Truth, As It Were

I feel that often the truth is left undiscovered, not because no one can find it, but because in their search, people overlook an important piece of the puzzle. This piece is one few might suspect, most disdain, and others disbelieve. This piece is the other side.

Often those who look at both sides of the issue, especially moderates, are ridiculed for being indecisive, unpredictable, or down-right disloyal. Senator Lieberman is a good example: abandoned by his own party for agreeing with a Republican viewpoint. John Kerry was called a flopper for his own decisions not always agreeing with the democratic viewpoint, and Sandra Day O'Connor was vilified for her own moderate stance. So why bother looking both ways if such is not popular?

For one thing, what is popular, is not always what is right. The geocentric viewpoint dominated science all the way up till the end of the Sixteenth century, in part due to its popularity. As we can see, however, the popularity of the geocentric theory did not make it any less untrue. Another popular belief was segregation, at least it was popular in the south. Yet, this popularity did not justify the trampling of other's rights based on their skin-color alone. It's a lesson history teaches us every time we turn the page to find an issue that became important to any nation's history.

Does this mean we do not learn from history? Not really. It means that politics is less about finding truth than it is about creating your own. Statesmen and others who champion good morals and just 'doing the right thing' don't usually last very long. Their picture of reality is not usually the one that the voters want to be presented. Jimmy Carter, for example, saw his popularity plummet after claiming that a great malaise had infected the American people.

The problem with this is two-fold, especially for politicians: For one, they're indirectly taking responsibility for the problems in society that they report. For a leader, the fact they must report these problems means that they haven't done anything to solve them. Two, calling your own people corrupt only conveys a message that you yourself are corrupt; they put you in office, after all, and it is an uncontested fact that the leader of a democratic country reflects his own people.

So we've basically come to the conclusion that truth, as it were, cannot be found, have we not? Again, not necessarily. Certainly, truth politically is harder to come by than those that we learn on our own. Which entails a bottom-up process; truth learned from the constituency is represented by the government. For instance, the verisimilitude of the civil-rights movement convinced the government to support the legislation that protected the violated rights of all races. This, in sharp contrast to the Patriot Act; that which aimed towards filling the information and bureaucratic loopholes that allowed 9/11 to occur. The idea of increased governmental supervision was a view not championed by the American People as a whole, and only through favorable political factors did the legislation manage to pass.

Thusly, we can conclude that truth can be found politically, yet must arrive through a conscious, and real effort by the people before the government can support it. With this in mind we can actually return back to the original premise of this writing: finding the actual truth so as to affect the world, at any scale without being vilified for searching rather than reflecting.

There is no concrete method that can be described in words for anyone to actually find the whole truth. There is only a guide that can lead you to a truth that is more than the previous truths. Hegel called this dialectic, and this simple guide has been a widely studied phenomena since its conception.

Let us look at economics as an example, or really, the history of economics. Capitalism in its purest form was found during the Industrial Revolution. Despite all that the economy as a whole gained, the abuses by the capitalist system were abhorrent and widespread. These abuses were well-studied by a young philosopher, Karl Marx, who is accredited - alongside Friedrich Engels - for founding communism, a system that diametrically opposed the established free-market order with the government taking the place as the invisible hand, and people placed before production. What was the result?

Communism had its own problems. Namely, its ability to create totalitarian states worse than any capitalist country, as well as ignoring those aspects of the economy which causes it to function normally. Russia, Romania, East Germany: all great examples that underscore Communism's own failings. Yet, we gained a new truth from the rise of this system, even if it caused its own degree of heartache.

We have todays robust economic system, that has neither the economic failing of either pure system, nor the atrocious human-rights abuses. We have a free-market system mixed with communist and socialistic tendencies that keeps the boom-bust cycles from returning, and attitudes that aims to treat the human being less like a consumer, and more like a person. It was the conglomeration of Communism and Capitalism that lead to a truth greater than that espoused by either system. Despite this, however, problems remain.

There exist still those attitudes which demand humanity remain nothing more than a generator for capital, and attitudes which ultimately call for the dissolution of individual freedom for utilitarian aims. These attitudes exist becomes problems still remain, the truth that the fusion of communism and capitalism gave us was not the whole truth, just a more accurate truth than its own constituent parts. That is all this sort of guide can give us: something that is more complete than before.

A more modern example would be firearms: two schools exist, one which calls for the total banning of all weapons, and another which believes in wanton availability of such. The disadvantages of both sides much outweigh the proposed advantages: anti-gun groups inevitably count on all human beings being rational, morally good human beings one-hundred percent of the time. A fact history tells us is false. Pro-gun advocates espouse much the same message, what guarantees exist that keeps unrestricted gun-owners from misusing their privileges? In both cases the government must exist, but in the former, the government must become a massive entity to control gun violence, and in the later the government is far too restricted to make free-access to guns worth while.

So what is the truth? That is something only you can ascertain for yourself, but dialectically, there is a requirement for these two schools to be fused so that a greater truth may be arrived at. A truth which maximizes benefit and minimizes harm by taking the truths of both ideologies and synthesizing them into a great whole. Otherwise, there is only conflict, indecisive bickering that never arrives at its intended goal. Through natural forces of polity, or individual discovery, truth must be attained through dialectic, or it may never be attained at all.