Is the Pursuit of Truth Worth It?

yes, if you are a masochist

One of my most deeply held beliefs is that we should always seek the truth — to try to operate from a place of truth as much as we can. Otherwise, we can't make good decisions, individually or collectively. One friend of mine even told me that I have a “fetish for the truth.” He insinuated there is something wrong about this. Probably he is right.

The philosopher Nietzsche interrogated the question of truth brilliantly and ruthlessly: “Indeed, what forces us at all to suppose that there is an essential opposition of ‘true’ and ‘false’?,” he wrote. “Is it not sufficient to assume degrees of apparentness and, as it were, lighter and darker shadows and shades of appearance—different ‘values,’ to use the language of painters?”

Nietzsche also proposed that the “ultimate truth” might be outside of what we, as human beings, can actually tolerate: “Something might be true while being harmful and dangerous in the highest degree. Indeed, it might be a basic characteristic of existence that those who know it completely would perish, in which case the strength of a spirit should be measured according to how much of the ‘truth’ one could still barely endure—or to put it more clearly, to what degree one would require it to be thinned down, shrouded, sweetened, blunted, falsified.” These two ideas often resonate with me when I seek to understand my psychedelic trips, particularly DMT. If you focus your mind on concepts like eternity or infinity or Nonduality for too long, you can get dizzy spells and nausea.

In our society, as I can tell you from my experience, the pursuit of truth is a pain in the ass. Probably this was always the case, but it is even more so these days. Most people prefer the truth to be “sweetened, blunted, falsified,” as Nietzsche put it. When it comes to postmodern spirituality, we prefer the half truths served up by “useful idiots” like Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra. If a charismatic guru comes along — Tony Robbins is a great example, or Keith Ranierre — who tells people with conviction that they can be super wealthy and have whatever they want in life if they follow his program (even if means getting branded, apparently), that guru is almost guaranteed massive success.

Ken Wilber wrote a helpful little book, Trump and the Post-Truth World, in which he tried to understand how postmodern relativism, which reached its zenith during the 1960s and 70s, paved the way for Trumpism. Essentially, the efforts by people at a certain level of consciousness — often liberals, progressives, or cultural creatives — to destroy hierarchy and question outmoded forms of authority led to a circumstance where there was no longer any privileged or authoritative position. This opened the gates for despots who can claim that anything is true, if it serves them, and dismiss evidence-based science and journalism as fake news and conspiracy.

We are clearly witnessing the disintegration of the old paradigm — what Jordan Hall nicknamed the “Blue Church” — which has held together our secular society and consensus reality over the last decades. We have to see this as a good thing, even though the fall out may be catastrophic in real-world terms. The old paradigm was built on many layers of falsehoods. The new worldview we are moving toward will be a great improvement — if we can arrive there without driving ourselves to extinction.

I tend to think in a way that integrates and synthesizes many different aspects of the world, which I find woven together, much like a piece of music has its various aspects — melody, tempo, counterpoint — that make up the whole. I am living in Tulum right now, among a community of privileged spiritual seekers. In the many workshops and gatherings held here, hardly anyone discusses the ecological emergency we are confronting as a species. I haven’t heard any mention of the multiple structural adjustment programs orchestrated by the World Bank, under the auspices of President Clinton, among other Presidents, which forced privatization of industries and deep cuts in social services here and reduced the standard of living for Mexicans significantly. That excess wealth was siphoned off to the financial and corporate elites of Europe and America, keeping Mexico poor and dependent — and relatively cheap for us foreigners. The same process happened across Latin America and around the world.

Personally, I feel that the root of the existential crisis the United States is experiencing now is the false consciousness — the tinplate, self-serving ideology — prevalent among our educated “liberal” elites. The shallow frequency of mind transmitted across this privileged sector of society over the last decades has been antithetical to deep questioning and authentic soul searching. Instead of just developing a good yoga practice or chugging ayahuasca, I would like to see this privileged and influential group confront the social basis of oppression and exploitation.

