> How can a society function when the rejection of knowledge becomes a political act?
It cannot.
Living in a "post-truth" society is just a sanitized way of saying living in a society without truth. Such a society must inevitably collapse.
It cannot.
Living in a "post-truth" society is just a sanitized way of saying living in a society without truth. Such a society must inevitably collapse.
Societies built on lies can go on for quite a while, there are tests, a war for example, that can finish them off. But even then, they might stumble along.
For example, in World War 2, the Japanese authoritarian regime took over newspapers and newsreels. Any time they would lose a battle, or have to withdraw, that would be stated as a victory. By the end of 1942, they had stated that the Imperial Japanese Navy had sunk "11 aircraft carriers, 11 battleships, 46 cruisers, 48 destroyers, and 93 submarines" (December 8th, 1942)
The Japenese people could look at maps, and see that the "glorious victories" were somehow occurring further and further west, closer to home each time. But they had no power, no way to challenge the newspapers and announcements from Navy and Army HQs. And the constant propaganda had warped the perspectives of everyone, including progressives and liberals, so they fell in line too.
A large part of Japan's defeat was because they fought an opponent capable of out-producing and out-training them. They had started to believe their own bullshit about being a superior race, about being simply better than the Americans, and as you said, collapse was inevitable. Before the atomic bombs convinced Hirohito to accept unconditional surrender, Japan was close to famine. If the war had lasted into 1946, millions of Japanese people would have died of starvation.
1+1 = 2, the earth is ~80% water, water freezes at 0degC.
What to you mean there aren't truths?
Do you mean people form opinions that are wrong? Sure. After sitting back at looking at it, it seems like the big problem is: there are small circles of power that make decisions for the rest of their population under the guise of "best interest of the people" when in reality we all know this isn't true.
So these small groups make the little people distracted with things that are very hot-button topics that affect a very small majority of people, by making appeals to emotion on both sides.
The small folks eat this up, rip a huge divide, and the small circle people sit back and laugh.
What does a life well lived mean? Is there a god or gods? Which one should one worship if so? What does it mean to be a good or bad person? Where does one find meaning? I don't believe there are truthful answers to questions like that, and modernity seems to annihilate the answers that cultures have developed in past. I'm not particularly versed in Nietzsche, but I believe he said it as "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him."
Something recognized since Socrates, whose death was foretold by Nietzsche, and finally rendered obsolete by the postmodernists a la Baudrillard (1981):
All Western faith and good faith became engaged in this wager on
representation: that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning,
that a sign could be exchanged for meaning and that something
could guarantee this exchange-God of course.
Language and rational discourse are based upon this principle - that when we exchange words or symbols with one another that refer to a thing, we have some hope in hell of referring to the same thing, such that I can represent an object in the "external world," or even a thought in my intellectual "internal world" or "soul", serialize it into a literate form, and have you deserialize that literate string into the same intellectual or cognitive structures that I beheld in my own soul when I put those words together and hoped to communicate to you.
"The death of God" means that we can no longer guarantee this exchange of "meaning" between minds/souls (both of which I regard as terms that refer to exactly the same thing and are perfectly coextensive), because no symbols are tethered to an underlying objective meaning nor reality. Language and definitions are relative, malleable, subject to revision. Context and intent of language and expressions are irrelevant; the meaning of any string of symbols is now unilaterally determined by their impact or impression on the receiver, and thus any subjective meaning can be inferred from any expression.
The condition of post-truth is a consequence of this rejection of objective reality, of the elevation of relativism to the highest degree, and the confusion of (hyperreal, manufactured) symbols with actual reality. There is no objective truth any more, only relativism, narrative, and belief.
> finally rendered obsolete by the postmodernists
is better render as "finally discarded as obsolete by the postmodernists". Since, after all, they didn't prove that symbols do not correspond to reality (they couldn't do that, since that would upend their arguments), they simply asserted that it was so.
You posited a lot of philosophical questions, and quoted a famous philosopher.
"Philosophy is the study of fundamental questions about the nature of reality, knowledge, and value. These are questions that everyone asks" [0]
If you're trying to say "we don't have answers to the philosophical questions of our time" I would agree with you. This would not be a salient point on your end, or even a useful one. This is an example of a well-established... dare I say... fact.
[0] https://www.cmich.edu/academics/colleges/liberal-arts-social...
Believe me, I'm not happy about it either.
