On the post-truth as a lie

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On the post-truth as a lie

R. Pop

Alexandra Ioan Cuza University of Iasi

Abstract

The value systems established by centuries have been reversed under the pressure of the political correctness. I intend to talk about a way of communicating and transmitting messages in the public space nowadays. I write about post-truth, arguing that it is a lie cosmeticized, hidden in a language that astounds and is supported by ideas that challenge not only refined intelligence, but also common sense. When I write the word truth, I do not consider the concept of truth, which philosophy strives to define it, but I refer to the instrumental truth, the objective truth with which we operate daily, the truth as a benchmark of stability. And I put this truth in relation to the lie. I offer some concrete examples from the last three decades, from different environments, about events or statements that have been the subject of scandals that have started from the claim of some people to present a lie as a truth. I also refer to the fact that there is a whole Neo-Marxist literature that nullifies the natural hierarchy of things, so that objective truth loses its value, becomes irrelevant, flexible, until it is despised, because it is the instrument of „the conservative” individual, the class enemy of the progressives.

Keynotes: post-truth, Neo-Marxism, political correctness, lie, moral values

Аннотация

Ясский университет им. Кузы

Системы ценностей, созданные веками, полностью изменились под давлением политкорректности. В статье речь пойдет о том способе коммуникации и передачи сообщений в публичном пространстве, который используется в настоящее время. Я пишу о постистине, доказывая, что это приукрашенная ложь, скрытая в языке, которая поддерживается идеями, бросающими вызов не только изощренному уму, но и здравому смыслу. Под словом «истина» я не подразумеваю понятие истины, определением которого занимается философия, но я имею в виду инструментальную истину, объективную истину, с которой мы ежедневно работаем, истину как критерий стабильности. И я соотношу эту истину с ложью. В статье приводится несколько конкретных примеров из разных областей за период, охватывающий три последних десятилетия, в которых события или выступления стали предметом скандалов, начавшихся с претензии некоторых людей на то, чтобы представить ложь как правду. Также я обращаю внимание на существование целого корпуса неомарксистской литературы, которая сводит на нет естественную иерархию вещей, обесценивая объективную истину до такой степени, что она становится иррелевантной, гибкой, вплоть до обретения ею презираемого статуса инструмента консерваторов, классовых врагов прогрессистов.

Ключевые слова: постистина, неомарксизм, политкорректность, ложь, моральные ценности

It is said that the effect of small lies is benign, such that they are pictured as a norm which we tolerate. It is a type of lazy tolerance to subjectivism, which means that lies (even those which seem insignificant) have consequences. Ouch! Serious consequences even. Because, whenever a lie is spread, things are distorted, which suggests that those things contain, structurally, the truth. A certain effect of indulgence towards deception becoming something normal is the adoption of a relaxed attitude towards any form of injustice or unlawfulness which does not directly concern the lying person. Because, in the end, it is noticed that the lying person is actually an accomplice of the committed injustice. Deception injures morality, in such a way that we cannot make a distinction between good and evil, honesty and fraud. Like carelessness, selfishness and coldness, small lies, step by step, make the human soul become crippled. “Never anything bad on purpose, visible.Nothing anything sinful, bluntly, palpable. But always (always, God!) triffles! From triffles, piles grow big. And looking back, you only see what is bad. Nothing good...Oh, God!”, said so simple and full of sorrow Pavel Florenski [1. P. 14]. The man that lies is vulnerable to manipulation and, without developing his critical judgmental thinking, he is bound to manipulate by criteria which rule out any form of moral value and ethics for truth and honesty.

This would explain why the academic world allows plagiarism. As shocking as it sounds, even if the act of plagiarism is a scourge, in reality there are these loud voices (the so-called 'decisive factors') that established that: “Yes, plagiarism is vile, but does it really matter?”. These people, that express a relaxed attitude towards the most important social and moral principles and are acolytes of this evil, are called amoral by Harry Frankfurt [2. P. 47]. Not immoral people, pointed out by Mircea Dumitru [3], but more likely having a kind of sociopath or psychopath behaviour. They exchange their devotion to rightness for a new type of discipline, imposed by the alternative ideal of sincerity. We are the pawns of a system that enslaves, a system that asks for more than the majority can offer, enough that the personal problems, a large family, all kind of needs and so on, are valid excuses nowadays in order to understand a plagiarist that admits his wrongdoing. And this sincerity is enough to impress his colleagues, so they forget about the ideal offair- ness. It is more severe than the worrying landmark, indicated by the Blessed Augustine, that 'when the respect for truth decays or is softly weakened, everything is questionable'. Now, as a prime phase is proposed, then it is enforced by laws according to which we have to accept the unnatural as normal.

