The Truth and its enemies
In my last publication I talked about nature, the natural physical order, and the natural will, which is expressed through translation and alteration, I also focused precisely on making it clear that I was only talking about physics, and nothing else.
Today I will speak about the maximum force that nature has to express its will, and if in the past this will was expressed through continuous movement and constant change, this time is expressed precisely through immobility and through the static and eternal permanence of what we call truth.
Truth is a quality, an idea, it is nothing that exists physically, however, like all other qualities, it manifests itself in all physical things in a kind of omnipresence; In spite of the fact that nothing physical is the "truth", everything that really exists is "true", therefore, the "truth" is always there waiting to be discovered.
Its counterpart, which is not the lie, but the falsehood, is on the contrary a human construct. If truth and true things are precisely the things as they are, and nothing else, falsehood represents the human will to ignore, to see things as they are not.
And as we all know, the human will, however strong man may be, can never overcome the will of nature. A falsehood, no matter how deceptive or elaborate it is, no matter how seemingly obvious to common sense it is, it will die, because if the falsehood is created by men, when there are no men willing to defend it, it will simply cease to exist.
A lie, like a falsehood, constantly needs men exercising their will to maintain it. The truth, on the contrary, is always there, it does not need anyone to defend it to make itself present, and sooner or later, it will overlap.
This reminds me of Max Planck's maxim: "Truth never triumphs, its opponents just die out".
His opponents? But who are his opponents? Does anyone dare to oppose the truth?
Just as evil is always done in the name of good, because there is no one who in his own opinion is evil; and just as injustice is always done in the name of justice, because there is no one who in his own opinion is unjust; those who oppose the truth don't believe, in their opinion, to be opposed to it, but as we intuited here, the opinion is the problem. And I say it literally.
If the truth is precisely the things as they are, and the falsehood the things as they are not. Opinion is things as they seem to us; either because we believe that they are so because we are ignorant, this when we are rational; or because we want it to be that way despite knowing that it is not like that, this when we are emotional.
But since we are not omniscient to know the truth, all men have opinions.
Opinion is subjective truth, that is, that which is true only with respect to the one who thinks it. Nobody holds opinions that he consciously knows are wrong. Even those who say that truth does not exist, contradictorily believe that their opinion is true. Therefore, for each individual in the world, their opinion is a series of ideas that are closest to the truth, knowing, of course, that opinions are always opinions and nothing more, some more true than others, some totally false, however, always opinions and never "truths".
Opinions are never objective truth.
The opponents of the truth are created when people become loyal to this subjective truth, be their opinions or the opinions of others, then, the objective truth, that prevails in the facts and not in the imagination, is forgotten.
And the problem with such people who are loyal to opinions, is that sooner or later they end up resorting to lies, sophisms, fallacies, and finally, to the total abandonment of reason. Why? Because they are afraid of the truth. They fear that their opinion is false and the world of cardboard they have built around them collapses. And unfortunately for them, the will of nature always overcomes, and those who honor the opinion and not the truth can only fail.
If you want to know when it is sought to get the truth and when there is only desire to maintain opinions, you should only look at the conversations. Those who seek the truth do so through dialectic, and when they converse with others they dialogue. Those who seek to maintain their opinion do so through imposition, and when they talk with others they discuss.
When there is no discussion but dialogue, then the personalism is over, is not you against me, but both for the truth, and if in the first case your opinion was enemy of mine, in the second opinions don't matter, because the truth is not at odds with you or with me, not with our opinions, but with falsehood.
Of course, at small scales we don't see clearly the distortion created by the denial of the truth, ordinary people create small problems. But when influential people refuse to accept the truth and begin to defend only their opinions, the results are catastrophic. Fanaticism, extremism and radicalism are always the result.
Those who are loyal, not to the truth, but their truth, tell lies to achieve their goals, as if deceiving people deceived the universe and changed the facts; they rewrite history, as if modifying the words on a paper will effectively change the history, and the infinite traces left by yesterday, not in the pages but in reality, and which are unchangeable; they censor books and hide information, as if the sun could be covered with the finger, as if by ignoring the truth this would cease to exist; and finally, they believe that indoctrination produces knowledge, but what can we expect from men who feel such contempt for the truth, since they well know that falsehood, unlike truth, must be imposed.
The greatest of failures can only be the best results to which someone who leaves the truth along the way can aspire. But as we already learned, failure does not worry them, because the truth is of little importance to them, sooner or later they will manage to pretend not to have done it, because as we know they don't care about the facts, but only the opinion that have of these.
Unfortunately, although there are some political sectors that archetypally represent this behavior, the reality is that we all are sometimes like that, and we stop seeing things as they are, to begin to see things as we want them to be, or as we would like, or as we think they should be.
The only thing that we can say then, is that, as much on their opinions as on ours, and above all the falsehood, the truth will always triumph.
Image Source: 1
I had some trouble reading your lines. My attention slackens when I have to think in abstract spaces. I would have liked some examples, but I suppose you didn't want to jeopardize the purity of your statements. But I was even more interested in your conversation with @vimukthi.
You talked about whether, for example, a painful blow received by one person can be objectively observed/experienced by another. I think that the subjective does not have to be called "just", because everything we experience and evaluate is always subjectively exactly how it can be objective. At the same time.
If the space between things (and people) is not recognized as "nothing", but as something that holds everything together, then the pain of one person is also the pain of another. The perception wanders over this invisible field and spreads throughout the entire field. If there were no space between the things, everything would condense and probably become a black hole.
If, for example, we see birds dying miserably due to an oil spill, our subjective view is present, but as humans we all feel the same when we see living beings suffering. Only an ignoramus claims that he would not mind seeing dying animals or people suffering. And only someone who consciously or unconsciously ignores what causes suffering gets lost in statements or actions that pretend to be none of his business. But what he says about it is completely unimportant. It is important to know that he feels differently.
