Truth

Truth, like belief and most other assertions or aspirations to objectivity, is always and already anchored as unacknowledged tautology upon itself and the game of denying and obfuscating this fact constitutes the shared existential, organisational and cultural histories – good, bad and all between – that we inhabit. The perspicacity required to understand this is generally occluded by a narcosis and willful self-deception invoked by the limited behavioural grammars and participatory cultural and psychological games to which we must concede intelligence as irreversibly bartered for commercial or ideological aesthetics and all associated superficial appearances of enduring gain, benefit or value. We treat complex realities as though they could ever be substantially appraised by the simple Lego and projective conceptual truth-tables of political or ethical certainty we reflexively and psychologically adhere to as (fictive) teleological closure and in finding that these caricatures always and inevitable fail, we quite unfoundedly and yet serially assume that more of the same is a lasting solution to this shambling leviathan of human history and civilisation. It is not.

It is a curious notion that we could ever leap or bootstrap ourselves out of the hyper-inflating system of self-reference and proliferating entropy we inhabit, but we do not need to. That is – we do not need the certainty and ineradicable leverage of a singular pivot and objective truth upon which to build our worlds, our complex self-organisations and our lives.

The uncertainty and doubt that forever lies beyond the epistemological shallows of everyday experience and colloquial “reality” is not something we need to conquer or control beyond abject simplicities because this uncertainty and ambiguity is implicit and foundational to whatever limited knowledge and belief as assertions of truth or value and cultural, technological or cybernetic control that we do and necessarily inhabit. That “otherness” and unknown to which truth is aspirationally directed is already intrinsic to logic and knowledge but because we do not (and arguably can not ever or unproblematically) perceive or measure and intelligibly record or otherwise know and control it, it is rendered invisible by an endemic hybrid convergence of ignorance and disbelief. This endemic logical transparency and (subsequent, emergent) anomalously recursive blindspot is the source of all utility and innovation but because it can not be simply monetised or coaxed to derive short-term value, it is off everyone’s radar. Quite a pity, really, when the Global and technical as much as technological or cultural and psychological complexity which threatens to overwhelm us all is very likely better-suited for constructive disentanglement and amelioration to just such conceptual vocabularies as these.

So, the metaphysical uncertainty that lies beyond is simultaneously that uncertainty that lies within and notwithstanding more rigorous demonstration of exactly how and why this actually is a fact, our incapacity to perceive this as wisdom and source of sustainable Global, cultural, ethical or technological futures is, yet again, an enduring and troubling instance and microcosm of human beings, quite simply, being human.