My intention in this essay is to refer to a certain way of transmitting messages and communication in this post-truth era, which is dominated by Neo-Marxism (cultural Marxism), an ideology which is manifested through all its discharges: political correctness, LGBTQ movement, radical feminism, environmentalism etc.

According to The Oxford English Dictionary, the adjective 'post-truth' refers to certain situations in which emotions and personal opinion are more important, when the attempt to enforce various opinions or manipulation, than the act itself or the objective truth (the previous example about plagiarism wants to bring into notice this aspect). I would like to specify that when I use the word truth, I do not use the concept of truth which philosophy struggles to define, but instrumental truth, the objective truth which we use daily and appeal to acquire the feeling of equilibrium and stability. And I use this truth in correlation with deception, which has reached such a point that was never met before. It is the lowest point that was ever reached, a kind of superlative of negation, in which everything is inverted: white becomes black, good becomes evil, man becomes woman or the other way round etc.

'Post-truth' is the scientific word through which its inventors try to shamelessly use a new breed of lies with ugly faces, but well covered with make-up, which also attempts to undermine moral values and face the nature of things. Ralph Keyes [4] brings up an extremely interesting remark when he says that dishonesty-inspired euphemisms are plentiful and they are generated by the desire to rid the listener of the implications of the word which would abruptly pinpoint the truth:

'In the post-truth era, we do not only have truth and lies, but also a third category of ambiguous phrases, which are not precisely the truth, nor lies. It could be called Enhanced Truth. Neo-Truth.Soft truth.Fake truth' [4. P. 15].

Here is a list of the alternative words to lying and to lie made by Ralph Keyes: Lies: poetic truth, parallel truth, nuanced truth, imaginative truth, virtual truth, alternative reality, strategic misrepresentations, creative enhancement, nonfull disclosure, almost true, counterfactual statements etc. To lie: enrich the truth, tell more than the truth, soften the truth, shade the truth, tell the truth improved, present the truth in a favorable perspective, make things clearer than the truth [4. P. 15--16].

Through aggressive euphemisms such as these, we avoid the discomfort we could potentially feel when we hear a lie. Euphemisms access remarkable resources of linguistic creativity. Facing an expression such as 'alternative reality', the truth has become a musty, retrograde concept. In exchange, the term post-truth has been enshrined. It started to have a more frequent use on the occasion of Donald Trump's electoral campaign and that of Brexit's referendum; it is an instrument used by mass-media and politicians for manipulation purposes, winning votes or getting rich through theft, corruption or deception. It is a subject which is already discussed quite a lot and that is the reason why I am trying to avoid generalities here, in order to emphasize a few aspects in relation to the 'post-truth' germinated in the laboratories of Neo-Marxist ideologies and contained by the agenda of political correctness.

