Feelings – the New Truth
ORWELL
George Orwell’s prescience about language, therefore expression, becoming state-controlled is proving eerily uncanny.
What Orwell did not see is that while freedom of expression is being forcibly curbed to further statist/liberal agendas something else is happening that seems to be the complete opposite: the relentless demand that our feelings (that range from refined notions to undisciplined preferences) are the foundation of truth. What was true, at least in the sense afforded it by modernity, was something verifiable, something observable to ordinary sense. No longer, apparently.
My truth is the new truth, and woe betide the hapless dissenter. My feelings are the arbiter of what is right and wrong. If I feel I am something I must be, I am, that. Others, you, must affirm that. To suggest anything but total and absolute agreement is always affixed with the pejorative - phobic. You will be called unloving, if you are lucky, but mostly you will be recognised as a hater. For disagreeing, having another perspective?? Who is the hater?
FEELINGS
Feelings are wonderful friends, nervous allies and dreadful enemies - sometimes all in the same hour. But to fix your compass on the fickleness of feelings is an exercise in folly and if not that, confusion. Admittedly, the dispassionate logic of propositional truth can foster a cooler climate and at times less compassion in human relationship, but equally (more so) feelings unleashed will scorch the earth. Simply, feelings aren’t adequate to arbitrate between right and wrong, between good and evil. This isn’t their purview. The subjectivity of our feelings requires the objectivity of external facts/truths, least we become the pawns of every-man establishing truth – their truth, which sounds benign until, that is, my truth impinges on yours or worse, excludes yours.
The structure of most viable/successful societies is in part founded on ‘law and order’ which things exist outside the preferences and control of the individual, their wants and feelings.
RESULTS
We will see, are seeing, some of the following outcomes.
Protests, the right of any Western democratic citizenry, will turn violent, because restraint has been jettisoned for the violent insistence of how I believe you need to see and affirm me.
People, once friends, will be separated along ideological lines, lines that strangely are premised on something not ideological – feelings.
Feelings change, especially with maturity. But the damage done by having to abide in a world where truth is no longer social (for the good of a community) but personal (for my good), is unlikely to be unravelled by saying, ‘I have changed my mind.’
With feelings defining truth and driving agendas it is inevitable that dispassionate discourse will not only suffer but be side-lined as anachronistic, on the wrong side of history. This in turn will damage healthy debate, so that we will be left with invective, acrimony, malice; there will be civil wars of and fuelled by feelings – the new truth.