When people talk about "truth" with regard to society, government, politics, culture, etc, they're talking about "the story". A story is something that shortcuts discussion, an agreement that two parties don't need to litigate the foundation of.
Take the statement "Joe Biden is president of the USA." Many people accept that as truth not requiring further discussion. Many people do not accept that for a variety of reasons. If you're going to make that statement, you need to be prepared that some percentage of those hearing it will object. There are people that will object to "The earth is round."
So "post-truth" means that there's not a stable foundation of generally agreed upon facts. The least common denominator for discussion and agreement is smaller.
That doesn't mean it isn't true about Biden being president. It is a fact, Biden is the sworn-in president of the United States. The part where people don't believe this doesn't make the world post-truth, it just makes some people wrong.
I don't care how hard someone believes Biden isn't president, he is. he was sworn in, this is a fact, not an opinion, not a story, not up for debate. The dude was sworn in as the president, he is the president.
Was he elected fairly? I think so, some don't. Debate that, sure. If two people on the opposite of that debate try and convince the other, it won't happen. That isn't post-truth, at all.
Truth still exists. People don't look for it. I posted this the other day as an example: My Brother-in-Law said recently "The NFL has declining viewership and is losing interest because of all the different platforms they stream to." Which I'm sure he heard/read somewhere, and knowing the fella, had a political slant towards what he was saying. I do not know what the slant was, but I DO know he was wrong. The NFL had one of the best ratings years ever in the 23-24 season.
My brother in law is just spouting nonsense. He didn't try and find the truth. We argued for 3 minutes, I pulled up the numbers, and he was wrong.
That isn't post-truth, it is willful ignorance, choosing to believe a false narrative because it aligns with core values.
This is a self-defeating statement. It's false on its face. If there is no such thing as truth, then this statement can't be true because it would mean there is at least one truth.
Normally this falls into the realm of moral truth. Or perhaps in a broader sense existential truth. For example: rape is wrong is not an absolute truth. It’s just like your opinion man.
In an entirely materialistic system morality is not universal. It merely the taste of whatever society wants at a time. Morality is ultimately might makes right. If you can enforce your morality through force, your morality wins. If the pro-rape camp could enforce their view, within a few generations we’d all say that the anti-rape camp was on the wrong side of history.
At the aggregate we seem to be making progress while at the individual level humanity always seems doomed. It seems a constant that the individual wants to pretend they live in the end times because at least then your time on this rock was a little bit special.
This sounds an awful lot like a higher being who sits in judgement of their creation; and something that humanity seems to reach for very quickly. I was taught something similar as a child, but lost the belief when I was still quite young. I'd love to believe in a higher power or purpose because nihilism is quite a terrible experience. I often wonder if I'm just wired differently so in some way unable to believe things as others are or if a lifetime of chronic pain has revealed things to me that most people do not learn until they are older.
What are the examples of that? It's closer to a phase transition than an actual collapse at the kind of scale we're talking about here.
I'm not disagreeing with your sentiment, though.
No evidence for that.
Can you define "knowledge"?
We had the tripartite definition, a "justified true belief", and the argument against it exemplified by a person looking at a fluffy white creature in a field and justifiably saying that they know there is a sheep in this field, but unbeknownst to them what they're looking at is a komondor and though there is a sheep elsewhere in the field it is not visible from where they are.
I think there is only belief, that we can have degrees of certainty about our beliefs but there is no way to transition to P(1) or P(0), and no specific probability other than 0 and 1 where we can reliably say that we "know" something to be true or false.
Belief is labeling the pattern and calling it a sheep.
Belief is also the labeling the pattern a Komondor.
Belief is thinking there is a person seeing the sheep.
That definition classifies every dream I have dreamed, every video I've seen, every game I've played, as "knowledge".
If anything, it is an easier thing to dismiss than the examples you give as "beliefs".
See "naive realism": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naïve_realism
Also isn't dismissal also just another belief?
2. I'm saying everything is
Truth does exist. And the ultimate truth is Christ. Yes, those words ring as ignorance to most, but just like we are forced to reckon with gravity and the laws of physics, we all will one day reckon with the ultimate truth.
But it is not my job to compel anyone to believe this. I just find it fascinating that non-believers will believe in magic, ghosts, simulations, aliens, evolution, but that a Creator that exists outside of time, space, and matter created this universe? Nah, that's ignorant religious thinking.
I never said that truth doesn't exist.