People are encouraged to assume a new kind of liberty in correlation with their own biological data, their own actions, the actions of other or with the historical truth. It is considered 'open minded' and progressive with a 'superior' vision towards the life and the reality of the individual that accepts, for instance, a man which has the right to be called by the feminine personal pronoun 'she' because he considers that he has a woman's soul. But this new way of thinking has not been created by a philosophy that could be the source of a new lifestyle, but by a dominant and destructive ideology. This can be seen by the huge psychological pressure exercised upon those that do not respond to a certain type of compliance behavior regulated by the political correctness that people should think in a correct way. It is an ideology that dominates mass media all around the Western world and it has a remarkable imposing and coercion power, without using weapons or penitentiary system. It acts through censorship, intimidation and labeling (anybody that will not comply to the rules that are considered politically correct will be seen as a racist, homophobe, fascist, Islamophobe etc). The intimidation through labels in a world in which decency is a cardinal value has an immense power. 'The psychotherapy of the revolutionary process aims towards the mental disqualification of those that oppose' [5. P. 81]. Now we are experimenting exclusion or labeling in a world that, essentially, is perfectly free; however, it is not free of this dominant ideology from the West that is constantly making legal steps in order to have power of action in Romania, as well. The risk of getting manipulated is huge, because, according to it, political correctness seems very generous. What can be more admirable, for instance, than the action of granting every culture the right to exist and manifest itself in an equal manner? -- H.R. Patapievici asks himself (in an interview made by Mihaela Dedeoglu at Radio France International) [6]. This is the proper thing to do by any civilized human. That's why it conquered the hearts of many. However, behind the statement 'we have to make justice for every culture', two elements are hidden which radical relativism overshadows. First of all, we are not able to make critical judgments about a culture we do not belong to. Afterwards, we cannot evaluate the behaviour of another culture, that means we should keep our distance, being completely separated for that statement which may be true.

'Or, this means there is no integrated society, there is no civilization in which universal regulations work for every human being. That means that people that embrace sharia have to maintain sharia, but us, the Europeans that adopt the rule of low, an idea of equality in front of the law, unconcerned by religion, by race or sex, we can apply this universalism of human's rights' [6].

This way of interpreting reality is based on a historically true objective which cannot be accepted by Neo-Marxism, and that is the reason why it must be modified and sweetened. In the view of progressive political persons, one has the right to establish benchmarks, in order for the truth to become only what the society sees as being the truth. But what society thinks is not left to chance, but thoroughly controlled on the one hand by speeches given in schools, manipulating young people's minds, and on the other hand, by tampering the general population through entertainment and eventually through laws. Even Camille Paglia [7], who is a feminist, blames ideologist teachers from the greatest American universities that they 'brainwash impressionable students with dangerously unfounded theories, which pretend genders is an oppressive fictive idea, which is arbitrary with no biologic arguments' [7. P. 222]. Critical thinking, explicit exposure and proven expression are replaced by the infatuated attitude of self-righteousness. The absurdity of these matters reaches hallucinating heights. Recently, New York companies have been informed about receiving penalties if either employees or other staff members will not use 'the proper genre pronouns preferred by individuals, otherwise this being considered a violation of human rights' [8]. Also, in North Carolina, where for years, the LGBTQ community has been imposing that women restrooms are also to be used by men who identify themselves as women, now, that with the persistent intervention of citizens with common-sense, normality has set back in, the action has generated a wave of outrage followed by intimidation strategies from the government, some corporations and a few celebrities that embrace political correctness.

The explanation on which the Neo-Marxist ideology is based is that the truth, the way it was defined by the Western traditional society, did more harm to mankind because it justified the oppression towards women, the Afro-American race, homosexuals or other minorities. For instance, the genocide committed by the Nazis was determined by the conviction that the Aryan race is superior. Also, the traditional society (Christian, bourgeois, capitalist) has been using women as a production tool (Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party -- 1848). This speech was initiated, in its socio-economic aspects, by Mars and Engels, continued in a psychological, sexual and cultural way by Willhelm Reich, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, enriched with feminism, environmental and racial aspects by Franz Fanon and others. Identified by Marx, confirmed and branded in a systematic manner by the members of Frankfurt's Schools, the prime enemy of this world is Western civilization, with everything it contains: ancient culture, Christian spirituality, traditional family, capitalist economy, literature canons. To be more precise, the enemy that the NeoMarxist revolution wants to destroy is the individual that built Western civilization: the white male, heterosexual, monogamous, capitalist, colonialist, Christian.

This is how the need of the left to 'deconstruct' the notion of objective truth is justified, because the starting point, from which the values of things that form the base foundation of a new progressive society have to be rethought, has to be radically different. Regarding this, Herbert Marcuse wrote in Essay about liberation [9], about 'the radical trans valuation of values, the relaxation of taboos, cultural subversion, a rebellion regarding linguistics, that culminates with the methodical reversal of meaning' [9. P. 33--34]. The Neo-Marxist project aims towards the destruction of the existent culture, permanently being in the sight of Antonio Gram- sci's warning (recorded in Notebooks from prison) that 'as long as people [referring to the working class] have a Christian soul, they will not answer to the revolutionary calls' [9. P. 29].

