It has been my view for some time that one of the most destructive concepts introduced by Leftism into the world is the concept of relativism.
Many things we encounter in our life have a duality to them. A hammer may be used to build a beautiful piece of furniture, but may also be used to extinguish a human life.
Words are no different. And leftists delight in using the concept of duality to their advantage in the appropriation of the use of language and symbols to their own ends.
As an example, to many of us, the word “gay” had a valid and useful meaning, to be happy and carefree. In these times, it has quite a different meaning, and if the statistics on the mental health of homosexuals are to be believed, in an ironic cultural twist, “gay” is no longer “happy and carefree”. There are many words like that...”diversity” is one such word. And it isn’t just words they appropriate. They do the same with symbols, and one example of a beautiful symbol debased by the Left, is the rainbow.
And so it is with relativism.
What was once a useful and relevant term is now imbued with all things negative due to the bastardizing wordsmithing of the Left.
The reason that this bears on the subject is due to the Leftist concept of “cultural relativism” and how it was used by the left as a camel’s nose in the tent for many other types of relativism, particularly “reality relativism”, otherwise more precisely known as “truth relativism”.
In cultural relativism, all cultures have equal value. This is an absurd viewpoint, because clearly not all cultures have equal value. The culture of Pol Pot’s regime and Stalin’s regime are not in the same universe as nearly any Western culture that is steeped in the values of individual human rights. This is unarguable.
But once the Left got people to swallow “cultural relativism”, it was not a great leap to “truth relativism”.
In truth relativism, all truths are relative, and all truths have equal value. In other words, the truth as viewed by one person is just as valid as the truth viewed by another person even if they are 100% diametrically opposed to each other. If we look up into a cloudless sky and state the truth that it is blue, the truth offered by the person who says it is not blue is supposedly just as valid.
Nobody is allowed to have their truth refuted, which means that there is no such thing as truth.
Or, put more bluntly: Everything is a lie. (This should start to sound familiar.)
There are factions of people who say this truth is valid, and factions of people who say their truth is valid, and both cannot be true. You therefore have no truth, you have factions.
Is this all starting to sound vaguely familiar? It should, because it is a tool of the Left which is the ideology of divisiveness. Their Raison d’être on the Left is to divide people into classes of various kinds, financial, racial, and sexual, and pit those groups against each other. That is how the Left survives and thrives. It is what they do.
And if all versions of the truth, both valid and invalid must be accepted, then it follows that everything one sees is conceivably a lie, and nothing can be depended on. Even something as simple as a product review on the Internet is a nearly useless endeavor now. There are entities that are paid to do reviews, and the Internet is full of them. Granted, it becomes our job as consumers to sift through them and separate the wheat from the chaff. That is fine, because the worst that happens there is that you may spend money on an inferior product and be sentenced to use it until you can afford to replace it.
With world events and a government, the worst that can happen is that you are sentenced to live under an evil tyranny that impacts every aspect of your living existence, if that living existence isn’t prematurely ended by that same tyrannical government because you are viewed as its enemy. (Not that it would ever happen to any political group in this post 1/6/2021 world.)
I believe this has been the focus of the Left in both the Media and on the Internet. Disinformation as a formal tool has been used to great effect by militaries and tyrannies throughout history, and while disinformation is not the sole purview of the Left, they practice it as an established and polished black art far more than any other ideology or entity.
I agree completely. The concept that no truths are absolute and thus my truth is as valid as yours is a virus that has infected western civilization.
Look even at conservative Christianity. The rise of nondenominational megachurch Christianity is a post-truth movement.
Doctrine used to matter. There are many issues where things are either true or false. Today insisting on those things is “uncool.”
so true, rlmorel. “gay”... at Starbucks a small coffee is “tall”. change the language change the culture. they are cunning linguists.