Truth vs Falsehood (37 page)

A serious downside to the pseudo intellectualism of relativism is that it is a trap for academia, which confused intellectualism with erudition or intelligence. Sophistry does not increase one’s I. Q. for it merely mimics what it does not really comprehend. Fallacious babble is merely pretense.

By research, it was discovered that the championed extremist positionalities appeal to only 5.0 percent of the U. S. population. Seventy-five percent of Americans view them as ‘stupid’ and attention seeking. A similar number of U. S. citizens view them as seditious and treasonous. Twenty percent are undecided or uninterested, and 70 percent consider extremists as the “lunatic fringe.”

It does not escape the notice of the public that vociferous enemies of the fundamentals of America’s freedom and success are themselves multimillionaires or even billionaires whose ‘hate America’ stance appears disingenuous at best. The most common comment is that if they despise America so much, why don’t they just leave the country. It would appear that vociferous critics of capitalism are personally very attached to the wealth of capital itself. In his 1953 Inaugural Address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.”

Classically, in inner spiritual work, the allure of temptation is called a “test.” These tests are sometimes painful to own and face, but in the end, the results are worth it. Statistically, the philosophic/political extremists represent only 5.0 percent of the population but, like a crying baby in a theater, they disturb the entire audience. The “whines and complaints” (e.g., the famous
Time
magazine cover, 8/12/91) of narcissism are given a false image of importance by the attention of media that themselves are heavily influenced and even dominated by the same elements. This propensity to ‘milk’ a favored position is well documented and does not escape attention.

Despite its great progress and overall erudition, ours is still a naïve society that, for instance, does not fully understand the difference between religion and spirituality, which is the very crux of the U. S. Constitution itself. (For reference, ‘religion’ is clearly defined in the tax regulations of the Internal Revenue Service.) The danger of theocracy was precluded and thereby established freedom
for
religion as well as freedom
from
it. Mere mention of the name “God” does not thereby establish a ‘religion’ or 90 percent of the American public would qualify as being tax exempt.

The Constitution says to let the Congress not establish any religion nor prohibit the free practice thereof. It does
not
say “separation of church and state,” which is a purposeful misquote in order to broaden the meaning and give justification to political attacks that violate the Constitution by trying to prohibit the “free exercise thereof.” Currently, such attacks are selectively directed to the public observance of Christianity. Paradoxically, the enemies of religion draw their roots from Christian principles upon which the Constitution was founded. (The misquote, “separation of church and state,” recalls the truism that the most efficacious lie is one that contains a little truth.) They also fall into the same trap as did theocracies, i.e., coercion by force. Secular coercion by judicial decree or historic papal decree is the same in form and operation. Prohibition of the historical practice of religious observance is basically the same as coercion to practice it.

The Constitution at calibration level 710 is more than just “fair and balanced”; it is pristine and in an unparalleled class by itself that hardly needs interpretation from the arguments of sophistry that calibrate at 185.

It is also important to note that secularism calibrates at 165, and that the secularism of Europe is understandable in view of the historical oppression of theocratic monarchies and centuries of ecclesiastic abuse. It was this very thing that the founders of the republic of the United States sought to preclude (calibrates as ‘true’).

In contrast, “freethinkers” have a long and honorable history, and their rights deserve to be safeguarded (see Jacoby, 2004). It is informative to note that secularism and atheism both calibrate at 165, whereas agnosticism calibrates at 205 and freethinkers at 335. That is a very significant difference. Several signers of the Declaration of Independence were themselves freethinkers who supported the theists, even though they themselves were not. They saw to it that Americans could have chocolate
and
vanilla and thus, by wisdom, precluded contention and bitterness, thereby establishing “freedom and liberty for all.” The integrous are the true liberators from the totalitarianism of either political extreme.

Free Speech

Central to the problem of identification of truth from falsehood is the much-daunted principle of “free speech,” which has become an icon that has misfortunately displaced truth as an ideal. Free speech, in and of itself, is a two-edged sword, the usefulness of which, like dynamite, is determined by intention. It thus can lead to salvation and progress or, alternatively, to malice and destruction.

Significant Calibrations

Contrasting Calibrations

Whereas the average American naïvely assumes that ‘free speech” is the bulwark of civil freedom, the opposite is just as true—it is also the most serious threat to liberty (e.g., Adolph Hitler proclaimed that the purpose of the Third Reich was to “make a better world.” Karl Marx exhorted the populace to “lose their chains,” etc.) Thus, it is not “free speech” itself that is the vaunted savior of freedom but the purpose for which it is put to use, e.g., a two-edged sword. While it can be the bastion of liberty, it can also be the arena of the slippery slope of nonintegrity and the disasters that ensue from falsehood. Note that wisdom calibrates much higher than free speech.

