A Bigger Problem Than Guns And School Shootings

I was about to address my thoughts concerning the recent school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, but I realized that there is a bigger problem than guns and school shootings. You ask what could be a bigger problem than the death of so many innocent children? Well, if you will give me just a few minutes of your day, I’ll explain it to you.

The problem that I consider bigger than the death of these children is the death of Truth. Yes, I realize that, just by writing these words, I am illustrating the problem I am trying to explain. However, I wonder how many of those who read this will understand what the problem is at this point in my blog post. I suspect the answer will be, ‘very few.’

When I said that Truth is dead, I capitalized ‘Truth’ for a reason. Today, it is common to hear people saying things such as, “What’s true for you may not be true for me,” or, “Your truth is not my truth.” Surprisingly, these statements are correct, but the key to understanding the problem on which I am focusing lies in understanding why I say these statements are correct. You see, these statements use the word, ‘truth,’ but they do not mean ‘Truth,’ they mean ‘belief,‘ and the two ‘truths‘ are not the same. Confused? OK, let me try to clear things up for you.

In the statements, “What’s true for you may not be true for me,” or, “Your truth is not my truth,” the word, ‘truth,’ is being used in place of ‘belief.’ Allow me to see if I can explain it this way:

“Your truth — that red is the best of all colors — is not my truth, because yellow is clearly the best of all colors.”

In this case, the statement is correct: your ‘truth‘ is not my ‘truth.’ In my illustration, your ‘truth‘ holds red to be the best of all colors whereas, my ‘truth‘ contends that yellow is the best of all colors. In this case, the statement is true: your ‘truth‘ is not my ‘truth.’

However, this is not the way I am using the word, ‘truth,’ when I write ‘Truth.’ When I write, ‘Truth,’ I mean ‘objective reality,’ meaning: that with which we cannot disagree and still claim to be rational. What do the two different meanings for the word, ‘truth,’ have to do with a bigger problem than gun control and school shootings? Simple: our society no longer sees or accepts the difference between these two meanings. Today, our society believes ‘truth‘ and ‘Truth‘ are the same things.

If you still do not see the problem, or you see it and you do not agree that it is a bigger issue than guns and school shootings, let me try to drive home my point by using the words of a famous Enlightenment philosopher:

Here is the point: ‘truth’ and ‘Truth’ are not equal, but using them as though they are equal — or worse — demanding they be accepted as equal is not only a fallacy, it is a contradiction. In logic, a contradiction is called an ‘absurdity,’ and it is said that, from an absurdity, “All things follow!” You see, Voltaire was merely putting a foundational principle of logic into colloquial terms (e.g., he stated a logical rule in common language).

This is why I say we have a bigger problem than guns and school shootings: because a large number of people in our society have been convinced of an absurdity. For these people, their ‘truth‘ is that contradictions can be and are acceptable as ‘Truth.’ To put this in logical terms, these people believe who believe in this absurdity are ‘irrational.‘ However, if the belief is strong enough, then the medical term for them would be, ‘delusional,’ which also explains why they cannot be reached by objective fact or sound reason. Unfortunately, this is still not the true problem I am seeing.

It is quite obvious that a large part of our society is delusional; they clearly embrace absurdities (such as we can choose or biological sex as opposed to our sexual orientation). No, the real problem is that the rest of our society has accepted these delusional people among us as ‘normal‘ when they clearly are not. This is a problem because it is also an absurdity, which means the majority of those people who think they are ‘normal‘ are just as delusional as those who have accepted the claim that ‘truth‘ and ‘Truth‘ are equal. Doing the math on this one means that the majority of our modern society is delusional, and the logical extension of this conclusion is:

Those who convinced us to embrace our delusions can now make us commit great atrocities…

In my calculus, my dear friends, that is a far greater problem than guns and school shootings because it means we are one manipulative nut case away from making NAZI Germany look like Mother Teresa’s convent, and — unfortunately — our world is filled with nut-jobs fighting for the right to push us over that edge.