What is Truth?

How do we know what's true?

Truth. Proof. Tooth. If it rhymes it is undoubtedly true.

This image was pretty good, but already opens a can of worms about the nature of truth and what it has to do with ‘objectivity’. It is truly copyrighted, at least!

We live in a peculiar era. I wouldn't say that it is historically normal or typical for a religion, culture, or nation to have truth as its foundational belief, but it is truly rare to see an entire civilization dedicated to being against truth as a concept like the postmodern West is. Every successful nation had to at least be founded upon what is materially true, such as how to facilitate successful marriages and child-rearing or win wars.

Truth, in its simplest definition, could be said to be results-based.

For example, a Roman aqueduct that has been standing for 2000 years is undoubtedly true. The evidence is right in front of us and undeniable. You could argue about when it was made or how, but how can you argue it isn’t real when you're looking right at it and touching it?

When there's only one ancient structure left standing for centuries amid ruins, we can look at that and say, “truly that was a well built house, because it's still there!” Simple, physical, results-based truth is easily verified and non-controversial, until it contradicts somebody's narrative. Once there's a personal or political goal which is at odds with truth, the truth must be destroyed, or buried, or ridiculed into oblivion along with anyone that is in favor of it.

If there were a powerful religious institution which had always taught that they invented concrete, and then concrete ruins that pre-date their order is found, then it's not real. The evidence will be destroyed and all mention of it will be scrubbed so as to try and make it true that they invented concrete. Reality now backs up their claims. Yet the actual truth is still that they didn't invent concrete.

It would be “objective truth” that this group invented concrete, once all the evidence of concrete pre-dating them was destroyed. It’s objective to make claims based on an absence of evidence, which is the massive hamstring a “scientific, rationalist, objective” view of the world carries. People have forgotten that it is so because they inherently prefer tribes over fundamental truth.

Tribalism vs. Truth

People are tribal by nature. Tribalism is such a fundamental and universal part of human nature that we behave tribally without even being aware of it. The reasons are simple enough: familiarity and similarity are safe. The people who look and act like you and speak the same language as you are comforting for how they resemble you, and you share a common worldview and set of values and beliefs so you know what to expect. This is the safe way to live life and create your associations.

The white devil whose like you've never seen before is unfamiliar so he puts you on edge, and he’s potentially dangerous, so you'll stick with your own rather than trusting that strange white devil. You might even put a lynch mob together for him because he threatens the status-quo.

But tribalism goes a lot deeper than ethnic tribal affiliation. It also comes into play with ideas and beliefs, and really any domain of the human experience.

The lack of self-awareness we have in the postmodern world is a tremendous obstacle to truth seeking. We take our scientific rationalist frame for granted, and believe that all our beliefs, and by extension, truth, is not only physically verifiable but is already verified. We look balefully at the primitive savage who created a golden calf and said, “this is God now,” but don't realize that human nature has not changed at all since then.

We still labor to create collective identities which can encapsulate all humanity and human experiences. It makes our lives so much easier to think in stereotypes, rather than recognizing that every single little thing in life is actually unique. The patterns are real, and they reveal a deeper truth; but turning it all into boxes into which you can put everything and everyone in is much less mentally taxing, makes you feel good, and therefore is desirable.

What the maker of golden calves looks ridiculous for is the same thing we do today, just in more abstract ways. Idolatry ultimately revolves around giving us some deeper truth, meaning, and a core identity that we feel is missing in our souls. Every time someone says, “I'm actually a woman or a man or genderqueer now,” they are committing a religious act which becomes a core truth in their new identity, and is reinforced and “made true” by ritualistic behavior. It is no different than fashioning your own god by hand: a new truth has arrived and the old must be done away with. The worship and idolatry is not as straightforward nor obvious i.e. genderqueers, and that is mainly because it is a set of religious rites in service of the gods we already have: the gods of the self.

Post Truth State

Whatever *I* like and want to believe is inherently good in the postmodern frame. “If it's not hurting anyone (external physical harm only) then you can do what you want.” This is the ‘moral good’ of self-affirmation, the identity is one of spiritual TRANSformation made physically manifest, and the truth is that there is no truth, the meaning is the meaning you make yourself a golden calf for. Meaning is actually quite arbitrary, at the end of the day, and isn’t the same as truth. All words carry meaning, such as calling a sign a sign or a spade a spade, that is the meaning of the word and it comes to be by mutual agreement, but this is not the same thing as truth. Meaning is mutable, but Truth isn’t.

The most offensive truth that can't be tolerated is that that idol isn't really a god; you're not really becoming a man nor a woman. The previous truth, aka reality, was undesirable and had to be spiritually transfigured, but reality didn't actually change, nor did truth, only the meanings of the words were altered.

