The Republican Party, the party of incessant paranoia about big government threats to individual liberty, has by its incessant perversion of the truth turned the political and the private spheres of America into a plotline out of George Orwell’s novel 1984. Doublespeak and factual re-representation has become as common to Republican Party members as their compulsions to save America from the tremendous threat of clean energy. Ironically, then, the very party that dreads the day that individual liberty will be crushed by a leviathian-like government has in its own way turned the freedom of individuals on its head by bringing “truth” into a space of never-ending flux.
Without a stable form of “truth” through which each of us can communicate ideas in the public or private spheres of our lives, a space opens for powerful elites in our society like the Koch brothers and their political puppets to fill this void with whatever rubbish they choose to dispel. Take anthropogenic climate change as one of the most striking examples. The evidence is clear that regional climate change is taking place, a change at least accelerated by the activities of human kind. However, given the weakness of “truth” in our society at present, even the consensus of the overwhelming majority of climate scientists isn’t enough to dispel the nagging sense among those on the right that it’s all some hoax, conspiracy, or coincidence.
In the case of individual freedom, truth is foundational. Truth is a fundamental piece of our U.S. Constitution (“We hold these truths to be self-evident…”). Without truth, then, even human kind’s seemingly indelible nature to be free remains subject to attack and reinterpretation (Here, “Truth” and “truth” work almost just as well since the “truth” of human kind’s natural tendency to be free is based upon a pervasive belief in West that, in a sense, be scientifically studied). But this point only scratches the surface of negative possibilities to individual liberty brought about by a perversion of truth.
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