Zero-Sum Reality and the Abolition of Truth

Reality is now a zero-sum game in which there are defined winners and losers based on the fickle trends of a system of social justice that have predetermined a reality based on group identity.

Taste is regarded as an autonomous matter. In art, it is a balance between our sensitivity to the form and structure of the thing itself, and response as shaped by our own experience. It is both trained and confers our personal meaning. Our attention to the intricacies and nuances in the manner of taste is often a reflection of the intuitive responses in our ability to relate it to inherent truths about ourselves and how we view our place in society. But what if that perception is skewed so far as to be rejected by those who don’t share our tastes, and by extension, our beliefs? How does that relate to the battle of objective truths that seem to elude a society in which objectivity is a barrier to equality, or equity? What society is suffering from, not unrelated to the emotionally insipid conformity of conscience, is the supplanting of truth for taste, reality for fables, and beauty for destruction.

History has bookmarked in the great works of literature, art, architecture, and the evolution of language, how we see ourselves reflected in and taken astride the aesthetic world and what it means to fit in its hierarchies. There always has been the taste making experts: those who set the scale of values of which we learn to judge the good art – or taste – from the bad. The more we learn to appreciate the mastery of a trade, the more we learn to appreciate the fruit of such passion. But now having a provisional standard equates to a hostile takeover of truth in its stead.

In his book, Of the Standard of Taste, the philosopher David Hume makes two points, “When the critic has no delicacy, he judges without any distinction, and is only affected by the grosser and more palpable qualities of the object: The finer touches pass unnoticed and disregarded…Though men of delicate taste be rare, they are easily to be distinguished in society by the soundness of their understanding, and the superiority of their faculties above the rest of mankind.” We are in a crisis in which we have an overpopulation of the former, and a lack of intellectual courage in the latter. What society built is such tolerance for the abstract that we no longer put meaningful importance on utility nor the necessity of fact. Why herald the merits of equality of opportunity when it is easier to justify failure through systemic racism? Why point out how far American society has come in terms of race relations, integration, and quality when it is more convenient to use the crutch of inequality to pit groups against each other in the name of preserving political power? Why admit that decades of ivory tower conservative intellectualism has resulted in the reawakening of a working class uprising when one can claim the mantle of moral superiority and direct blame to the rhetoric of a former president? We have retreated so far into our castes that any objection to gaslighting by elites causes a wrenching by the plebes that can only be categorized by them as an insidious revolt instead of trying to reclaim our seat at the table in the marketplace of ideas.

Objective reality is no longer the anchor to which we can moor our understanding of each other, ourselves, our history, even our future. Reality is now a zero-sum game in which there are definite winners and losers based on the ever-changing and fickle trends of a system of social justice that have predetermined a reality based on group identity. Failure to adhere to the abstract concept of someone’s personal “lived experience” or identify them by their preferred pronoun can brand someone as being problematic. Affirming the original meaning of the U.S. Constitution, teaching the facts of slavery, Jim Crow, the Emancipation Proclamation, the roots of the Civil War, debating transgenderism, body dysmorphia, speaking against child sexualization and politicization, are all grounds for not just being intolerant, but for denying someone else’s rights to their own reality. It is a dangerous cliff off which to fall, and the trip is fatal. The consequence is that the line between matters of subjectivity and truth are blurred so much as to become nonexistent.

The intellectual institutions that in previous decades have incubated the young minds who craved a deeper understanding of the world by means of intellectual curiosity are now whorehouses of indoctrination. Instead of sex being the currency, it is prestige and power. From the Ivy’s trickled down to poison the wells of the preparatory and grade schools, arbiters of a reshaped reality are abusing their power as perceived paragons of knowledge to imbue their ideological viewpoints - not posed as exercises of debate or challenge the merits of taste, but to subvert truth and cement an alternate reality. Critical Race Theory is becoming so difficult to combat not only because it is entrenched in the narrative of an illiberal education system, but because the political Left has wielded the language to be abstruse and elusive. It can mean whatever the left regards as the defender of their perceived history.

The manipulation of language is the crux of regaining reality. Right now, we are on defense. We see it in the Summer of Riots being rebranded as Civil Unrest or a Protest for Justice. Looting is justified reparation. Citywide destruction is mostly peaceful demonstrating. Infrastructure is everything – or nothing. Silence is violence and words are violence. We are not to trust our own eyes, but the twisted tongues of ideologues whose loyalties are to the lies they ceaselessly wave about like Don Quixote and his lance, being forever the hero in a story of their own making.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his Essays series, “Intellect and intellection signify to the common ear consideration of abstract truth. The considerations of time and place, of you and me, of profit and hurt tyrannize over most men’s minds.” We are left to battle over reality. It is the last stop before we have surrendered the reigns of our history to an unbridled horse in the wilderness. It’s a path we cannot steer, a trail without a beginning or end. The generations that follow will only have the destruction of ideas and conformity of thought necessary for a reconstructed reality as their measurement of being. Moral proclivity will favor the most powerful tribe. Political sides will win their affected loyalists with language. They will use it to identify their leaders, fight opposition by brandishing slogans, establish moral authority through selective vocabulary that defies the reality of those who are subjected to it: Latinx, systemic racism, privilege, personal pronouns, Western canon, religious truths, inherent human value – the sliding scale of control through perception and disavowing reality swallows each generation more vociferously than the next. To hold a belief in the traditional sense – to defy the woke ideologies continuously churning tranquility and sacredness of reality – is to deny someone else the right to their reality. It will become the pinnacle of hate crimes. We are fast approaching the time when we cannot elude the suffusing of zero-sum reality into an already fractured society.

There is a lurch away from purity. We no longer have the will to distill all of the things superficial. The ugliness and pettiness that drive people apart including the focus on superficial characteristics leave us clamoring for truth, beauty, and objective reality. It is the oasis in a Lawrence-esque desert, the resting spot that nourishes the soul and tenders the heart. It is grace, honesty, and the type of stoic strength that comes from knowing the pain of life but nevertheless pursuing it to its fullest. Let us not turn from a trickling spigot, but double our effort to open it and give life to all who seek to quench their thirst.

“For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please.” – C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man