Why Commitment to the Objective Truth is Important

Let's continue talking about laying the foundations for a culture and politics rooted in shared values. Last time, we talked about compassion. This time, I think we should talk about commitment to, and respect for, the objective truth. One reason why an extreme and toxic politics has proliferated on both the left and the right, is because of a lack of commitment to the objective truth across the board. Postmodernism, which has strongly influenced the Western left in recent times, openly rejects pursuing the objective truth, and sees speech, discourse and knowledge itself as fundamentally manifestations of oppressor vs oppressed power dynamics. There is clearly no room for respect of objective truth in this worldview. Meanwhile, the right is at least equally, if not even more, disrespectful of the objective truth, in its pursuit of power. In the past few years, the right has demonstrated a sickening level of 'will to power', never letting a crisis go wasted, trampling on both scientific and social truths in their attempt to create a politically advantageous narrative. Together, in slightly different but ultimately similar ways, the left and the right have buried our previously long-standing commitment to the objective truth, to the extent that people basically don't live in the same environment of objective facts anymore. This has made society and politics fundamentally dysfunctional, and is one of the biggest reasons for the polarization and tribalism we have right now.

Why is the objective truth important? It's because only when we know and acknowledge the objective truth can we begin to make fact-based decisions and take reality-based actions to improve things. Of course, knowing the objective truth is only the beginning. What decisions we make, and what actions we take, will also depend a lot on our values. Two people with different values can and will act differently even if they agree on the same set of objective facts. It is our values that make us want to rectify injustices where they exist, or resist tyranny in all its forms. If people with a different set of values were in charge during World War II, for example, they might not have had the will to stop fascism, even if they otherwise had the same facts available to them. They might have decided to make a peace deal with Hitler instead, not caring about how many people would suffer and die under his rule. Therefore, it is ultimately our values that determine our course of action. However, those values would only be able to be applied accurately if we know the objective truth, and know it accurately, in the first place. Knowledge of, and agreement with, the objective truth also forms a fair basis on which we might judge the ideas being sold to us in the marketplace of ideas. I think a major reason why some ideologies wantonly distort and obscure the objective truth is because they want to distort the marketplace of ideas. It's really about forcing their ideas down our throats, when a fair appraisal of such ideas would always lead to their rejection.

Postmodernism and New Left critical theory clearly have a problem with the objective truth. Their view that knowledge and discourse is fundamentally and inevitably shaped by power dynamics is incompatible with a commitment to freely pursue the objective truth, both in theory and in practice. In theory, such a worldview necessarily leads to the selective censorship of ideas, as argued by Herbert Marcuse in his Repressive Tolerance essay. In practice, this worldview has led to the phenomenon of cancel culture, and has clearly made many people afraid of speaking their mind. Some people have asked me, what if they acknowledge there is some truth in what postmodernism is saying, while not following it to its logical conclusion, is that OK? I think the important thing here is whether you are critiquing power dyanamics for distorting the marketplace of ideas, or dismissing the validity and necessity of the marketplace of ideas altogether. Far too often, the postmodern project is clearly of the latter worldview. It is clear that most adherents of postmodernism are not out to critique power dynamics so that the marketplace of ideas can be even freer. If that were the case, we wouldn't have cancel culture, so-called 'progressive stack' speaking systems, and the ostracization of people who don't toe the party line in many leftist spaces. The problem with the postmodernism-influenced left is that they don't trust the marketplace of ideas to arrive at the best understanding of the objective truth, and that the application of our long-standing values to the objective truth will result in fairer and more just outcomes in society. Old school liberals and progressives have long trusted this process, but postmodern critical theory ideology has destroyed that trust, to our collective detriment.

While members of the political right have enjoyed criticizing the left's lack of commitment to the objective truth and the scientific method, as if they hold the moral high ground here, there is actually a similar crisis happening on the right as well. For at least a generation now, the right has had a strong distrust of expert scientific opinion in many areas, simply because such opinion is usually not in line with the right's increasingly reactionary ideology. From the fact that LGBT people are 'born this way', to the rejection of 'intelligent design' in favor of evolution, to the strong evidence in favor of man-made climate change, scientific facts derived from empirical observation and the scientific method have been a thorn in the side of right-wing politics since at least a generation ago. Therefore, the right has indeed been anti-science for even longer than the left. This attitude informs the anti-academic stance of ideologies like neoreactionism, which has become more and more influential on the right in recent years, after fully breaking into the mainstream at the time of the pandemic. The post-pandemic right is essentially post-truth, and this is really not an exaggeration. Just look at how Trump and his allies have campaigned and governed. From spreading fake news about immigrant communities, to the drastic cuts to the funding of scientific research, the right is really waging war on science and truth right now.