In an ideologically dominated space, reality is created by the power of speech, while the truth is nothing else than a social construct. If this definition is not accepted, the truth is something dated, 'a small bourgeois prejudice'. These are Lenin's words, which, for about a century, represent support for everyone that tries to minimize or destroy a value, like the act of telling the truth for a greater good. And this greater good is the success of the Neo-Marxist revolution. I will name now a couple of examples from which I will show that once the filter of the progressive ideology, any story, idea or event will no longer belong to a logical view, in which the truth is imposed through itself. This is how (like in a mythical time) Saint Basil the Great considered [10. P. 585]. But, right now, it is obvious that truth needs guardians. That is why I consider that post-truthfulness is more than a lie, it is defying the truth, it is an upside down evidence, it negates reality, it is the crazy denial of accepting physical and biological laws. Under the pressure of political correctness, post-truth penetrates deep in our daily activities and the concreteness of life through the decisions made by global politics, which make the official speech influence personal destinies through a gradual and almost invisible change of the way of thinking, even from an early age. The individuals molded by such a mentality will try to defend certain types of outraging behaviors or attitudes, as in the following examples, which prove that there exists an agenda whose tasks have to be followed and accomplished bit by bit.

In 1983, Rigoberta Menchu published his autobiography in which he relates details about the life, habits and traditions of the Indians from Guatemala, but especially about the conflicts they had with the military government, after which a lot of people have been expelled from the country. Even Rigoberta Menchu was forced to live in Mexico. Due to these findings and the activities of defending the rights of the indigenous from Guatemala, Rigoberta Menchu received the Nobel Prize for peace in 1992. After a couple of years, during a campaign for anthropological research in Guatemala, the American professor David Stoll discovered an amount that was not at all negligible of untruths regarding what was written in Rigoberta Men- chu's book. The anthropologist's disclosures provoked an entire scandal, which led to the New York Times newspaper making a journalistic investigation (article published on 15 Dec. 1998) and it proved David Stoll had been right, labelling the reports from Guatemala as 'manufactured episodes or seriously exaggerated'. The witnesses that were involved in the investigation were her family, neighbours, relatives, Catholic nuns. The evidence being shown, the Indian activist confessed that she lied. And yet, what I want to underline in this scandal's context is the reaction of those who defended the Nobel Prize's winner. The partisan Neo-Marxist agenda [4. P. 137] is more important than reality, because the academic environment explained that, even if she admitted that she lied and was dishonest, Rigoberta's book is spiritually true, because it attracts the reader's sympathy for the need for social change; after all, her supporters continued to support the idea that, true or untrue, this autobiography helps us understand the oppression that the Indians from Guatemala received by the military forces. In order to impose their power and authority, they issued various accusations towards those that doubted what she wrote in her book, for example they accused them for denying the terrible brutality Indians were subjected to. And yet, even if the lie was uncovered, the one that shed some light was David Stoll, which was accused by the academic environment that he is defending the interests of the white tyrants [4. P. 137]. In this respect, a professor from the University of Pittsburg said that the issues pointed out by David Stoll about 'verifiability' are less important than his position regarding the 'armed fight', that his attitude is characteristic to a narrow-minded person and of a despicable soul restricted by the mind. Furthermore, when a Spanish Prime Minister was questioned by some students if they should read Rigoberta Menchu's book, he answered yes, because, after all, 'he does not care if it is true or not'. This attitude is defiant and shocking, which says more about the relationship between intellectuals and the truth, than about Guatemala's activist's events or individuals.

