Today we reach part 3 of the tenth chapter of THE TEN LIES THAT KILLED DEMOCRACY. Please sign up as paid to enjoy this important piece of work.
CHAPTERS to date:
Preface: The Ten Lies that killed Democracy // The First Lie: Liberalism //The Second Lie: Cosmopolitanism // The Third Lie: Progress // The Fourth Lie: Freedom and Liberty // The Fifth Lie: Justice // The Sixth Lie: Open-Mindedness // The Seventh Lie: Equality // The Eighth Lie: Power // The Ninth Lie: Diversity
THE TENTH LIE THAT KILLED DEMOCRACY: The Denial of Truth
by Ashok Panikkar
The Tenth Lie: There is no ONE Truth and all that passes as ‘truth’ is a social or political construct.
CHAPTER 10.1: PROVING TRUTH
CHAPTER 10.2: DESTROYING TRUTH
Chapter 10.3: THE RETURN TO REALITY
This is an exceptionally long chapter and I thank you for your patience. I do hope though that a minor insight will make it worth your while: Truth isn’t complicated, society is.
Reality, Truth, and Wisdom
The bottom line is that we don’t need to experiment with the Truth.
In Malayalam there is a saying ഉണ്ണുന്ന പാത്രത്തിൽ കാഷ്ടിക്കരുത് which loosely translates into “you shouldn’t crap in the vessel you eat from”. Most species are intelligent enough to not mess around with the conditions that makes life possible. It would be foolish for humans to mess around with or experiment with the larger forces that we are dependent upon like the weather, the oceans or even the fragile ecosystem of mangroves. An intelligent species not only doesn’t experiment with the real world that sustains us, we also don’t subvert the truths we hold or tell each other about this reality. Having found the truth once, we would also try to hold on to it for ever —or until such time as we discover that we were wrong.
Reality doesn’t bend to our fashions. And truth doesn’t need upgrading with every passing political peeve, psychological trend or consumer fantasy. Funny thing, truth needs no innovation or experimentation. Unlike painting, poetry, or a new gadget, we don’t need to play around to figure out the truth. Sure, truth seeking may need some ‘imagination’, but only if our vantage point has prevented us from seeing it (as it did until Galileo used a telescope to look at the heavens) or if we have lost our capacity to think critically about the world. In the socially fragmented, urbanized and technologically mediated world that most of us live in, we have been so bamboozled that few of us are able to think critically anymore.
Truth always yields to humble discovery which is a very different cognitive process than innovation. Sure, they both rely on cognitive abilities like combining existing knowledge in novel ways, analogy, abstraction, problem-solving and intuition. However, while invention is a proactive process involving deliberate creation through combining concepts or solving problems, discovery is a reactive process of finding something that already exists, but was previously unknown. Inventing a rocket to take us to Mars or new pharmaceutical drug to cure Alzheimers involves creation, while discovering a new law of physics requires uncovering a pre-existing reality.
There is a time-honored word for inventing the truth, it is called a ‘LIE’.
