In a world where everything is relative there can be no absolutes.
This simple but eternal, absolute truth is forgotten or ignored in our age of universal stupidy.
It’s gotten so bad that even scientists are making the mistake of ignoring it.
And so it’s no coincidence that during an online discussion a big fan of the “you have your truth and I have ny truth” mantra threw at me a lengthy quote of some scientists who in all seriousness claimed that all reality is relative.
This was so absurd that I didn’t know whether I should laugh or whether I should cry. For a scientist to make such a claim he’s got to be absolutely stupid. Why?
Very simple answer: If it were true that ALL reality is relative we couldn’t know ANYTHING with ABSOLUTE certainty.
We couldn’t KNOW with absolute certainty that ALL reality is relative and neither could we ever prove it.
Therefore we couldn’t make any kind of ABSOLUTE truth claims such as “ALL reality is relative”.
One could say that science never makes absolute claims. I’m not only perfectly ok with that but that is also the reason why I love real science. This ability for selfcorrection is what makes science so great.
But then we have to say that those scientists clearly stepped outside of science.
Their claim then is a philosophical one, and a pretty lousy one at that, and has nothing to do with science.
After many brains were fried by the utter nonsense of postmodernism and indoctrinated by the ideologies of relativism (cultural relativism, moral relativism or relativism of reality) it is absolutely necessary to state those obvious truths again and again because relativism has become a danger to the survival of society.
There must be at least some absolutes. Without those absolutes we couldn’t do any kind of science let alone think and communicate.
In our daily lives we are making fundamental assumptions without even thinking about them.
And why don’t we think about them? Because they are so selfevident that we view them as absolutely true.
The rules of logic are a good example of such basic absolutes.
Take for instance the rule that two mutually exclusive statements cannot be both true at the same time.
The statements “I’m hungry” and “I’m not hungry” cannot be both true at the same time.
Science is based on the fundamental assumption that the universe doesn’t change just willy nilly but that the laws of nature are today the same as they are tommorow and that they are the same as they were yesterday because otherwise you couldn’t make any prediction about the future. You couldn’t calculate the earth’s position around the sun for the next month if the law of gravity would suddenly change tommorow.
Bottom line: No matter what your world view or theory is it needs at least SOME absolutes.
Now, if you still believe that everything is relative I suggest that you throw away all your books, your computers, your phone and all communication devices and please don’t argue with me because that would be utterly pointless for the simple reason that language and any kind of communication is based on the fundamental assumption that there is an absolute truth, an absolute reality.
Now that we have established that there must be at least SOME absolutes let’s have some fun and show how utterly flawed one of those infamous relativisms, namely cultural relativism, is.
Cultural Relativism
From Wikipedia:
Cultural relativism is the principle that an individual human’s beliefs and activities should be understood by others in terms of that individual’s own culture.[1]
It was established as axiomatic in anthropological research by Franz Boas in the first few decades of the 20th century and later popularized by his students. Boas first articulated the idea in 1887: “…civilization is not something absolute, but … is relative, and … our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes.”[2] However, Boas did not coin the term.
Notice, the claim is that it was established as axiomatic.
Right here we have the first flaw. Axiomatic here means selfevident. That is of course nonsense as you will see.
If, as Boas claims, our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes, then the same must be true for the idea or conception of cultural relativism. This means that cultural relativism, if true, is only true for the culture in which it was developed. Therefore cultural relativism must be viewed as a construct of western culture and therefore cultural relativism can never be an universal principle.
The whole idea of cultural relativism is selfrefuting.
To put it differently, we can easily concieve of another culture which does not view cultural relativism as true and if we were to take cultural relativism seriously we could not claim that their view is false.
Therefore cultural relativism can never claim to be universally true.
The idea of cultural relativism selfdestructs.
Wikipedia also tells us:
The epistemological claims that led to the development of cultural relativism have their origins in the German Enlightenment. The philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that human beings are not capable of direct, unmediated knowledge of the world. All of our experiences of the world are mediated through the human mind, which universally structures perceptions according to a priori concepts of time and space.
Although Kant considered these mediating structures universal, his student Johann Gottfried Herder argued that human creativity, evidenced by the great variety in national cultures, revealed that human experience was mediated not only by universal structures, but by particular cultural structures as well. The philosopher and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt called for an anthropology that would synthesize Kant and Herder’s ideas.
Kant makes a cardinal error here.
If his claim was true that we cannot know the world without mediation then the very idea of this mediation would be the mere product of the human mind and could not be confirmed through observation of the world since the very observation of the world would require the mediation of the mind.
So, how did Kant know that the observations which led him to that idea were not merely a product of his mind instead of reality? Answer: He didn’t know. He couldn’t know.
Kant’s idea is selfrefuting because, if true, we can easily dismiss his idea as the product of a mind that cannot know reality as it is but only as the product of some processes of the same mind.
To put it simply, if we can know reality only indirectly then we can never know that we know reality only indirectly.
That’s what I call the matrix problem. If you live inside the matrix you can never know that you live inside the matrix.
The only way to know that you are inside the matrix is to step outside the matrix or to get revelation from a being that is outside the matrix.
If what you perceive as reality was different from reality itself the only way to know that there was such a difference is to know reality as it is but you could never do this since you would be stuck with your perception of reality.
As far as I’m aware, Kant never claimed to have some special revelation or special knowledge that others could not have.
Again, we have here a selfrefuting idea and, worse, we have an an idea that can never be tested.
Moreover I find it hilarious that great enlightenment thinkers who put so much emphasis on scepticism and rationalism came up with such unreasonable, untestable and unscientific ideas that require as much, if not more faith than the faith that religion requires.
Bottom Line
The relativistic ideas that the Left, progressives, socialists and all others who find them convenient try to force upon society are fundamentally flawed, unsientific and selfrefuting.
Artaxes' brainbench 