When public truth becomes subjective

In my last post I wrote about the subjectivisation of truth in the progressive programme. But it would be a mistake to think this is restricted to specific examples like race and gender, because the postmodern element of progressivism extends it to the whole of life. It is all truth that becomes subjectivised to a preferred narrative, not just particular instances. Needless to say, this has profound implications.

Even before postmodernism, the subjection of facts to theory can be seen in the case of Soviet “revolutionary justice,” in which Marxist principles decided guilt on the basis of class enmity, rather than actual actions. This was not simply an ad hoc matter during a violent revolution: it became enshrined in Soviet law. And so it was a matter of indifference whether the accused was actually guilty of anti-Soviet acts, so long as it was established that he or she was a class enemy. That verdict decided torture, imprisonment, exile to Siberia or a bullet in the head.

Interestingly, though, whenever the judicial process had outside observers, such as in the Stalinist show trials of the thirties, great pains were taken, and inflicted, to procure a confession of actual deeds from the accused. And this tells us that the Bolsheviks’ subjective concept of truth was not merely about uncovering the internal life of the defendant, but about reconstructing the events in the world according to the dictates of Marxist theory. You could express that as “Hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue,” as Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld observed, but ostensibly it was the re-creation of reality itself to suit the theory. I doubt Stalin believed it was the latter, but the ideologs did.

Modern progressivism develops that idea even further under the baleful influence of postmodernism, destroying everything of truth in the world as a result, as I will seek to show in the rest of this post. I will do this by linking to two videos covering the forbidden subject of the US election, which is the prerogative of my being a foreigner not hosted by American tech. If either of the links go down it will only serve to demonstrate the point of this post – that reconstructing reality to fit a world-view is a very real and utterly ruthless process, and not merely a philosophical disagreement about oppressed minorities.

The first video is a British take on the article that appeared last week in Time magazine, essentially admitting that all the rumours about hidden forces influencing the election, dismissed as conspiracy theories at the time, were true. There was a secret conspiracy, but it was a jolly nice one.

Possible explanations for the publication of this article, which might be seen by dispassionate observers as a smoking gun placed in the hand of a murdered man, are as follows:

(1) It is truthful, and shows that it was entirely necessary for a cabal (Time’s own term) of mainly Democratic politicians, state legislatures, mainstream news, social media, big business, trades unions, BLM, Greenpeace, an entire army of new election officials and so on to unite clandestinely for a year, in order to prevent the outsider Donald Trump from stealing the election by not changing the rules and by being popular with working people.
(2) It was written by a whistleblower in an obscure way to evade censorship.
(3) It was written to establish a particular whitewashed version of a dodgy narrative before, inevitably, the facts begin to trickle out.
(4) The perpetrators couldn’t resist crowing about their coup, thinking that nobody can now do anything about it.

You choose your preference(s) – but be aware that, if it happens to differ in any respect from the story the Times article is trying to tell, any attempt to talk about it will be shut down. It’s interesting to consider how that accusation of “misinformation” can be justified as applicable to truth under postmodernism, and I will in due course.

The second video is the already much-cancelled assemblage of evidence for extensive election fraud by the extremely cancelled businessman Mike Lindell. I’d never heard of him before, and it is clear that he is no media person, enthusiastically interrupting his own more dispassionate sources. But he is all the more credible for his naive enthusiasm. Presumably the main social media removed his video on the usual specious grounds that it is misinformation and might provoke violence. But then widespread censorship is no less likely to foment a deeper, far more dangerous, anger.

The most significant part of this is at the end where, various experts having pointed to multiple and deliberately-coded vulnerabilities of the Dominion voting machines, and their competitors, a forensic record is shown of a massive cyber-attack that occurred at the time of the election, mainly from China, just at the times when huge numbers of votes changed in Biden’s favour. In a real world, the validity of these plausible claims would be investigated fully, especially now that a conspiracy has been trumpeted by its progressive perpetrators.

I admit that one of my reasons for linking to this video is simply to get it out there whilst its claims about objective realty still exist. In these claims, the election process was distorted both by domestic corruption, and simultaneously by foreign interference of which the American operators must be fully aware.

If that version is removed from human memory, then all that remains is a crooked attempt by Donald Trump to remain President by means that always seem to be hinted at or assumed, rather than demonstrated, which was stymied by an entirely independent and innocent coalition of patriots ideologically opposed to patriotism. It becomes the reality by the removal of the alternatives.

The 2020 phenomenon of “fact-checking,” recognised as a rather ironic idea particularly since it has apparently become unnecessary in the case of the Biden administration, demonstrates neatly the postmodern concept of truth. Facts only need to be checked when they oppose the preferred narrative of progressivism, and will invariably be found to be false, just as the suspected class enemy was always guilty of anti-Soviet crimes. However, if the “facts” presented serve the narrative, there is nothing to be gained by checking them, because the truth is to be found in the orthodoxy of the presentation, not in the external world.

And this explains the potential futility of even the best investigative journalism under the current prevailing ideology: whereas with Watergate, the question was whether Richard Nixon was guilty or not guilty of complicity in a burglary, all that matters under postmodernism is whether Biden promotes critical theory, and that precludes the very possibility of his accepting money from the Ukraine of the Chinese Communist Party corruptly. The theory says that didn’t happen, so it becomes misinformation by definition.

In Soviet Russia, remember, the courts themselves worked on the principle of revolutionary justice. Now, a postmodern judge, committed to a theory of truth based on a certain kind of lived experience rather than on the supposedly Patriarchal, white-supremacist, Christian and bourgeois concept of objective truth, will not suddenly be swayed from the truth by “proven facts.”

A postmodern natural scientist, educated out of that Christian Enlightenment conceit that truth is out there regardless of how we feel about it, will not hesitate to design his computer models accordingly, so that they prove the truth that green or progressive ideology requires to be proven.

Under postmodernism, “misinformation” is what contradicts the preferred narrative, and is nothing to do with actual events in the world. Or more graphically expressed, the preferred narrative is what determines the facts of the world: the facts are to be checked against the narrative, not the world. Hence, “conspiracy theories” about a rigged election remain “baseless” even after the Time article spells them out and names names. And you only have to read Foucault to see that this is not simple dishonesty, but the correct application of the underlying philosophy. Colossians 2:8 explains the roots.

My point in this post is to show that postmodernism is a universal acid not only in ephemeral concerns like political choices, but at the most fundamental level – that of the world out there, or in Christian terms, “creation.” Unless you are combating it at that fundamental level of delusion, you’re trying to treat a cancer with cosmetic cream. Or schizophrenic paranoia with evidence.

The whole system is, of course, doomed to collapse eventually because objective truth exists, and prevails. But now its demon has possessed the whole western political and social system it can do tremendous damage for an awful long time, and perhaps only the return of Jesus will shorten that painful process. Meanwhile, it behoves us to know our enemy, that it is our enemy, and that it is not merely flesh and blood. One could, sometimes, evade Soviet Revolutionary Justice, and history would eventually destroy it, but one could not negotiate with it. One could only expose its falsity to people created in the image of the God of truth, one by one.