Truth is not a Leftist Value

Posted today on my Facebook page. I could not resist making some additions for the present venue.

.............................

My title is a Dennis Prager riff. But it needs a bit of nuancing, a job for a philosopher, not a talk show host.  Truth is a value for leftists in an instrumental sense: they will tell the truth if it serves their agenda. If it doesn't, they feel justified in lying. So perhaps we should say that for a leftist, truth is not an absolute value. They don't respect it as an objectively binding norm.

 

For a leftist, especially the 'woke' species thereof, truth is simply a matter of perspective: it is the perspective of a particular power-hungry individual or tribe. The perspective is true to the extent that it enhances the power of the power-unit whose perspective it is.

 

The underlying metaphysics and epistemology is Nietzschean. Now this here's Facebook, and not the place to get all academic. But perhaps now you understand why a leftard like the Ladder Man is enamored of Nietzsche.

 

Die Welt is der Wille zur Macht und nichts anders!

Das Kriterium der Wahrheit is die Steigerung des Machtgefühls! 

 

"The world is the Will to Power and nothing besides!"

"The criterion of truth is the increase in the feeling of power."

It is also worth pointing out that coherence is not a leftist value either. Lefties say all sorts of things that make no sense in pursuit of their agenda. For example, "Walls are immoral." (Pelosi); "Diversity is our strength." (Pelosi and numerous other leftards.) Here too the absolute-instrumental distinction kicks in.

 

The problem with "Walls are immoral" is not that it is false, but that it makes no sense, and therefore does not satisfy a necessary condition of a proposition's having a truth-value. A wall cannot be either moral or immoral; only a person who uses a wall for one purpose or another.

 

But try explaining that to a destructive knucklehead like Madame Speaker! You won't get through to her because power is the cynosure of her political machinations. She was always a dingbat, but now she is a dingbat wrapped in senility. And a clear and present danger to the Republic, as witness her ill-advised Taiwan junket.

 

A decrepit donkey should not poke a dragon with a stick.