An extremely uncivilized controversy took place in the French academic field, in 2008, after Sylvain Gouguenheim published the book Artistotle at the Mount Saint Michel. The Greek Roots of Christian Europe (published in our country as well, in 2011, by Nemira Publishing House). He writes in that book that the way in which we understand the duty of Scholasticism in connection to Arabic philosophy and to the translations that came through the Arabic or Syrian pathway from the Greek language is exaggerated and that we should rethink this thesis. I am going to quote some of the ideas that caused very intense debates: 'Beside the circulation of ancient translated texts, the cultural exchanges between the Islam and the Christians have been minimal.' From Islam as a religion, the European civilization has borrowed nothing, neither text references, nor theological arguments. The same thing has also happened in the political or legal field, because Europe remained faithful to its rights and to its institutional legal framework. The European clerics have taken up from various wise men, either Arabians, Persians, Muslims, Jews or Christians, some philosophical commentaries that had a real influence, although they were the subject of some filtering and readjustments. But even through the commentaries of Avicenna or Averroes, nobody could say that some notions that were specific to the Arabic language or some concepts that belong to the Islam carried any cultural revolutions during the 12^th or the 13^th century [11. P. 196]. The conclusion of the French medievalist is clear; he thinks that the Europeans were in a real dynamic and were preoccupied by the secular search of the Greek culture which is illustrated by the movements of translation from Mount Saint-Michel. It is the reason why he considers that Medieval Europe would have had an 'identical path even in the absence of any link to the Islamic world. The Arabic middleman, even though it exists, it surely did not have the decisive contribution that is given to it; speaking of the Islam of Lights means excessively westernizing the thinking process of these falasifa and giving them more influence than they actually had in their own society' [11. P. 197].

Immediately after the book was published, Sylvain Gouguenheim was accused of savant islamophobia and, for two following two years, his career in the University was ruined. There were ferocious debates that entirely lacked the elegance associated to medievalist scientists. A critical and lucid party was defending itself and the other party (led by a great scientist, Alain de Libera), it was stigmatizing the ones that had this historiographic thesis, accusing them that they were adepts of the fascism or of what was called 'savant islamophobia'.

A different event with dramatic effects that has happened very recently gives us the means to understand how chaotic the guidelines of the progressive people are and how absurdly far their ethic has gone, as the lie comes gushing and splashing everything around it, contributing to the self-contradiction of the listed arguments. After the New Year's night, between the 1^st and the 7^th of January 2016, in Kцln, at the local Police were filed over 90 charges of theft, sexual harassment and rape done by the African or Arabic emigrants to some of the women present in the Railway Station and the City's Cathedral Square to celebrate the New Year. The mayor of Kцln, Henriette Reker, suggests that women should stay one armlength away from men, trying to avoid walking along with strangers. The hashtag #eineArmlдnge (one armlength) was viral on Tuesday on the German Twitter, where a lot of users said that this expression is a wrong way of understanding the roles of victims and the wrongdoers.

Pascal Bruckner [12] monitored a few of the most hallucinating reactions of some radical feminists or left-party activists. Therefore, expressing a great naivety, Sofie Peeters, a Belgian feminist that made a documentary on this theme of the rapes done by the Muslim emigrants back in 2012, said: “My greatest fear was how to handle this theme without creating a racist movie (...) It is about people of a foreign ethnicity in 95% of the cases (...) The Muslims have a pretty persistent behavior regarding sexuality: a woman who wears a skirt already risks enough” [13]. Sofie Peeters did nothing but to disclose that in the new world that is coming together, the law is done by denying reality [13]. How else could we explain the reaction of an older activist of the Socialist Party, Caroline De Haas who had the following reaction on Twitter, on the 7^th of January 2016: “To the ones who tell us that the sexual harassment from Germany was caused by the arrival of the emigrants, I tell them: go spread your racist shit elsewhere.” 'The schizophrenia between feminism and antiracism has never been more inflamed', thinks Pascal Bruckner [12. P. 55]. What is essential for the radical feminists is to drown the events from Koln in the warm sea of equivalence: 'Will we have some rape victims that would deserve to be helped much more than other, depending on the origins of the aggressors? Every day, from Koln to Paris, from Beijing to New York (...) men of all heights and different weights, with different jobs, religious confessions and of all social origins rape women', shows an official announcement made by the organization led by Caroline De Haas, continuously insisting on the fact that it is already bad enough to be a woman if you live in the European patriarchal societies [apud 12. P. 55]. 'Consequently, indignation ought not to be selective, because feminism cannot have a varying geometry', says in the official announcement, an indication that reminds how during the Cold War, when the dissenters from USSR or from other communist countries were asking for assistance in the West, there were always people who asked for the countries oppressed by the American imperialism from Africa, Asia and the Latin America not to be forgotten [apud 12. P. 56]. 'Not to be able to get a job anywhere, it is enough for you to be hired everywhere' [apud 12. P. 57]. Let us see that when it comes to the reactions to the event from Koln, the denunciation of the potential racism of the ones who indicated the origin of the aggressors was far more important than helping the harmed women.

