P
Philemon
The term "post-truth" has gotten some traction around here and I stumbled onto it again while reading an article over at my favorite green-friendly, socialist-oriented political site Counterpunch.org.
Here is a brief snippet of said article:
According to Wikipedia:
As of late I have been balancing non-dualism, orthodox Vedanta, and the occasional Western occult excursion with smatterings of Pizzagate podcasts, conspiracy theories, and worrisome fringe articles about Fukushima and radioactive isotopes invading Europe. What is funny to me is the stark contrast of these two areas. In the one, conscious awareness is the Absolute. All things beside it are relative, fluctuating, ephemeral, and false (relatively, that is). When anything you become aware of is objectified and put asunder, recognized as not-Self (neti neti), truth becomes a living presence - the only unchanging, honest "thing" is no-thing at all! It is the awareness with which one experiences everything - from the evening news to a headache to full on Alzheimer's. There, behind the varying disguises that consciousness wears, is THE TRUTH.
Meanwhile, when identified again with the passing stuff of the world, I find myself pulled back into the "We've got to do something about this! We've got to clean up Fukushima! We've got to stop the nukes! We've got to expose these evil politicians! We've got to upend the corporatocracy! We've got to put the power back in the hands of the common people!"
Then I return to my limited sense of personhood and recall I am completely incapable of making the slightest dent on any of these terrifying realities. There is nothing new under the sun and the world/samsara/maya/God has gleefully held a mirror up to humankind and its hubris with the kind of shitstorms we appear on the cusp of experiencing before and now again (though these may prove to be super shitstorms rather than the normal, garden variety kinds.) Karma will yet produce its vegetables, and we will have to hold our noses and choke them down, like them or not.
And, then, I remember that who I really am is simple, ordinary, conscious awareness and not this little, powerless person. All the world is "fake news" and "alternative facts." The kingdom draws near! Knock and the door shall be open to you...
Here is a brief snippet of said article:
There is no such thing as a “post-truth world.” We live in the same world where humans have always lived, where the truth is hard and brutal and always wins in the end, which is why truthfulness has always been and always will be considered a moral virtue. It’s only academics and pseudo intellectuals who feel the need to constantly proclaim the dawning of a new post-something age because they need something to sell and novelty is an effective marketing strategy. The only thing new is that when a chunk of ice the size of Manhattan breaks away from Antarctica and Trump’s lies are considered more newsworthy, our inevitable collision with reality just became a lot closer.
According to Wikipedia:
Post-truth politics (also called post-factual politics) is a political culture in which debate is framed largely by appeals to emotion disconnected from the details of policy, and by the repeated assertion of talking points to which factual rebuttals are ignored. Post-truth differs from traditional contesting and falsifying of truth by rendering it of "secondary" importance. While this has been described as a contemporary problem, there is a possibility that it has long been a part of political life, but was less notable before the advent of the Internet. In the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell cast a world in which the state is daily changing historic records to fit its propaganda goals of the day.
Political commentators have identified post-truth politics as ascendant in Russian, Chinese, American, Australian, British, Indian, Japanese and Turkish politics, as well as in other areas of debate, driven by a combination of the 24-hour news cycle, false balance in news reporting, and the increasing ubiquity of social media.[1][2][3][4][5][6] In 2016, "post-truth" was chosen as the Oxford Dictionaries' Word of the Year,[7] due to its prevalence in the context of that year's Brexit referendum and U.S. presidential election.[8][9]
As of late I have been balancing non-dualism, orthodox Vedanta, and the occasional Western occult excursion with smatterings of Pizzagate podcasts, conspiracy theories, and worrisome fringe articles about Fukushima and radioactive isotopes invading Europe. What is funny to me is the stark contrast of these two areas. In the one, conscious awareness is the Absolute. All things beside it are relative, fluctuating, ephemeral, and false (relatively, that is). When anything you become aware of is objectified and put asunder, recognized as not-Self (neti neti), truth becomes a living presence - the only unchanging, honest "thing" is no-thing at all! It is the awareness with which one experiences everything - from the evening news to a headache to full on Alzheimer's. There, behind the varying disguises that consciousness wears, is THE TRUTH.
Meanwhile, when identified again with the passing stuff of the world, I find myself pulled back into the "We've got to do something about this! We've got to clean up Fukushima! We've got to stop the nukes! We've got to expose these evil politicians! We've got to upend the corporatocracy! We've got to put the power back in the hands of the common people!"
Then I return to my limited sense of personhood and recall I am completely incapable of making the slightest dent on any of these terrifying realities. There is nothing new under the sun and the world/samsara/maya/God has gleefully held a mirror up to humankind and its hubris with the kind of shitstorms we appear on the cusp of experiencing before and now again (though these may prove to be super shitstorms rather than the normal, garden variety kinds.) Karma will yet produce its vegetables, and we will have to hold our noses and choke them down, like them or not.
And, then, I remember that who I really am is simple, ordinary, conscious awareness and not this little, powerless person. All the world is "fake news" and "alternative facts." The kingdom draws near! Knock and the door shall be open to you...