Template:Critical theory, modernism and the death of objective truth: Difference between revisions

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-{{Quote|“people of every age seem to be in a sort of post-truth scenario here where I get to pick my own facts. There are a lot of facts out of their, I get to pick the ones that I like and I can go with those. And nobody can really tell me that those aren’t the facts because it’s my truth. Those are my facts and don’t tell me that they’re not. The fact that we are all kind of getting caught up in that leaves me very worried about the world. We even now get to pick which scientists we want to believe. So I know that 98% of the scientist say this, but I like the guys who are in the 2%.”
+{{Quote|“People of every age seem to be in a sort of post-truth scenario here, where I get to pick my own facts. There are a lot of facts out of there, I get to pick the ones that I like, and I can go with those, and nobody can really tell me that those aren’t the facts because it’s my truth. Those are my facts, and don’t tell me they’re not.”
 :— Robert Prentice,<ref>https://www.mccombs.utexas.edu/Directory/Profiles/Prentice-Robert</ref> quoted in {{author|Gabrielle Bluestone}}’s {{br|Hype}}}}
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 [[Critical theory]]’s grain of truth, ironically, is that ''there is no truth''.  This is its debt to [[post-modernism]], and it is a proposition that contemporary rationalists find hard to accept, whether hailing from the right — see {{author|Douglas Murray}}’s {{br|The Madness of Crowds}} for an articulate example — or the left {{author|Helen Pluckrose}}’s detailed examination in {{br|Cynical Theories}}.
-The problem, all seem to agree, is this modern rejection of ''[[truth]]''. And it isn’t by any means limited to the critical theorists: it lives in Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts”, and the relaxed attitude to facts on the populist parties of the right.
+The problem, all seem to agree, is this modern rejection of ''[[truth]]''. And it isn’t by any means limited to the critical theorists: it lives in Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts”, in Elon Musk’s [[twitter]] feed, and the generally relaxed attitude to rigorous fact-checking of the populist right.
+At the same time we lament the death of “[[authenticity]]” — is it the same thing as truth? Is it what we ''mean'' by “truth”? — and with it, the terminal defection of ''logic'' from the mechanical operation of the world.
+We think: ''what have we done''? Have we syllogised truth away altogether? Have we passed a point of no return? Some kind of [[event horizon]] between truth and post truth; an invisible force-field from the outside in a collection of received veracities, which  once you permeate it, once you cross its threshold all reality dissolves and it is suddenly the ''only'' visible truth that remains, in a twisting kaleidoscope of unfathomable nonsense — truth is no longer possible?
+Nowhere is this more evident than the [[blockchain]], and its two most startling, and contradictory creations: [[bitcoin]] on one hand: the utter rejection of any underlying reality: bitcoin unashamedly represents “value” as a totally abstracted essence; a theoretical quality, disconnected from our ugly Platonic cave, floating free of any messy, ugly corporeal, earthly extension that might taint it with mortal frailty; the [[non-fungible token]] on the other, a means vouchsafed by that very same essential abstraction from the earthen shores, of achieving unimpeachable authenticity. A non-fungible token cannot be replicated, it can’t be cloned, copied or imitated: it is immutably, eternally, ''digitally'' unique
 The irony deepens, for defenders of the enlightenment bring critical theory to book for its ignorance of obvious truths, while critical theory itself has bootstrapped itself into assembling a new set of of objective truths, which happened to be different to the conventional enlightenment ones.