Monday 22 February 2010

The End of Truth

Post-modern theory has long suggested that ‘there is no such thing as absolute truth’. History is written by the victors and, rather than one solid reality, all events and experiences are filtered through the ‘innate’ knowledge and beliefs of the individual to create a unique reality, true only to the teller.

The foundation of our societal activity as a species is based on our attempts to align our version of the truth with that of as many other group members as possible in order to gain acceptance, approval, affirmation and power.

Each entity observing another entity anywhere in the immeasurable reaches of the universe creates a truth from that observation, one of so many unique individual truths as to be an unimaginably small fragment of anything approaching an absolute truth.

Example:

Truth 1: Nick Griffin is the leader of the BNP, a splinter group of the National Front running on a policy that Britain should remain fundamentally British.

Truth 2: Nick Griffin is a holocaust denier with criminal convictions for inciting racial hatred.

Truth 3: Nick Griffin is that big chap who feeds me on a morning, pats me on the head and takes me for walks.

Truth 4: Nick Griffin is a group hallucination caused by the toxic gases released when an angry child got hold of a blowtorch and used it to melt the face off his telly-tubby Po onto his ‘Talking Farm-Fone’, causing the molten rubber to erode through the farmyard phone’s plastic casing and into the soundboard circuitry, leaving a tragic puddle of noxious, smouldering toys robotically, repetitively, croaking out the dying message ‘Hello Mr Cow! Get out of the barn! COME HELP ME!’

Truth 5: Nick Griffin is the proprietor of ‘Griffin’s Shoez’, a budget footwear emporium near Castleford.

Everything is so clouded by misinformation, miscommunication, misunderstanding and miss-speaking that the certainty of even the must mundane of utterances spewing forth from our gob-holes is based on wobbly logic and tremendous hope.

What seems ‘right at the time’ will eventually be ‘wrong’ at some point in the future; truth and falsehood are not solid things but elastic concepts open to revision, rewriting and resurrection at any point.