My Thoughts
As legend has it, George Washington, in his youth, admitted, “I cannot tell a lie. I did, I did chop down that cherry tree.” Now, why he wielded axe to such a pithy blossom must remain a mystery. Yet, truth be told—it is a morality tale, after all—strict adherence to truth is the severest form of virtue; to lie, no matter size nor reason, brings the liar low, truth elevates the soul toward the divine.
George Orwell foresaw well how the adherents of Marxism and the subsequent advocates of socialism, fascism and communism misused and abused words to manipulate and distort truth to their own ends. On page 6 of the first chapter of his dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, he wrote: “The Ministry of Truth—Minitrue, in Newspeak—was startlingly different from any other object in sight … From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party: War is peace; Freedom is slavery; Ignorance is strength.” Weakening the strength and independence of the mind by producing a continuous state of propaganda-induced terror, the Party induced the people to accept anything without question, anything, no matter how illogical. Fiction carries an odd virtue, a gift of becoming fact should sufficient time elapse to make it so.
Seek a definition for truth and the Google dictionary will likely return this one: “A fact or belief that is accepted as true.” I trust anyone reading this will immediately discern the two obvious errors with this deplorable definition. The first obvious error to note is that the definition fails completely to define truth or anything else at all. Any definition in which the word or any derivation of that word is used to define it is nothing more than pure bourgeois bushwa (nonsense), like defining goodness as something good. Pure poppycock and balderdash. The second significant error with this bit of googly bushwa is the subjective idiot button embedded within such nonsense. Should mere acceptance determine a thing to be true, then truth, in truth, cannot possibly exist. Would I to convince—that is, accept—myself or all my friends and acquaintances or the country or the world that I am God, does that make it true? If it, by the oddest of chance, does, then, what does truth truly mean? Nothing. If everyone agrees two plus two always and everywhere equals five does such agreement make it true, make it my truth or your truth or anyone’s truth? If so, then there can be no truth, in truth.[1]
It is difficult, nigh impossible these days, to hear the truth for it is so seldom expressed for fear of being found out committing the honest crime of verity. Prevarication has become the highest form of flattery, the more obvious the mendacity the greater the acclaim. We are living in the age of the Big Lie, of lies so “colossal” that no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”[2]
Wake up America.
Just my thoughts for a Friday, for what it is worth.
[1] Colloqui, Bourgeois Bushwa: On the abuse of logos, May 31, 2019.
[2] Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 1925. Hitler believed the technique was used by Jews to blame Germany’s loss in World War I on German general Erich Ludendorff, who was a prominent nationalist and anti-Semitic political leader in the Weimar Republic.