Here is what Clementine Autain, one of the extremely vocal French communist militants, had to say: 'Between April and September, 1945, the soldiers raped two million German women. It was the fault of Islam again.' [apud 12. P. 57] Of course it would have been preferable that the claim had a historical documentation to sustain it, but numbers do not matter that much in this context. The discussed realities are different. East Germany was occupied by the Russian soldiers after four years of war, whereas now the Islamic migrants are hosted in Europe, especially in Germany, with no restrictions. The situations are incompatible and the claims of this lady bring serious disadvantages to the feminist movement itself, highlighting how her reactions fluctuate between denial and embarrassment. Pascal Bruckner was right when he said that denouncing a potential racist before taking care and protecting women means catastrophically messing up your priorities [apud 12. P. 58].

These are a few relevant situations for this 'post-truth' era that we are living in, in which it seems that the truth is negotiable like goods at the market. It can be clearly noticed that politically correct intellectuals (and also politicians who make laws and seek to respect them) stopped applying the classic principle of knowledge by searching for objective truth. 'They transformed their chair in a pulpit from where they promote ideas from their political agenda' [14. P. 49]. The principles which serve as a guide for their actions have been mapped out by members of the School of Frankfurt for long enough time that now the result of their thinking has been materialized and can be seen. First of all, the target was on the eradication of the patriarchal society's prejudices. We can all see that, if we issue an idea, for example, about the other-worldly marriage between persons of the same sex, bringing our common sense driven arguments is not important, as we are immediately categorized as retrogrades, conservationists, medieval. Theodor Adorno proposed in his book The Authoritarian Personality (1950) a 'scientifically planned re-education' in this respect, by replacing the fundamental system of values, opposite values which would be considered revolutionary. In addition, Herbert Marcuse, in Essay on Liberation, talked about radical change of values, relaxation of taboos, cultural subversion, critical theory, and also a riot in the linguistic level which culminates with 'a methodical roll-over of meaning' [9. P. 42]. Besides, he targeted the disintegration of society, through a cultural revolution pointed 'against dominant culture, including the moral system of the existing society. What we must also achieve is some kind of diffuse and dispersive disintegration of the system' [9. P. 42]. It is about betting on the strategy that, children being inoculated with these reversed values from kindergarten and school, their revolutionary and progressive character will evolve, no matter what model their families offered them. It can be seen that all this effort is paying off. The fight is at the mind level [15. P. 354], so the weak are indoctrinated with the idea they are discriminated when they get marginalized in connection to other ones who excel, and there is no way they have a problem with their power of will, the work rhythm, their implications. These people have their hatred stimulated and they are incited to fight in order to remove the source of discrimination. Success would come from the idea that the differences stemming from sex, age, social status, color, religion, genealogy etc. could be cancelled by changing the thinking optics and through speech, making it seem like nothing is permanent in reality. This is how any essential attribute that pertains to human nature has suffered benchmarking until insignificance. And 'the result is an egalitarian ethic whose platitude (...) is pushed to absurd' [15. P. 354); values are reversed in favour of the weak, but at the expense of the good. It has come to us to live the prophetic times long announced by Isaiah: 'Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter' (Isaiah 5:20).

By virtue of his hallucinating ideal, in a very subtle way for children and defying any evidence in the eyes of grown-ups, they are being put between brackets, compromised and ridiculed by the institutions which substantiated Western civilization: the ancient culture, Judaic-Christian civilization, patriarchal family, Christian spirituality, classic literature (for this one a new lecture grid appeared -- Deconstructivism -- for radically changing meaning). Everything that has passed, by which I mean tradition, is seen as a means of domination, therefore it has to be eliminated. Hierarchies are also a means of discrimination, so it is mandatory for them to be eliminated. The critical mindsets from school education must also be put to rest. The educational system is constructed after benchmarks that are meant to strengthen the devaluation of the past which plays the role of perpetuating the valorization of traditional institutions.

