Marcus Tullius Cicero: To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?

I have one more sidebar before I return to my series of articles on objective vs subjective truth. I feel compelled to connect the dots between my philosophical ramblings and what we are witnessing on the evening news. The world is in disarray, with conflict and corruption unlike anything we have seen in America before. There is a real question of whether America can endure this season we are in, as much as the crisis Lincoln faced as he fought to hold the union together.

I’ve been writing about these things for twenty years, the wholesale loss of factual, objective truth. It is the convergence of several factors, the philosophical loss of truth, the tools of the internet, and now AI, which will make the truth even more evasive, and the enduring political lust for power, which has always haunted humanity.

As I have been writing, the loss of external factual truth always ends with the loss of morality, because you cannot say anything is wrong if there are no external factual truths upon which to make that case. When our truth becomes personal, created via our own experience and imagination, it will eventually become useless.

This brings me to the conservative writer David Brooks. I found him and followed him when I was a Republican. But he is a lone voice in the conservative movement, speaking to this immoral world we are moving into. The sad thing is that none of this would have happened without the enabling of conservative Christians and their unabated lust for social power. Jesus had but one command… to love unconditionally.

Peace,

Mike