At Sunday lunch, I was engaged in a heated discussion about 'truth'. Across the table, my friend stated that truth exists. My position, a very unpopular one, is that we each have a sense of the truth, but no one truth exists.
Opinions
This is the argument that has often been put to me. Arthur, what you say is only your opinion, and nothing more than your opinion. Everyone has an opinion and your opinion is just one of many opinions out there. Live with it! You have only an opinion.
Fairness
Well! What can one say to that? My thinking is that somehow I know better than the average person and thus my opinion is worth more in finding out the truth. My experience is of remembering that I was right when almost everyone else was wrong. No! I remember most often when I was right, when everyone else was wrong. My opinion does not seem to me to be worth just one view. But, then I have to think deeply about this and about the way society makes its determination of what is the best or what is the truth.
In our democratic elections, we have a system of one vote per person. We see this as a fair system, and it meets our basic requirement for fairness, that of equality.
Political process and opinions
In society, your opinion starts out as just one among many, but if you are elected to a political position because of the democratic process of one vote per person, then your views, all of them, are not just one of many, but one with a premium, a higher status. The higher status is accorded from your being an elected person, a chosen one.
The opinions of elected people is most often deemed of greater worth than the opinions of individuals as individuals. In a sense, the elected person is a hero, and you may realize that heroes tend to be worshiped. The greater the majority in votes going to the elected person, the more that person is likely to be seen as a hero. Out of the election of heroes, we achieve a peace of mind. By having a hero leading us, and making decisions for us, we sense a closer association with what we see as the truth.
Dissonance
It is subtly assumed that the hero is closer to the truth than any individual. However, there is a contrary view that we hold because we know that we search for the ideal of equality. We know that the hero is just one of us and that the opinion of the hero is no better than any one of us. Within our mind, there is a dissonance between the mathematics of equality and the process of electing a hero to make our decisions for us.
Rationalizing
Because of the dissonance in our mental calculations, we have the further process of rationalizing. Very quickly, we attach all sorts of reasons for the hero to be 'the one', who is closer to the truth and the one to lead us. We say, for example, that the person is more gifted. By such rationalizations, we move away from our notions of equality to our reasoning that the world of equality is not where its at. We make an inner assumption that the world is basically unequal, and that the world needs heroes, those that can make decisions for us.
Inequality and the Bell Curve of Opinions
The political process just one of many ways that we 'elect' our heroes to represent us. While still pushing the idea of equality, we introduce something statistical, such as the bell curve and say that in society there are those that are at the top end of the bell curve and those people are closer to the truth and will make better decisions for us. Very often, we do not examine the bell curve notion very deeply, but just assume that it is passed on from generation to generation through some genetics inherited by those we assume to be further along the top end of the bell curve.
So it is that societies making decisions move away from one person one opinion in order to get at some notion of the truth. In the electoral process of choosing a hero, we move away from fairness to reason and rationality, but in the process we can lose something. We can disassociate ourselves from the process of ever possessing the truth. By disassociating ourselves from the process of possessing the truth, we may also stop seeking the truth. Our society may stop searching for what is real and truthful. It may replace the notion of searching for truth with the process of searching for the hero.
The Search for Meaning
When we have our heroes make our decisions for us and seek the truth for us, we lose the meaning of truth. We assume that others have that meaning and that our reality has that meaning because they have that meaning. In reality, our heroes give us something that comes from outside us and we thereafter seek to suppress our inner dissonance with it in order to be loyal members of society. In reality, we suppress our understanding of the truth until the next opportunity to vote. If we do not seek the truth, our vote becomes a popularity contest for the election of a hero who can take us further and further away from the truth.