This is what it means to live in the post-truth world. The base truth claim to be socially acceptable is the denial of the concept of truth. Nobody can be more right than anyone else, and I can't be proven wrong because there just isn't any right or wrong. It's whatever floats your boat. Once we encounter a reality that we don't like or that offends our sensibilities, we change it as a moral imperative, no matter the cost. If the results, or objective truth, of our actions don’t line up with our beliefs, we play make believe that it has actually changed like a child does. You'll never have functioning gonads from the opposite sex you were “assigned at birth”, but you can get all the cosmetic surgery, hormones, and use a different bathroom, and compete in sports as a different gender. Men still won’t get pregnant from men and women still won’t impregnate other women, but it's offensive to notice that the results don't line up with the ideology, comrade.

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Mass migration is necessary for our economies (sort of true, corporations built their business model on preying on people for cheap labor) and is a moral good to help all those poor people. The crime, rape, terrorism, and worsening economic situation for the indigenous population isn't real. Talking about it makes you a racist and literally Hitler. Corporations are good and are allowed to circumvent the US constitution, bigot, and you deserve to be silenced and discriminated against for your heinous thinking! If only we didn’t have thinking people like you!

There's enough examples of our contradictory postmodern religion to fill a bookshelf. War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength. The irony is that communism was (rightfully) thought to be the totalizing ideology that would nuke Truth into oblivion, but it's actually the heir of liberalism that has done a much better job. It can be adapted to anything and everything, including pre-existing religions; liberalism lacks the limitations of a spelled-out ideology like communism. The definitions and goalposts can be changed and swapped around at the drop of a hat, and it's so easy! The possibilities are endless and reality is no longer a limitation.

Relativism reigns supreme and has accomplished its mission of being anti-matter to truth. It is the religion above all religions in the postmodern West, and you’ll find it in nearly every “church” as their base principle.

What is Truth?

Truth is a simple notion, a mere idea. But it’s also as real and terrifying as staring down a 1,500 pound grizzly bear. It is blind but sees everything, deaf but hears all, ignorant yet knowing all of what lies under the sun. It is spiritual and physical; verifiable yet also perennially beyond the grasp of the scientific objectivist. Has anyone proven or disproven God? No, and they never will, because He and His Truth are beyond men’s means.

It is an intuitive understanding. Do you stop and consult your car manual or a youtube video when you pull out of your driveway? No, you just do it on instinct and training. Similarly, truth and its understanding can’t be conveyed or demonstrated from a handbook or treatise: it must be experienced and understood in an idiosyncratic way. There is no one way to understand truth for every single person.

No two men agree on the truth in all things. Not too many ever even learn the truth of anything — and nobody ever has nor ever will have an understanding of the totality of truth. Not even Solomon did.

What is known of truth, from those wise men before us, is that it is immutable. It isn’t always scientifically provable, nor directly observable, nor an apparent part of our lives — but it will always come back, it will always darken our door, and it will always haunt us until the day we die if we ignore it.

Whether we understand it or not, or are ever even aware of it, doesn’t have any affect upon Truth. The vast majority of men and women in all times have spurned and scorned Truth, preferring to make their own. It has never worked out for any of them, except the rare instances of people lucky, blessed, or cursed depending on your perspective. And it was always dependent on how they conformed to truth, unwittingly.

Truth is a circumstance, it’s a thought, it’s a way of life, it’s an understanding, it’s a knowledge of good and evil, and it’s detestable. You can quickly tell if someone knows any truth or not by how self-satisfied they are by it. If they don’t know that truth is equivalent to misery then they don’t know any.

It is truly a happy and great life that is lived in darkness, with no knowledge of how things truly are, never seeing the light even once. If you don’t know what you’re missing, you’ll be happy and content; when you know what we are all missing, it begins to take the color out of this world and all those things you were so in love with as they start to turn into grey mush.

None of it is permanent, none of it is right, none of it is good, and none of us are either: this is truth. Countless lives, and the vast majority of them, have been wasted on pursuing the exact same things that every generation pursues and fails to catch. It is the vanity of vanities that propels humanity forward: had we accepted truth we’d all be living the exact same lives as our ancestors in contentment, but it was never good enough. You always need more, want more, and teach your children to hunger and thirst for more, more, more! Blind fools.

Now our more is un-truth. The one overriding pursuit of the Western postmodern conscience is liberation from the limitations which made truth, satisfaction, and righteousness somewhat attainable in this life. The sacrifices made for us today are countless and incalculable, but the sacrifice of Truth we and our predecessors have made is beyond the value of all human life put together.

Believe, really believe in something and drill it into your heart. Christ is what you need, but even if you are wrong and misguided at least believe it truly and in light of truth. Truth is not a physical state, but a spiritual concept that is borne out in the physical. Not every marriage will be a happy one, but every married couple that abides by God’s ordinances will do much better than those that don’t.

Shalom my goyim.