Colbert defined it in 2006 as:Truthiness (noun): the belief in what you feel to be true rather than what the facts will support. Truthiness has matured and none of us are really surprised.
Truthiness is merely another shape of our desire to conform the world to our preferences. This current incarnation was perhaps honed in the early years of the USA, from original secession through a civil war to become a sanctified philosophy of American exceptionalism. Jefferson edited his own version of the Bible to create an ethical framework acceptable to his preferences. Lincoln reflected this attitude when he said “You can have anything you want if you want it badly enough. You can be anything you want to be, do anything you set out to accomplish if you hold to that desire with singleness of purpose.” i.e. the early years of the USA established a nation that was built on a belief in the individual's ability to conform the world to their desire, despite all evidence to the contrary that this could work for everyone. Some did achieve power, but many more fell in the dust. Yet as a society they accepted this and exported it as a universal truth - framing the millenia-old "truth" that we are all little gods at one with "the force".
The landscape of power is changed, and we are slow to react. Power does not belong to the government, it belongs to preference, and has been usurped by those positioned to exercise their desire to conform the world to their preferences. At one end of the spectrum Mugabe destroys peoples lives while his wife shops in Paris. Elsewhere "democracy" is enforcing a nanny state in the UK with increasing erosion of personal privacy; socialism tries to conform the Scandinavian societies to liberalism; and the self-claimed leaders of the free world elect misogyny and racism in the name of "You can have anything you want if you want it badly enough" (and have the power to ride roughshod over truth).
For the sake of argument, if you lived as if you really know that truthism has trumped truth, what would you do? It's obvious that society is a faithful adherent of truthism. But has the church also adopted this as a new doctrine? Everywhere I look I see a church that frames the practice of preference as the mode of operation while seemingly paying lip-service to hard truths. Which is sadder: that society has succumbed to truthism as the normal way of life, or that the church has lost its spiritual backbone and become a boneless bag shaped by preference? Truth cares not about a preferred comfortable spirituality: why should the church?
3 Comments
r4space
27/11/2016 12:18:29 pm
Problem for church is the world gets to adopt truthiness while the church tries to hold a "The Truth" but "The Truth" from the church is largely (by definition as argued in prior blogs here) incomprehensible, and un-testable, and personally costly.
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Hadassah
27/11/2016 05:43:23 pm
Hmmm ...
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r4space
29/11/2016 03:51:46 pm
Incomprehensible? - yes, or obscure, confusing, opaque at the least! Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
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