Not all truths are created equal. Truth about what is most significant is of most significance. But awareness of signification itself comes from significant education… itself originating from a quest for most significant values.
And this is where what is called “French Theory” (in US elite universities), aka contemporary philosophy, comes short, because it tends to denies that hierarchies of significance are of any significance, which makes no sense as denial of signification is itself of the highest significance… And this sort of nihilism makes sense in a highly plutocratic society, and is a sign of it.
French Theory became popular because it was encouraged by stealth influencers (the CIA recognized it paid more than fifty influential French intellectuals in the 1950s), and their government sponsors, themselves sponsored by the Global Deep Plutocracy.
The essence of “French Theory” (a US academic recipe, using French ingredients!) is that all cultures are equally significant. Lévi-Strauss got the ball rolling, 80 years ago. The view has some merits inside, like diamonds in a rock matrix. However, brandished as an absolute truth it has also been used as a bludgeon against reason and the enlightenment.
It it this author’s view that this is not by accident: “French Theory” has been sponsored at the highest level, precisely because it had the value of being a bludgeon against reason.
In practical US politics, it means all proffered opinions are beyond reason. This meta-mood is all over the political and social spectrum. And all what’s left then, is tribalism. This is why the New York Times rejected thousands of my comments: it made a tribal, not reasonable analysis of my comments on their merits. So, when I objected to Biden-Bush (proposed, then implemented) invasion of Iraq, the NYT would not look at my reasons: I was just classified as anti-American, a Jihadist. The Guardian (in the UK) operated the same way… and to this day bans me for that reason (!)
The most significant question is what should Lévi-Strauss derived equality of superficiality be replaced by? It is simple: good arguments and facts, alternative or not, should be extracted, refurbished and used. Trump’s wall started long ago with Cesar Chavez. Chavez knew that illegal or should-not-be-legal immigration was used by the plutocrats. That argument was, and is valid. That contemporary politicians use it should not be a question of colors.
Famously, Roman politics, when the fascist empire degenerated into catholic terrorism, had become just a question of colors. Gone were the ideas and intelligent debate. God could not be put into question. It was not red versus blue but rather green versus yellow. It lasted centuries, and civilization ultimately went extinguished (Rome/Constantinople called the Franks to the rescue in the Eleventh Century twice, and then was captured in 1207 and terminally by Muslim Turks in 1453).
So what is today’s god, forcing us into colors? Well, the mind makers, academia and the Pluto owned media. Their notion of truth of the highest significance is simple: whatever serves plutocracy is true, and the rest is “conspiracy theory”. “Factchecker” organization go as far as claiming that believing that the Deep US State had anything to do with Muslim Fundamentalism is “urban legend”. To show me how true that was the financier of “Factcheck.org” confronted me and threw my own nine year old daughter out of her bilingual school. His truth spanned the world, it was stronger than mine. All what matters in a plutocratic universe. The truth? How many billions?
Real progress will consist into making locally true arguments, no matter the consequences, as long as they don’t miss most significant facts visible to them. Further progress in understanding will be achieved by the opposite process, considering precisely which value(s) participants will attach to such truth(s). So we have to use a pincer approach on truth: the truth no matter what, in conjunction with coming from the other side, the meta approach of pondering what is the matter with that truth which makes it valuable, or toxic, to the actors involved…
Either side of the pincer will have to involve the genealogies of the attending logics… Not just coincidentally reminiscent of the famous “sum over histories” of the path integral approach to Quantum Mechanics… In truth reality, and thus truth is Quantum in more ways than one…
Patrice Ayme
