets, and you’re invalidating their existence. It is an assault on their sacred souls, an act of blasphemy and attack on all believers, to question dogma. Hate speech is the new blasphemy laws, and they’re allowed to be morally outraged, organize a lynch mob and kill you. (Same reasoning in the Koran is used to execute critics of Islam and those who leave the faith - to challenge or deny the ideology is equated with a literal assault on all believers.)

But unlike Islam, there isn’t ONE over-arching culture. Instead, each culture has their own. And each identity group/tribe can claim their own “truth”, dogma, etc.

So the solution is to say MY truth, YOUR truth, and you don’t have to understand or agree but to tell me I’m wrong is evil. The end result of social justice and post-modernism is each person can live in their own delusional world and it is akin to attempted murder to contradict it in any way.

And it is perfectly fine for an individual or a group to respond to facts, reason and evidence with a hand wave, it doesn’t matter in MY truth, my world view.

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