Dec 27, 2025 04:38 PM
https://theconversation.com/is-democracy...ons-269038
EXCERPTS: We find ourselves in the midst of a crisis of truth. Trust in public institutions of knowledge (schools, legacy media, universities and experts) are at an all-time low, and blatant liars are drawing political support around the world. It seems we collectively have ceased to care about the truth.
The nervousness of democrats before this epistemic crisis is partly based on a widespread assumption that the idea of democracy depends on the value of truth. But even this assumption has a cost. Sadly, the democratic tendency to overemphasise the value of truth enters into conflict with other democratic demands. This leads us into contradictions that become fodder for the enemies of open societies.
[...] But do we really need truth to share a reality? In practice, most of our experiences of shared realities are not involved in truth. Think of myths, neighbourly feeling, or the sense of community, perhaps even religion and certainly the ultimate shared reality: culture itself. It would be hard to argue that we share in our community’s cultural reality because our culture is true or because we believe it to be true... (MORE - details)
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The radical socioeconomic equality that the classic far-left sought, now combined with the quest for a multicultural utopia, is by its very nature going to entail having to surrender various areas of truth in order for those conflicting societies and population groups to integrate with each other. These aims are the secular world still being perversely obsessed with achieving its own version of the paradise that religious beliefs promise.
EXCERPTS: We find ourselves in the midst of a crisis of truth. Trust in public institutions of knowledge (schools, legacy media, universities and experts) are at an all-time low, and blatant liars are drawing political support around the world. It seems we collectively have ceased to care about the truth.
The nervousness of democrats before this epistemic crisis is partly based on a widespread assumption that the idea of democracy depends on the value of truth. But even this assumption has a cost. Sadly, the democratic tendency to overemphasise the value of truth enters into conflict with other democratic demands. This leads us into contradictions that become fodder for the enemies of open societies.
[...] But do we really need truth to share a reality? In practice, most of our experiences of shared realities are not involved in truth. Think of myths, neighbourly feeling, or the sense of community, perhaps even religion and certainly the ultimate shared reality: culture itself. It would be hard to argue that we share in our community’s cultural reality because our culture is true or because we believe it to be true... (MORE - details)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The radical socioeconomic equality that the classic far-left sought, now combined with the quest for a multicultural utopia, is by its very nature going to entail having to surrender various areas of truth in order for those conflicting societies and population groups to integrate with each other. These aims are the secular world still being perversely obsessed with achieving its own version of the paradise that religious beliefs promise.