On the New Left’s Hatred of Ugly Realities

 Humankind cannot bear very much reality. —T. S. Eliot

 

I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell. —Harry S. Truman

 

The naked truth is always better than the best-dressed lie. —Ann Landers

   Let’s say there is a very ugly fact, a fact that, if true (and it empirically is), many people would feel threatened and very unsafe, or maybe just upset with the unfairness of it all—but, even so, the fact is an objectively demonstrable fact.

     Now let’s say that an empirically minded honest person publicly states that fact, simply for the sake of telling the truth; and let’s say further that the fact has to do with, oh, genetically conditioned cognitive differences between human ethnicities. Do you know what would happen? Of course you do: Indoctrinated, hysterical leftists would call that person a RACIST, and the fact that he had uttered would be called HATE SPEECH, and they would exert themselves with every means at their disposal to have that fact silenced and banned and the person who uttered it silenced and punished.

     The empirical case for that demonstrable ugly fact is left entirely out of account, as is the honest empirical-mindedness of the person who stated it. Anyone who, for any reason whatsoever, makes an observation contrary to leftist dogmas with regard to, say, the measured cognitive skills of Australian aborigines, will be accused of wanting that observation to be true—or rather, that it can’t be true because it’s RACIST, or because it just can’t, and so the person is deliberately lying out of sinister and hateful motives of RACISM and WHITE SUPREMACY. He’s a NAZI. An objective desire simply to state objective truths is just not an option, especially if the truths are intolerably unpleasant (because indicating that the new “emancipatory” leftist belief system is based on patent falsehoods) to indoctrinated neo-Marxists. Empirical truth must be entirely in accordance with the new leftist ideology, if it is allowed to exist at all, just because leftists are always right—or maybe because something is right just because leftists want it to be. Right-wingers can be irrational and intolerant too of course, but freedom of speech and objectivity have now shifted primarily to the political right, at least in the west. Often the left dismisses objectivity out of hand.

     We may as well leave out of the picture the new left’s infantile idea that truth is nothing more than a cultural construct, or that rational objectivity and empiricism are sinister Machiavellian tools of white patriarchal oppression; but I would like to make a few points, even though I’ve made them before. There are obviously empirical truths, including some that are quite unpleasant but so undeniable that all but the most soft-headed and immature have to acknowledge them. For example, we will all die someday, at least on the physical level. The underlying bedrock of objective, worldly truth is considered not to be ultimately true in accordance with Buddhist philosophy, being like the shadows on the walls of Plato’s cave, but nevertheless it is there and it is not just a cultural construct. Those shadows can be carefully observed and accurately measured. No change in culture or in economic systems will cause dropped rocks to fall up instead of down, or cause orange juice to come from apples, or cause camels to lay eggs, or cause Australian aborigines to score higher than Chinese people on math tests, on average.

     This apparent bedrock of empirical facts may be due to the similarities in how we humans perceive the world, considering that we are all members of the same species, and thus are all programmed (“deluded”) by nature in pretty much the same ways…although the hysterical left now asserts, in accordance with Karl Marx’s pre-Darwinian theories, largely based upon wishful thinking, that there is no human nature whatsoever and we are all born as a cognitive blank slate, the same as everyone else, and ready to be indoctrinated by a society and an economic system. (We may as well let slide the observation that his opinions on economics also were unrealistic and based more on wishful thinking than on empirical reality.) This belief in the blank slate is empirically false, but then again, empiricism has come to be viewed as a tool of white patriarchal oppression.

     These indoctrinated and intolerant ideologues deny that truth exists yet nevertheless, even in the same breath, they imply that their views are correct, and that anyone who disagrees with them is wrong—in fact so wrong that they should be silenced and punished.

     But the objective fact of the matter remains that there are icky, ugly truths (some of them involving inherent, genetic psychological differences among human groups and ethnicities). It would be very nice if they weren’t true, it would be positively lovely and the world would be a more righteous and more pleasant place perhaps, but they evidently and demonstrably are true regardless of their ugliness and ickiness; and stating these evident facts is not necessarily more racist or hateful than stating any other evident fact, regardless of the hysterical shitstorm that may be elicited with that as an excuse. A person may make an ugly observation not because he is hateful and WANTS it to be true, but simply because he believes it to be so and respects truth. If someone else considers such unpleasant, hard to accept statements to be false, then those statements should be disproven, or at least reasoned against, with some patience and emotional maturity—although that would require objectivity, which again is a sinister tool of white patriarchal oppression. And as for the emotional maturity, that may be a tool of white patriarchal oppression too for all I know.

     Our civilization is in a state of crisis. The ideology which supported it for centuries, as well as the people who created that civilization, are under attack. It is turning against itself, and as a wise man once said, a house divided against itself cannot stand. But the intolerant radical cult that has arisen in our midst and has taken control over the educational system, the mainstream media, corporate boardrooms, and to a large degree the federal government of the USA and many other western nations, is opposed to any fact that might cause the most dysfunctional weakling or fool to feel threatened, or even to feel like the dysfunctional weakling or fool that she or he really is. Consequently our society must be founded upon blatant feel-good falsehoods, on utter bullshit…and no society based on blatant falsehoods, especially when it prefers falsehood to truth, will prosper for very long.

     The main point that I am trying to make is simply this: Empirical reality can be unpleasant, in fact it can be downright icky. The First Noble Truth of Buddhism amounts to essentially this. It’s fundamentally built into this universe, and there’s no way anyone will ever eradicate it. So simply acknowledging some of this ickiness, especially if it contradicts the indoctrinated emotional wishful thinking of the cult of “progressive” Social Justice, is in no way indicative that the person who acknowledges it WANTS the empirical universe to be unpleasant out of motives of hate. Seriously, most of the hate is flowing the other way, from indoctrinated lefties towards the person who has a backbone and acknowledges objective reality.