Given that both the left and the right, as they exist right now in the 2020s Western political landscape, have substantial problems with respecting the objective truth, I believe that those of us who remain committed to the free and unbiased discovery of the objective truth must remain independent of the dominant political discourse of both the left-wing and right-wing echo chambers. In an age where partisan politics has been fundamentally corrupted by anti-truth forces, independent thinking is the key to restoring the truth.
 

Why We Need to Bring Back Love and Compassion

Today, I am going to start a new series, where I attempt to lay the foundations for a culture and politics rooted in some fundamental shared values. The value I am going to focus on today is compassion. Compassion, love for each other, following the 'golden rule', or whatever else you can call it, has long been a cornerstone of any successful society, and is a major driving force for society's improvement over time. I think a fundamental problem with today's Western political landscape is a lack of compassion, especially among the loudest voices on both the left and the right. This, in turn, is due to a combination of factors, including polarization and tribalism, obsession with ideology and philosophy, as well as the proliferation of dishonest influencers in the media. I will talk about how to tackle these problems, and bring back compassion.

The level of compassion in Western society has dropped rapidly in the past ten years or so. Many people might point the finger towards online political culture, especially of the right-leaning variety, which started the whole 'SJWs owned' thing. But although that culture is really toxic and is indeed part of the problem, what is often called the 'woke left' is equally responsible for trashing compassion, in my view. Let me explain.

Wokeness, the worldview and brand of activism heavily influenced by postmodern critical theory, likes to say that it is for social justice. However, it is not for the kind of social justice most of us knew before 2015 or so. The 'woke left' simply doesn't care much about justice at the practical, individual level. Instead, it cares about fulfilling its ideology, which is basically the dismantling of what it sees as interlocking systems of oppression. This ideology divides people into oppressor vs. oppressed groups, mostly based on their immutable characteristics like race and gender. And if you're somehow placed in an 'oppressor' group, they don't have much compassion for you. Even if you are in the 'oppressed' group, if you disagree with their worldview, they might try to label you as 'privileged' in another way, and by implication, less deserving of compassion. Therefore, under the postmodern critical theory identity politics model, there really is a lack of compassion towards many people, and in many contexts, especially when compared to the model of universal compassion old-school liberals used to argue for civil rights and gay marriage. Wokeness prioritizes its ideology of deconstruction over genuine, universal compassion, and its attempt to supplant old-school liberalism on the left in the 2010s led to a rapid loss of compassion on the left, and eventually across society more generally.

On the other hand, the New Right are clearly not into compassion either. During the 2010s, the angle they took was that so-called SJWs were too focused on compassion, to the exclusion of everything else. This implied that what was needed was less compassion. However, this is a dishonest way of framing the problem because, as previously discussed, the woke left suffers from a lack of compassion, rather than a surplus of it. By framing compassion as the problem rather than the solution, the New Right was able to mainstream their own extremely uncompassionate brand of politics. Instead of championing free speech on the ground that everyone deserves to be able to express their concerns, or that a free marketplace of ideas would allow us to get to the truth which is best for everyone, their 'free speech' is about nihilistically 'owning the libs', often by saying things that are deliberately bigoted towards minorities. This has allowed them to build a culture where deliberately antagonizing and hurting people for no benefit is not only tolerated, but actively celebrated. Today's online right, where being against interracial marriage and openly hating minorities is effectively normalized, is the end result. Thus the New Right effectively used the widespread frustration towards wokeness to dishonestly build an even more toxic movement.

To end all this, I think we need to start by simply demanding a return to compassion. We need to insist that compassion is universally applied to everyone, and that ideology and philosophy are never allowed to get in the way of this again. We need to insist that truly caring for everyone's wellbeing is a valid goal of politics, in and of itself. On one hand, the woke left should be called out for the harms that result from its ideology labeling certain people as oppressors based on their immutable characteristics. We should push this radically hateful way of thinking out of polite society, where it clearly doesn't belong. Indeed, we should teach our kids that it is always fundamentally wrong to think this way, so that this ideology doesn't find a way to spread to future generations. On the other hand, the New Right's toxic embrace of an anti-compassion culture that revolves around the nihilistic goal of 'owning the libs' should be firmly rejected too. Life is already difficult enough for most people as it is, if your mission in life is to make other people more miserable than they already are, there really should be a special place in hell for you. Again, polite society should be able to just say no to this cancer. If we can't even do this, there is no hope for the future of humanity.