Let’s begin with this question: Why is the social media platform that’s so obviously filled with lies called “Truth Social”? And the top name attached to this platform, Trump, presently runs an administration that lies continuously. Think of Karoline Leavitt, the president’s departing press secretary. She spent the past two years of her life lying day in and day out. And some now believe it will be difficult for Master MAGA to find someone else who will lie so hard for him. But what’s even more impressive is that all of the key members of this administration are fanatically indifferent to any amount of evidence, proof, or logic.
For example, everyone knows that USS Abraham Lincoln is going through some really deep shit right now: shortages of convenience store essentials, broken this and that, and sailors struggling with suicidal thoughts that become evermore vivid the more they look at a sea that seems to never end. (They’ve been deployed for nine months, many of which were extra stressed by active duty in a war that has sunk the whole US army into a world historical abyss.)
What does “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth have to say about this? “We make sure every ship, every crew, every captain has everything we can provide them at every single moment.” Yes, this is plainly not the truth. And more insidiously, it results in gaslighting the family members of the sailors suffering on this ship: Are their sons and daughters the liars, or Hegseth?
At this point, we must ask ourselves, why is the truth so weak, so easy to dismiss, to crush and toss into the bin like a spent condom?
The problem might be the status of truth itself. Maybe it’s not all that. Meaning, if Trump and his faithful are so willing to dismiss truth, so should we. But how is this to be done? How do we leave truth with the rabid Truth Social rabble and move on? I propose we begin by interrogating it in a manner that borrows the mode and method of philosophical analysis. In the way one might ask: What is life?: we must now ask: What is truth?
Let’s begin by making a crucial but ignored distinction between truth and opinion. The former has, upon close examination, much less empirical value than the latter. This might surprise some. Truth has a noble register, whereas that of opinion has a fallen one. The truth will set you free; opinion will keep you in prison. But the source of this valuation is not hard to find. It’s in ancient Greek philosophy. The texts from that period frequently associate “doxa” (popular belief) with the dēmos, and truth with the few.
According to Hannah Arendt, whose book The Promise of Politics deeply influenced the essentials of this consideration, philosophers of that age identified doxa as the opposite of truth, which was philosophical or Platonic and not, like its reverse, political or ethical or even democratic.
Arendt writes: “Closely connected with his doubt about the validity of persuasion is Plato’s furious denunciation of doxa, opinion, which not
only runs like a red thread through his political works but became
one of the cornerstones of his concept of truth. Platonic truth, even when doxa is not mentioned, is always understood as the
very opposite of opinion… To Socrates, as to his fellow citizens, doxa was the formulation in speech of what dokei moi, that is, “of what appears to me.”
But Plato was once again wrong. Truth cannot be trusted; but an opinion can. Why? Because it can be in error, this can’t be said about truth. Remove the possibility of error from any statement or doctrine, then the foundation of science, which is specific to and forms the backbone of the modern world, vanishes. More important yet, opinion, in the strict sense, has error as its opposite, not a lie. This cannot be said about truth. Its opposite is a lie, and a lie is wholly private. As such, it can be revealed less by the facts and more by a confession. If the confession is never extracted, the truth still lingers. This is the stuff of Truth Social.
An opinion, on the other hand, can, by external confirmation, be in error. If it is not, then it corresponds with a fact that might change an opinion. John Maynard Keynes is credited with saying: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” Meaning, the facts of a matter can change his opinion. More importantly, facts, which are never absolute but always an abstraction of a totality that’s always beyond comprehension, can only be verified by a community, not just by an individual.
Opinion, of course, has this as a weakness: Let’s agree to disagree. Republicans (particularly RINOs) who fear for their soul at the moment of judgment in the afterworld, and so fear lying, duck from damnation in this weaselly manner. The way they see it, the all-knowing Old One will forgive them if they honest-to-God only expressed an opinion. Maybe He will even agree to disagree.
The fatal flaw of truth is that it is metaphysical–or, put another way, it can only be 100 percent. But an opinion is, to use Aristotle’s cosmology, sublunary; it can never be as perfect as the heavenly spheres. How come? Because an opinion, by its very definition, can only be an abstraction—a part of a whole that, in essence, doesn’t exist because, for humans, it’s exactly like that super-valuable rock in the blockbuster Avatar: unobtanium. An opinion can either be not plausible, or somewhat plausible, or very plausible. If the latter, we say it’s an informed opinion. There is no such thing as an informed truth. It either is or is not. You can take the truth with you to the grave; not so with a fact or an opinion. They remain in the world. The truth is not out there.