While it may not be true that I say to you that I feel your pain when you are kicked because I did not receive a punch in exactly the same place, it is quite meaningless to me because I can imagine the pain. Therefore your pain is also my pain. And that is true again. There is not much to interpret when we witness physical processes. The directness of the experiences speak for themselves.
Abstraction is good for the fact that we don't always need a direct physical experience to know that it's bad to put my hand in the fire because it hurts. Just like when I integrate violence into my communication. The direct and subjective can then be transferred into the indirect and objective. It's actually a process of "on" and "off", of "to" and "fro", of "true" and "untrue". A vibration, a cosmic dance between objectivity and subjectivity.
The thing is that we need to learn to be attentive towards this vibration of ourselves and give it direction, no?
It's true, from my point of view, that everything must necessarily be one, and even though illusively it may seem that between one thing and another there is "nothing", such a vacuum is just a conceptualization, due to the fact that "nothing" cannot exist, because "nothing" is precisely the non-existence, and non-existence can't obviously exist. And since there is no "nothing", no vacuum, everything that exists must necessarily be connected. All is one.
Neither can there be space between people, because there is nothing that divides them, therefore, people must be part of the space.
On the other hand, it is true that humans are of an empathic nature, this for the mere fact of being social, and therefore, we can "feel by abstraction" what other people feel, however, as the sensations are strictly subjective, such abstraction is rarely precise, and never objective, since the latter is a task proper to the intellect.
If I told you terrible stories about things that have happened to me, even if they were not true, you could feel a pain for me, that I never felt. In the same way, even if the story were real, when you are different from me and perceive your sensations in a different way, the pain that you can feel for me is not at all similar to what I felt.
In both cases the abstraction failed, and there is not much we can do to avoid it.
You can only "abstract by sensation", what concept you have created, I believe, with people who are truly similar to you. Hence the existence of relationships, be it a couple, family or friends, because there is a kinship, let's say, in their worldview. And even then it's not always accurate.
Therefore, most times the sensations that one or the other perceive, should not be seen as objective truth but as mere opinion, as something that is true for the one who feels it, but nothing more than that, because it is impossible to perceive such things objectively.
Hmm ... I think I want to translate that again for myself. If you tell me a lie, then I wouldn't necessarily share a pain if the lie wasn't believed by yourself at the moment of the story. I would probably be similarly unimpressed.
I have a relative who's always terribly upset and very committed about his work, but I know that the content is mostly a lie, but the feelings are true.
So if your feeling of pain was real, I don't see much difference between your pain and mine. It is like rage or fear a universal feeling. Agony is agony, it differs gradually, but not according to its basic truth content. So it's interesting why someone needs a lie with terrible content. It also reminds me of my son, who sometimes lies, but not because he is completely uninvolved behind it, for example, but because his lie merely conceals one aspect. It is at least as painful as the revealed part (the lie).
If I think about it further, an untrue story about pain is an act that wants to create pain. But if I knowingly want to create a painful counter-reaction in someone, I am interested in experiencing it and perhaps only then in being able to find my own pain.
I think the aspects that are determined by opinion are those that are mistakenly taken at face value or considered to be sensations. The projection of a matter. When I see a little girl being slapped in the face, I share her pain. I project my experience and pain onto the girl. We are all similar in this respect.
It would only be a false projection if the girl were to grow up in a culturally completely different system, in which slaps in the face, for example, symbolized an honour. Then I would conjure up my memory of my own slaps in the face and I would feel sorry for the girl because she had been humiliated in my eyes. My projection would then be wrong.
But in order to notice this at all, I need a subjective as well as objective view of what is happening inside and around me. In order to subjectively identify the difference and objectively accept this difference. Precision, I think, is not necessary to want to be objective. I still have the means to ask questions and have a perspective explained to me that helps me. Much depends on my will and that of my counterpart to arrive at a reasonably objective view.
If you were painfully plagued by an event to which I have no personal (and cultural) reference, it would be impossible for me to comprehend your grief.
For example, because you were patted on the back, which was a terrible ostracism for you, but a tribute for me.
Universally, however, there are things that apply to all people all over the world: that is the grief at the violent death of a person and at which one was a witness. This is the fear of being attacked in your own life, this is the aggression of defending someone you love.
Did I understand you correctly or is my formulation or examples coherent for you?
You have understood me accurately.
This was what i meant.
The projections we make in others are always false, because, well, they are projections, if they were real they were not projections. They are therefore a merely subjective invention.
That's why I said that you can only know, in a way, let's say it lightly, objectively, with people close to you, because with strangers they will always be projections. Of course you can empathize with strangers, but the less information you have about the person, the more speculation you will make about it, both for good and for bad.
So, I think, we are quite in agreement.
we are :)
Absolute agreeable truth can never be achieved, in my opinion. Your version of truth might be different than mine. Truth, morality, immaterial things are all in the grey area. Black and white wouldn't do the justice, I presume.
As Nietzsche said, there's no facts, only interpretation.
:)
I would say that there are no versions of the truth, the truth must necessarily be one, the versions are simply opinions.
But I share the thought that the truth is not attainable, what we can achieve is true opinions, without ever believing that we are masters of the truth.
For this same reason I don't think we should be dogmatic with our opinions, and we should listen to the opinions of others, that way we will be able to test our vision and seek to bring it closer to the truth.
On the other hand, if there are no facts, but interpretations, what is it that we are interpreting? Although I agree with the message that no interpretation is the fact. That's my interpretation.
And of course, this is just my opinion.