Truth

One of the greatest propaganda victories of our recent history is the idea that when two ideas seemingly oppose one another, that the “true truth” is “somewhere in the middle”. This is a patent falsehood. If I stipulate that gravity operates at 9.8 meters squared per second, and you claim it is 5 meters, the truth is not about 7.5.

But practically, in public dialoguq, leftwing radicals get away with this constantly. What they do, to be clear, is abuse the goodwill of honest people to make lies plausible. They take everything that works in America–our fundamental honesty, decency, concern with doing “the right thing–and pervert it in the interests of an insane appetite for power, the only good they know.

What I would propose here is that truth is more like the bullseye on a dart board, and various guesses best understood as relatively closer or farther from the center. Now, it can happen that two guesses are equidistant from the center, but on opposite sides. This is the ONLY case where the idea that the truth is somewhere in the middle would be true. Most of the time, different guesses would share many common accurate ideas, but differ both in the exact details of their mistakes and their accuracies.

To further complicate this idea, but bring it closer to my view of reality, imagine both the guesses and the truth they are trying to approximate as being little swirls of smoke, in constant rotation, and drifting here and there, sometimes dramatically. What is an accurate truth today could become quite wrong tomorrow. What was actual racism in the past is in almost all cases today a simple concern with truth, the future, and common decency.

And when speaking of moral truths, they are based upon the ideals actually in place. The present America cannot be judged by its past ideals. If one wants, as an example, to look at our treatment of the Indians, one must also look at the activities of all other nations at that time, and the ideals informing them. One must look at the Belgian Congo, and Rhodesia. One must look at the slave states of the Islamic world, and the serfdom of Russian peasants.

If one studies actual American history, and compares it to the world, the simple fact is that our nation has been by far the most principled, idealistic nation in human history, even if we have often failed to adhere to our ideals. The point is that these ideals can be invoked, and people CARE. That is how leftist propaganda operates: it uses words with high meaning content to Americans to trick them, and is thus most effective precisely on those people who LEAST need to be upping the moral ante. One can’t use the propaganda used here in Russia. One can’t use it in China. One can’t use it in the Middle East, or any Islamist nation. One can’t use it in most of Africa, where tribal loyalties continue to make the most vicious sorts of racism and social exclusion ubiquitous.

The truth of a moral intention is its sincerity. Do you actually want to improve the world? That is good. However, as I state over and over and over: you are NOT sincere–you are a sanctimonious asshole–if your actions are not constantly rconciled with the actual OUTCOMES of the ideas you espouse.

If you claim to oppose racism, but persistently assume as a matter of course that black people are inferior, then you are worse than open racists. You are worse than the KKK, who were at least open about their aims.

What has been the effect of half a century of what is called “compassion” by the thoroughly disingenuous? Hell. That, has been the outcome. Detroit. East St. Louis. East Palo Alto. Philadelphia. Trayvon Martin.