All We Need Is Truth

People are simple. And love to be simple. That’s why, for most of them, aside from their profession, all they know is “sports”, and it’s a new religion. Being complicated is expensive.

One commenter on my site, Benign, apparently obfuscated by my broadside against the delirious sexism of past and present Catholicism, called me “deluded to think that “rationality” even exists. Evolution does not “progress.” The Soviets “rationally” outlawed marriage from ~1918 to the 1940s, before realizing that this “rational” decision didn’t work.”

The USSR outlawed marriage???????? Same source which saw them drinking blood of “capitalists”? Logic is easy, truth is hard.

Modernist, Postmodernist, Metamodernist Jargon Is Jargon, and jargon ain’t truth! “Meta”, though, is a serious operation we all practice. See “Mind From Meta“.

Marriage is a fact of human ethology, the natural behavior of humans. To outlaw it would not have been irrational, because reason can always be found, but futile, as going against marriage goes against human nature. This is exactly why the Soviets didn’t outlaw marriage: they were not that dumb.

By the late 1920s, Soviet adults had been made more responsible for the care of their children, and common-law marriage had been given equal legal status with civil marriage. Is that what Benign alludes to? By 1944, the Soviets went back, and recognized only legal civil marriage, to encourage more steady families.

Rationality exists, but as I have emphasized in the past, as a constant rolling of the drums, a logic can be anything. That evolution “progresses” is a battle from 1800 CE, when Lamarck asserted this thesis. It’s correct: clearly some of today’s lifeforms are the most complex ever.  Some day all biologists will proudly view Lamarck as right, and their predecessors of the 1960s, who were fanatically anti-Lamarck, as deluded bigots.

How do I know Lamarck was right? Tons of knowledge that those who scream Lamarck was a maniac (following the slave master Napoleon) never heard of these tons, they are children.

To see evolution’s progress, don’t look at sharks, or oysters, and other animals in evolutionary stasis. Instead, look at Blue Rorquals, most massive animals ever, & look at us, most clever. The most advanced animals are the most complex, and they are complex in ways beyond what we understand of genetics.

Beatles sang: “All You Need Is Love!”. Silly stuff: we all got love, otherwise we won’t exist. We have all the logics, at our disposal, and all the love we got as children.

To order and discipline our logic, and even our loves, most of what we need is truth

“Postmodernism” was the realization that many ideologies were the fruit of tribalism, not truth (as they malevolently claimed). This is not really new. See  “vérité en deçà des Pyrénées, erreur au-delà“ de Pascal (a thought unpublished in his lifetime: truth before the Pyrénées, error beyond them)..

“Deconstruction” consisted in finding out where things came from. It’s not conceptually different from analysis (a unloosening), a concept found in Aristotle, and obvious centuries before him.

All this is to say that those who have pretended to introduce new ways of thinking about thinking have eschewed the truth: there is no truth, but truth, and, in the human species, it’s as old as dinner . There is no truth, but truth! In the human species, truth is as old as dinner. No truth, no dinner for the human, but one for the lion. The truth was in the dinner. In how to get dinner!

Right, truth is dangerous, because some claim to have it, and they don’t. But they always have, and always will. The Wise can’t go around, claiming they don’t have the truth, as Socrates did, or, worse, as Socrates claimed again and again, and the self-declared “post-modernists” parroted, that there is no truth… Because if they do that, they do exactly what German Jews (among others) did with Hitler and his Nazis: leave a wide open field for infamy to proclaim its own version of truth. And everybody, or, at least, most Germans, believed them. And others, like most Americans, pretended that it was OK with them.

The scientific method does NOT opposes the notion of truth, as those who have only a shallow knowledge of pop science are all too often led to believe. It’s exactly the opposite. Euclid’s theorem or the classical laws of optics are still true… They are actually more true than ever. In their domain of application. They are more true than ever, precisely because now we know where their domain of application came from. In other words, we control their meta-logic. We know where their truth come from, and where it’s located. And how to control it.

There is no logic without a metalogic, establishing therein, a notion of truth. Thinking is, and always was, an experimental process.

All we need is truth. But it’s the hardest thing. Truth never was, nor will ever be, a safe place. But it’s the safest place.

Patrice Ayme’

Tags: Metamodernism, Postmodernism, Truth