Truth
What is the problem of Truth?
In an age where news has become politicized, with people on both sides of the political aisle questioning the validity of each other’s news sources, you’d think the answer might be a straightforward one. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy (things rarely are). We have to go a bit deeper into ourselves to understand why we think one source of information is better than another. Just because many people believe something, does not mean it is true.
For instance, why is Fox News unreliable, or why is CNN unreliable? Is it because they have definite interests to portray news in a particular way? I could say this about many scientists, so that gets us nowhere. Funding for research in those fields are contingent on their producing useful results, otherwise they’ll probably not get a renewed grant. It’s part of why political scientists find it easier to get grants; for instance, they might tell people that actors make rational choices with regards to civil wars, and then provide an exact formula for whether a civil war will happen in a country. If they were to mention to the grant committee or whoever they’re talking to, that they can’t predict civil wars because they’re too complicated, but that we should study them anyway because they might understand some small part of them, they likely wouldn’t be funded at all.
The question of truth is much more important in everyday life than in academia. Our whole decision-making process is dependent on our opinion of what is or is not true. Rather than make a poor decision on unreliable information, we would rather decide based on information we believe to be “true.” Again we reach a stalemate.
How do we know if something’s true?
Truth does not exist independently of human experience. A German philosopher named Arthur Schopenhauer argued that “all that exists, exists only for the subject” [1]; in other words, he meant that there is no objective reality outside of the person that experiences it. According to Schopenhauer, truth is still a universal, however. He believed that there was a truth independent of the individuality of the subject, that there were “correct” and “incorrect” ways to interpret something. Truth still transcended human experience for him. We must move past this definition of truth if we are to make any progress on this question.
Michel Foucault, a French philosopher, noted that the truth is always subject to social relations [2]. A whole system of different people generate knowledge on a particular subject, and truth is judged by its accordance with the social structures that produced this knowledge. For an example, we should look to a historical archive; all the evidence that is preserved in history is preserved by a person who is deeply involved in society. Because societies are all driven by political and cultural forces, Foucault argued that the archive itself was also subject to these forces, so that the truth produced from its evidence was never universal.
What does this mean for objective truth?
All the truth we understand is based upon context. It cannot be universal. Belief is always a component of truth, and no belief can ever be completely proven correct; Foucault’s view of knowledge was correct in this case. There is no truth that exists independent of human experience. The only problem with a Foucauldian understanding of the truth is what he considers social forces. He does not consider economics a power relation, and argues against the existence of economic classes [3]. Truth is something that is made.
How does society produce the truth?
People who have power in a given society are the ones who have the power to determine what is and is not true. In contemporary American society, this means we must look at the people who control the flow of information and communication. This means that the primary producers of truth in the United States are communications companies, marketing firms, social media companies, and so on. Companies such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, and a whole host of other organizations have a near-monopoly on communication between people, modifying the methods and content of messages sent between people. In the absence of industrial capitalist production, the postindustrial society turns primarily to the reproduction of labor power. In other words, the society is producing people who act and work in a certain way that is considered useful; truth is merely a means of achieving this end.
How does the truth produce people?
When we realize that the truth is manipulated, particularly by large corporations and information-mongers, we come to another problem. When a person receives their information from any media source (be it a book, webpage, or other message), they experience the information itself. Heidegger, a German philosopher, understood this as Dasein, or “being-there” [4]. A person cannot experience reality without interpreting the information their senses provide, nor can they stop seeing, hearing, or feeling things. A person forms their very identity through their social surroundings; through what they are taught, the words associated with symbols and connotations, they form their very understanding of who they are and what they should do.
The truth as produced by media produces certain behaviors that are necessary for the society to survive in its current form. This means that the truth is dependent upon a person’s present existence in their social surroundings, and thus they are taught to reenact the same ways of speaking, thinking, and so on. Their activity is branded as more productive if it reenacts the past more closely to how the society previously operated. This itself becomes a way of reproducing labor. Perhaps it happens so that a worker refuses to join a union because of what they believe they should do as they were taught, which is of much more social use to a capitalist economy. They can’t be a “union member,” as that would invoke a whole set of practices they don’t perform.
Where are we going?
There is no objective truth. It does not exist out there in a state of nature, but is made by people. Truth is not made individually, but socially. People base their identities and activities on these socially produced truths.
To control society is to control the truth in that society. To arrive at any individual truth is to erase the process by which we arrive at truth in the first place. The process of economic production is the only way of producing truth, at least in the current social situation.
How is my identity based on the information I consume? How is my identity manufactured by the people who make the information I consume? These are far more important questions than whether something is true or not, for that is a question we will never answer.
Notes:
[1] Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, vol. 1, §2.
[2] Michel Foucault, see The History of Sexuality, vol. 1; Discipline and Punish; and The Archaeology of Knowledge.
[3] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley, originally published 1976 (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 94.
[4] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 1.12.