The naïve belief of integrous people is that public figures, celebrities, and officials in high office would not really purposely distort the truth. “Oh, sure,” they say, “it is expected that they will favorably ‘shade it a little’ but not deliberately deceive the public.” The downside of misplaced faith is that it is painful to overcome denial. It is disillusioning and therefore creates anger, which is also unpleasant to integrous people. Pride also precludes awareness that one has been duped. Whole populations choose to follow an egomaniacal madman to their own death rather than admit they were mistaken. That is the downside of blind faith.

The vulnerability of democracy to its deprecation by the nonintegrous elements of society was noted by Socrates in 350 B.C. For that reason, he favored an oligarchy in which only the most sagacious and wise were the appointed rulers; otherwise, selfish rhetoric would eventually prevail and weaken the republic, progressively leading to its downfall. In the Fourth Century B.C., the complacency and self-delusion of the affluent, free Athenians led to their downfall by Phillip II of Macedonia. Free speech was the road to freedom but also to enslavement and death.

Whereas sincerity can be convincing, it can also be in error. Passion about beliefs is not an indication of truthfulness because it is often primarily the emotionalized imbalance of a positionality. Balance is more often indicated by modesty of beliefs. Until the discovery of how to tell truth from falsehood and a science of consciousness, the average human has been at the mercy of prevailing belief systems, the influence of memes, propaganda, and the persuasiveness of
Popular Extraordinary Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
(Mackey, 1841, 1980). In the past, many people did adhere to the dictum “Be vigilant for truth,” as there was no means to ascertain what was the truth, much less to what degree or in what context. As is obvious in today’s world, the truth has been frequently quite unwelcome.

The pervasiveness of nonintegrity in today’s society is considerably a product of the impact of the media, which tend to pander to the contentious elements in society for their headline value and attraction of attention. In ‘traditional America’, for instance, the New York Times published only “All The News That’s Fit to Print” to differentiate itself from less integrous, biased “yellow journalism” and “gossip rags.” Discretion was exercised by reporters and the broadcast media so that the airwaves were not inundated by provocative or salacious material. Programming for children was nonsexual because sex education was considered to be the province of parents and biology that of the schools.

With the progressive decrease in acceptable standards of decency in the name of total freedom, the media output is now a “free for all” that constantly pushes the limits of credibility and tolerance. The other extreme is censorship; thus, the problem is how to express freedom, yet maintain a responsible and responsive manner.

While the above is obvious and blatant, a more serious skew to editorial influence is the current trend of critics to favor negative comment as being
au courant
and elite and positive comment as being naïve and not “cool.” Thus, positive commentary about the country or its leaders is actually unwelcome. The media are unduly negative and promulgate contention and conflict, feeding off artificially inflated controversy (e.g., the New York Times’ front-page repetition of the Abu-Ghraib incident forty-five times, a columnist’s fatuous editorial on how much they hate Christianity, comments on President Regan’s death (“He did not do much for AIDS in Africa”), the acidic attacks on Tillman’s death, President Bush’s visit to the troops in combat, etc. All the above calibrate in the range of 170-180, which indicates a serious degree of bias, warp, and catering to the political fringe.

Naïvely, people believe that the First Amendment means no restrictions, consequences or accountability. It just states that “government” cannot interfere, but others, such as employers, etc., are not prevented from doing so. Employees get legally fired for nonjudicious or intemperate speech, as “bloggers” recently discovered when the lost their jobs (Jesdanun, 2005).

Social Narcissism (Cal. 180)

Social narcissism as a new, purportedly ‘progressive’, standard of acceptable behavior results in social distortion, with major negative consequences to oneself and society. Inflated egotism results in ‘sensitivity’ by which personal responsibility is projected in paranoid style to cultural discourse. The perceived ‘offender’ is depicted as a perpetrator from whom apology is now extorted by the demand of indignant self-righteousness and declaration of victimhood. To further add to the social distortion, the hypothetical perpetrator is brainwashed into guilty self-recrimination for being the
cause
and thus ignominiously wallows in guilty obeisance. Thus, the supposed perpetrator is now actually the victim of moral blackmail as well as extortion.

“Narcissistic personality disorders” are classified as such by the American Psychiatric Association and are considered to be in need of treatment for persistent infantilism, with associated interpersonal distortion and conflicts.

As pointed out by George Will (January 2005), a narcissistic crisis can express itself as hysteria, with concomitant physiological disruption and emotional imbalance and excess, as well as impaired judgment. As Will noted, campus-based indignation is now a social industry that proselytizes imaginary bias and “operatic reactions to imagined slights.” A widely reported incident was triggered by a remark made by the president of Harvard University who said that in some aspects of human capability, biology influences fate. This idea was so upsetting to a listener that she had to immediately contact the major public media with her lament.