The insurrection at the Capitol this week is a clear result of the “no truth” ideology of postmodern viewpoints: emotion and violence can be the only result.
We need not just to hold accountable Trump, the insurrectionists who raided and looted the Capitol Building and the Congressional chamber and offices of Congress members, and Ted Cruz and the six other Congressional office holders who perpetrated the lie of a stolen election to satisfy their own lusts for power. But we need to do more than that as we recover from this dark day in U.S. history.
Most of all we need to replace the ideology of irrationalism that has gripped so much of academia and the U.S. culture. It is the ideology that holds that there is no such thing as “objective truth,” “objective—i.e. logical—thinking,” or an objective set of ethical principles that set parameters for responsible actions, which is responsible for ushering in an ideology based on the sentiment that “my truth has no accountability to you,” which is the viewpoint of narcissists, self-entitlement, egotism, and ultimately nihilism. This withdrawal of reason from public discourse is alarming in light of these events of this week, in this way: without the use of reason and its innate concerns with truth, objectivity, and normativity, the only thing left is the visceral appeal of emotion and force between individuals and between groups, and all it takes is the right kind of propaganda to push the emotions of various ideologues in a certain direction, the result of which is deleterious for society. We just saw this in play this week.
On January 6, Trump lit the tinder box of this warped view of the world, and as a consequence, showed us in intense form the direction we have been going as a nation for some time now. It came into full and open view this week; no filters. Unless something is done about these events, both legally and morally, what we saw this week was just the first of a series of such events, all potentially escalating over time. This insurrection was a metaphorical “crossing of the Rubicon” in the sense that it broke through an unspoken barrier about not ransacking Congressional chambers and offices. It is no another broken down cultural norm.
The most important part of the events of this week is that the mask has been painfully ripped off of U.S. domestic life, both governmentally, institutionally, and culturally, showing us what many people of color have known for a long time: that the underbelly of our “Wizard of Oz” democracy has been shown to be not just vulnerable, but impotent. One of the sure lessons that should be learned from the events of this week is a mirror-image has once again been held up to our faces. The same mirror was held up to us on 9/11, and showed us the results of our foreign policy: in each case, both 9/11 and 1/6, there were a group of people who were committed to striking at the heart of what motors U.S. culture: in 9/11, the mirror came in the form of a destruction of a symbol of capitalism and showed us our rapacious greed and power-lust that has resulted in destruction of other nations by our foreign policy; on 1/6/21, the mirror came in a form of an insurrection, and showed us our weak and vulnerable (and broken) institutions and practices domestically, and our failing culture. Many people who cannot afford their rent and food already know this. Now the rest of us have been shown it.
The attempted sedition we saw this week should be a cause for us to self-reflect, as we prosecute those responsible for these federal crimes, on our institutions and what they truly stand for. It is a defining moment for us to see who we have been, who we are, and what our standing in the future world order will be. Right now, it doesn’t look good for America. With a broken and fragile democracy at home, and a world no longer in awe American governance, how is Biden supposed to present a strong and unified democratic government to the world when he negotiates with world leaders, after the events of this week? The “Wizard of Oz” days of maneuvering allegedly democratic levers of domestic politics behind the curtain of manipulating agents, through the awesome mirage of Oz as “the bedrock of democracy,” has been revealed to the world. One must admit that it is at least a steep uphill climb, one a 78 year-old entrenched technocrat of old-style government (“Don’t pay attention to that man behind the curtain”) is probably not in good enough shape to climb.
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m wrong about all this if and only if there are concrete and effective actions taken by Congress in response to this, such as the removal of Trump from office and at least censure of Ted Cruz and the other unprincipled opportunists who used “Steal the Vote” to confuse people about the Biden election and its confirmation. Further, there will need to be a renewed concern for what is true and what is right, and the latter includes a government that is responsible to its people, and a culture and set of institutions that shows a renewed commitment to the equality of all citizens, white, black, brown, or otherwise. Short of significant moves in this direction, I will maintain that this could well be just the first episode of more to come, and that includes the current concerns of gaining power instead of the rule of law from our institutions. In short, the tinder box that is the U.S. today could have been set on fire by Trump this week, and the fire will not go out with his departure from office.
We can begin to climb out of this crater we have fallen into only by overcoming the philosophy that got us here: the replacement of the primacy of emotion, narcissism, entitlement, and nihilistic relativism, along with unethical and power-hungry politicians manipulating irrational citizens, with a truly democratic philosophy of focusing on inclusion, equality of all citizens, and rational discourse based on an attempt to keep at the goal of finding out what is really true and doing what is really right, rather than on just the desires of the various subgroups that, for instance, comprise much of what identity politics has come to stand for.
After the events of 9/11, the people who had been oppressed by U.S. foreign policy responded with a general view along the lines of “welcome to our world; you now have a taste of what we experience regularly from U.S. actions.” Instead of thinking about that, we allowed our institutional leaders to double and triple-down on such oppressive actions, and invaded Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, etc.
On 1/6, the world of those oppressed by U.S. domestic policy and the absolute abdication of responsibility on the part of Congress members for its citizens has been shown to us, oddly enough, by the largely white insurrectionists themselves. This time the mirror image shows not just an intellectually and economically bankrupt group of citizens, but also white supremacy in all its ugliness. There is a large swath of U.S. population who are undoubtedly uttering under their breath: “Welcome to our world; you now have a taste of what we black and brown people experience at the hands of a white establishment on a regular basis.” How will we respond to this? Will we make adjustments to our system, first of all by ousting those in Congress who supported this insurrection movement? Will we remove from Congress those who will do nothing in response to this sedition? Will we return to reason and ethics in our discourse? An affirmative answer to these questions could very well require the removal of many of the current members of Congress during their next election cycle, members who will likely do little about the events of this week except virtue signal on Twitter for the next two weeks. Then Trump will escape with his crime not only of inciting a sedition against the U.S. government, but other untold injuries he and his henchmen could cause over the next two weeks on their way out the door. Oddly enough, Speaker Pelosi holds the key to all this. If she was petrified enough by having to hole up in a bunker and beg the governor of Maryland to come rescue them, as he stated in a speech on Thursday, then although she has been more responsible than other congressional leaders for abdicating her responsibility to the people, she could be the start of turn in the direction of sanity by actually bringing the impeachment of Trump forward and to completion.
The post The End of the Post-Truth Age appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
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Robert P. Alvarez | Radio Free (2021-01-08T07:55:59+00:00) The End of the Post-Truth Age. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2021/01/08/the-end-of-the-post-truth-age/
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