'Multiculturalism, for example, is the systematic restructuration of the educational curriculum in order to prevent the youth from gaining information and knowledge about the Western tradition. The ideology of political correctness follows the direction of egalitarianism by instilling young minds with a deepened form of cultural relativism.' [14. P. 49]

Even the writing of history, whose ration of being constant in transmitting factual truth, has been subjected to the perversion [16. P. 215] of political correctness. At least two of the examples shown above are eloquent in this matter (the case of Rigoberta Menchu and Eduard Said). History courses in the country are becoming more and more scarce or have been completely removed, and high-school curriculum has suffered changes that denote the alarming disinterest for coherent historical truth. In the USA, the top 50 universities history courses [14. P. 50] are no longer demanded. For the same reasons, it is of great interest to remove from the educational curriculum the classic languages and even revoke classing languages faculties, bringing the argument that they cannot be financially sustained. The propagation phenomenon 'step by step' [14. P. 51] has a long lasting impact on today's generations and those to come. In this respect, when a few American students were given the homework to write an essay with the challenging title 'Producing Reality', they concluded that 'the idea that there is an absolute and objective truth is not only a mistake, but a social and political danger' [4. P. 139].

Therefore, this kind of masked lie name 'post-truth' acts in a destructive manner, attacking the very moral fiber of the human being.

From Patrology and Biblical teachings, we understand that the human nature is a state that follows its previous one (which has been lived only by the Protoparents, before they received their 'leather clothes'), a state in which we find ourselves only after the Fall. This is not its native state. What we experiment in this life is not our true nature, an issue which is reinforced by St. Gregory of Nyssa, when he says that 'life of divine nature is personal and in line with the nature for people' [apud 17. P. 79]. Adam has fallen in nature, but in the way it is understood today for fundamental truths to be eluded, through denying everything that is ontological to man, 'the recent man' [6] falls below this, and if I can put it like this, falls from fallen nature and 'pins himself in matter' [18. P. 14]. The distance between God's creation and the man who recreated himself, using ideological values as benchmarks, is immense.

How the truth, in general, possesses instrumental value through the fact that it captures and transmits the nature of reality that it expresses [19. P. 40], it means that through 'post-truth', things tend to be distorted. The need for truth is not an absurd claim of some moralists, but something that comes from within the human being. Among the gifts of 'image of God' in humans, there is the search for the truth and the 'awareness of a growing ability to reach and sustain the true nature of oneself (19. P. 34]. Through the fulfillment of moral laws, a path to seek is chosen and therefore it reaches a feeling of vitality, equilibrium and peace. As God himself stated in His commandments, respecting the truth, one finds one's own peace. 'If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free' (John 8:31--32). The need to rely on a fundamental Truth prevails from deep within each one of our souls. But darkened by knowledge which 'puffeth up' (according to Paul Apostle's expression), we wander in search for small truths which are not but particular truths, which fragment and fan out, eventually becoming blinding dust powder. Humans find themselves when they live in agreement with their own authentic self, and that is the moment when they feel real joy, which they can support and prolong, loving what helps them become more fulfilled.

Months after the events of 1989, these words were engraved on a wall in Ia§i: 'Truth is no more and freedom is over'. In a mixture of humour and despair, this is the expression of a need for moral benchmarks in our daily social life. This is because schizophrenia can be reached if we separate our presence in the city from the moral component of life. No matter the 'roles' we play, we need to support ourselves against the Pillar and Foundation of Truth (1 Timothy 3:15). Otherwise, what I have covered about the thinking and acting of progressive thinking people in this world is able to stir in us the feeling of being in a zone of the diabolic kind of foolishness, and in front of a situation such as this, the witticism of I.D. Sirbu (a Romanian writer) becomes revealing while saying that 'stupidity is not a chapter of psychology, but of the Apocalypse'.

References

post truth lie communication

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About the author

Pop Rodica -- PHD in Philosophy, researcher, coordinating member, Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Religion, Philosophy and Science, Universitatea Alexandra Ioan Cuza Iasi.

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