Chrysalis-Marketing-Mke: Facilitation: Mediation: Strategy Mapping

Truth in Today's World.

Most all of us, as engaged humans, must be deeply concerned about what has transpired over the past several years as "Truth" has become less settled, seldom agreed upon, often dismissed as no longer having any meaning, and non-existent. The loss of "Truth" - if in fact that is what we now must face - together with the demise of the biota, will be among humanity's greatest losses of the 21st century.
Recently I have been reading several works on Truth which I urge readers to pick up for themselves.

In an American political and civic world where a sitting president and his personal lawyer can deny that Truth even exists or continue to say that facts no longer matter, the very foundations of our freedom and democratic republic are threatened.

The books:
Hector Macdonald's Truth: How the Many Sides to Every Story Shape our Reality is an intelligent analysis of the difficulty of knowing how to investigate Truth. Macdonald is a marketing communicator, a creator of positioning campaigns for many of the world's well-known corporations. His taxonomy of truth-tellers begins by outlining the "four classes of computing truths" and reminds us that not only is reality complicated, complex, and often-times partially hidden from our view, but that "competing truths" shape our perspective of reality.
The 4 "truths" Macdonald identifies are:
1. Partial Truths
2. Subjective Truths
3. Artificial Truths
4. Unknown Truths
In summing them up, he reminds his readers that In George Orwell's 1984, Macdonald posits that we are well off if wee do and that we should be fearful, as was Orwell, that the integrity of Truth has been shockingly compromised: "it is not only that we are being lied to; the more insidious problem is that we are routinely misled by the truth."

The second book is Truth: A History and a Guide for the Perplexed. Written by one of the world's greatest living comparative cultural historians, now teaching at Notre Dame, the Englishman Felipe Fernandez-Armesto. Professor F. F-A's book-length essay traces the idea of "truth" from ancient and primitive times up through today. The book is highly readable, not weighted down with scholarly details only the very few want to absorb, and I recommend it heartily.

F.F-a.'s work is brimming full of wisdom and I want to share just a few quotes in order, I hope, to entice the would-be reader to find a copy and read it again and again: For example:

"We live in a Mickey Mouse world in which images flicker with the speed of animation and confusion is treated as a good. The result is a crisis of values undermined, certainties discarded and fears excited."
or
"...when people stop believing in something, they do not believe in nothing; they believe in anything."

That certainly sounds as though it describes today's world to a tee. F.F-A goes on to say "truth is fundamental to everything else...there is no social order without trust and no trust without truth or, at least, without agreed truth-finding procedures." In today's America and in many other parts of the globe, that seems like a pipe-dream, doesn't it?!

While Professor Fernandez-Armesto acknowledges that underlying the notion of Truth lies the notion of the sacred, he recognizes that most people today live in a much more secular world and as a result often find themselves unanchored from Truth.
He adds later on in the book:
"The search for truth is a struggles: part of a war against champs, a strenuous ritual to wrest reality from doubt by naming its parts, or a spell to save it from being engulfed in nothingness. Relativism, subjectivism, and deconstruction could all break the spell. Truth could be relativized out of the lexicon, or left as just another name for falsehood..."

Isn't this the quandary of a world in which a narcissistic sociopath is now president ? But as Professor F.F-A reminds us with a quote from Roger Scrutton's Modern Philosophy, "The man who tells you truth does not exist is asking you not to believe him. So don't."

The Third book is perhaps will require more prompting for potential readers to pick it up and peruse it: Its author is perceived as a much more difficult thinker to embrace; the book is Martin Heidegger's What is called thinking? I urge you to give it a serious try!

Heidegger's argument posits that the argument that the meaning of truth has been lost to Westerners since the time of Plato and Aristotle. Rather than outline his sometimes dense and closely-argued message let me leave my readers with several ideas he lays before us in powerful maxims:
1.  "What is most though-provoking in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking."
2.  "Language creates world."
3.  "Truth is unhiddeness" not merely conforming to facts
4.  "Science does not think"
5.  What Malcom Gladstone extols as "blinking", which I understand as first impression decision-making using some mental calculus, Heidegger calls "calculative -thinking", a poor alternative to deep contemplative thinking given that so-called "common sense" is nothing less than the "shallow product of the manner of forming ideas...these ideas are from the start incapable of holding themselves open to what is."

I know that this posting may not offer "the answer" as to the nature and or importance of Truths; but I hope that some reader will take up the banner and fight to demonstrate that Truth is vital to civil life and that Truth is Un-Hiddenness!