This is going to be the first part of a three or four part series
that I’m going to title “Truth, Fact and the Consequences Thereof.” It is going to be discussing the realities of
the world that we live in and refuting the notion that there is no absolute
truth. Since this is such an integral
subject to the way we think and act, it is going to be hard to discuss it
without touching on other subjects. It
may seem a little less well framed because of that, remember that this is in
fact only a discussion about the existence of truth and fact and not a
discussion of what those facts are. The
truth of those facts will come in later posts.
“A=A, and that means that a man is subject to
an absolute morality.” –Ayn Rand, in “Atlas Shrugged”
“Would
it be alright if I punched you in the face, because I didn’t like the way you
looked? No? So that is absolutely wrong? Then there are moral and factual absolutes.”-
Mike Lott
In this
blog, I want to challenge the preconceived ideas we have that shape our paradigms. I want to help you to find, and to challenge
the ideas that your mind functions by and thus to challenge you to change and
make those ideas better. The first step
to doing that is defining the absolutes of your mind; defining the truth that
you believe.
In
modern thinking, there is no longer a thought of absolute truth. Most people think that “if I believe it, then
it must be true for me,” or that truth is relative depending to the person. The thought is stems from the belief that
there is no single “right way” and that there are many ways of living life that
are equally valid and equally acceptable.
It allows for the person to define their morality by what is inside
their mind and project that upon the world, or to see things as they wish to see
them. These thoughts allow for the
thinker to make up the rules as they go along.
We see this in the brought out in the statement: “It may be true for
you, but not for me,” or “it may be right for you, but not for me.”
The
effect of this thought process being that a person is able define what is moral
and what is not by how they feel at the time, and the pressures on them. This was the birth of the phrase “it may be
alright for me, but not for you.” The thought here is that at any given time a
person may determine what they think to be permissible and do it, whatever it
is. That may be taking a candy because
you are starving, or killing a person because they have made you angry. It makes all things permissible to mankind.
This thought process naturally leads to the
idea of “you cannot judge me, because you do not know what was right for me at
the time” where a person is convinced of their right because they felt it was
so. The feelings of the person led them
to act in a certain manner and thus they acted.
The idea being who are we to know what they were going through and how a
person should react in that circumstance.
Conversely,
before the 19th century postmodern thinkers came along, most people
believe that there were absolutes to truth and there was a right and wrong way
to live. There was the universal belief
that because morality was given to us by God that we were responsible to live
our lives in a certain way. The idea was
that because we were given laws by God to govern our actions that we should
live by those laws. This has sadly gone
away from our society, because most no longer believe in God.
The
fact of the matter is that A=A. What I
mean by that is, there are things that are.
By our own existence we can validate that we are. We think, we breathe, we do, we act and
therefore we are. If we can think, it is
evidence of an intellect and an absolute, and if we possess an intellect and
are sure of it, then we, by the nature of being, are a fact. That is the first fact of life that a person
can become aware of when they are born: they think. My child was born she spent the first few
hours of her life looking up at me and blinking, then she started to move, and
discovered her hands and feet, then she started to understand that her mind
controlled the movement of her body. She
became more aware of her surroundings and began to use her body to manipulate
it. She began to understand that there
were natural laws, like gravity, and mass and began to move and walk. The crux of this is she used her mind to
learn all of this. She began her life
thinking, and therefore she is sure of her own existence.
Many of
you will say that an infant is not capable of thought on our level, I agree. They are, however, thinking. They think of the new world that they have
discovered, and the old they just left.
That is why a child is comfortable listening to a heartbeat of its
parents, because it is reminded of the safety and security of its mother’s
womb. The child has recognized its
surroundings have changed, and that implies a thought.
This
being the case, we know that the child is, because it thinks, and that we are
because we think. Our intellect is
awake, and our mind is active. The mind
is the first proof that we exist.
If we
exist, how to we know if there are absolutes, because we absolutely exist and
therefore there must be absolutes.
Ourselves and our mind are the first absolutes that we know. Our nature demands that we believe in
ourselves as existing absolutely, and therefore are.
The
truth is that we are, this truth being non-relative, and absolute. It is an established fact that it we
exist. This is proof that there are
absolutes and that the modern way of evaluating truth on a personal basis is
false. If it were not false, I could
simply decide that a person was not a part of my paradigm, and thus treat them
as they didn’t exist. They would be a caricature
of my imagination and thus I would be correct to do whatever I wanted to
them. It would then become moral and
acceptable for me to commit atrocities to that person, because they would be
imagined, and not real because I decided that they were not true, not
real.
The
mind being the crux of a person’s being must be convinced of the fact that it
is real, of its own assurance, and then accept that others are real simply
because they say they are. That is why a
hallucination of a person is so powerful.
We automatically ascribe to the “person” we see as reality, as it is
right for us to do so. We ascribe the
reality of a second being with the virtue of reality like we possess. We can surmise others are real in a second way
by their own thoughts and mental process.
We discover this through their ideas, and those are communicated by
speech. Our communication with one
another shows us that there are people outside of us, and assures us of one
another. To test this theory, and see if
somebody is real, try slapping them. If
they are a figure of your own mind, will it hurt when they slap you back? No, because they aren’t real, but when they
hit you back with a broom handle because you hit them first. It is a simple test that assures us that they
are real, no matter what we want to suggest.
We know that it was absolute that we got hit. A=A.
In very
much the same manner we can know that much of our physical world is real. What then of our mental or spiritual
world? The truth of that is our mental
and spiritual worlds are what define how we perceive physical reality. We see through physical eyes, feel and know
through our hands, and speak physically though our mouths. Our physical is tied in an absolute way to
how we think, feel and act. It is tied
even more deeply to what we believe. We
find this because we know that what we think translates into what good or bad
we make with our hands; how we treat others.
We know that our minds form our actions because the mind controls the
body, and that our beliefs control our mind because it is through our beliefs
that we must learn to think.
Therefore,
we must know that there is right and wrong, mentally and morally, because of
the way that our mind shapes our physical world and the way our beliefs shape
our thoughts.
I will pick up here and discuss the effects of the ideas of right and wrong and why they must be.