Why is it the case that certain groups have tremendous freedom while so many others are still essentially enslaved to serving them?

That freedom possessed by the liberal, educated elites, in the US and Europe primarily, should have been seen as a temporary loan from the universe rather than a guarantee. If we wanted to keep it, we needed to earn it. We have not done so. The way we could have earned it was by using our power — our cultural, social, and financial capital — to build a world where everyone was able to enjoy a similar degree of freedom and opportunity. To do this, all we need to do is to to interrogate and deconstruct the fundamental structure of Capitalism and build a new political-economic system where we share our resources and knowledge while massively reducing excess consumption. Instead, we devised fake ideologies around technology, entrepreneurship, meshed with a form of spirituality that is basically a narcissistic game, extending our culture’s insipid egotism.

I am writing this a few days before the (s)election. My strong suspicion is that Trump will win again. I hope I am wrong, although I am not tied up into knots about it. It is painful to watch the US slide into fascism. But history shows us that you generally can’t defeat the Big Lie with mediocre hypocrisy. For the most part, Democrats and liberals still refuse to speak truth to power. Biden, for instance, guaranteed his Wall Street backers that there would be no significant new legislation impacting their parasitic extraction of capital if he wins the election.

I haven’t followed the Hunter Biden story too closely, but my sense is that the main point is not the specifics of it but the obvious glaring reality that Hunter was able to get glamorous and lucrative consulting gigs not because of his personal merit but because of his family connections. Everyone knows that this is what most everyone does in our society, if they can get away with it. As I recall, Chelsea Clinton similarly landed a $300,000 a year job in media with little experience.

Considering the existential edge-of-the-cliff we are facing as a society, Biden should have addressed this directly and honestly, making a mea culpa. If Biden had said something like, “Hey man, yeah, there is an unfair system of privilege that directly benefits the families of people like me in the Neoliberal ruling elite, and my son had undeserved success because of this, and if I win, we plan to keep it this way,” he might have created a somewhat greater degree of social trust. Perhaps the main reason so many millions of people still prefer Trump is that, even though he is a corrupt, dirty, lying piece of scum, he is at least honest about it.

When I read The New York Times, The New Yorker, and other such publications, I am amazed by the ongoing lack of awareness as to why the masses so deeply despise rich Neoliberals and the elite progressive class. The late anthropologist David Graeber addressed this very well in his book on the Occupy movement. He noted that to have a career in any of the creative fields — in the art, film, or other media worlds, for instance — you have to be able to take an unpaid or severely under-paid internship that may last several years. This basically makes the creative fields where someone can hope to self-actualize entirely off limits for poor and working class people, who would also have to break through the invisible snobbery, the barriers of cultural elitism and patronage, which define these professions. Even Princeton sociologists now admit that American society has gone from being a meritocracy to an oligarchy over the last decades. People see this — and they directly experienced how wealth inequality increased under Obama and Clinton, despite all of the glad-handing and fine words.

You see? I still have this addiction to uncomfortable truths. While it doesn’t win me any popularity contests or add zeros to my bank account, my truth-fetish does have one benefit: It allows me to keep cleansing my conscience. How I would love, at this point, to transition to the other team: To transform myself into a lifestyle guru who is going to tell you how — by using the power of wow, some secret mantra, the law of manifestation, or a series of voodoo incantations — you will be able to engorge yourself with everything good and delectable, from now to eternity. Unless my karma runs over my dogma, I don’t think such is my fate.

In any event, I just published a new E Book, Conspiranoia: The Betrayed States of America, now available on Amazon. If you refuse to use Amazon or don’t have a Kindle, I will send you a PDF for $7 if you email me, or you can become a paid subscriber to my newsletter here. The book dives into some of the darkest aspects of what is happening now, seeking to understand the appeal of conspiracy theories like Qanon, the anti-vax movement, and the popular idea that Bill Gates seeks to control the world with biometric chips and vaccines, and depopulate Africa. What is exciting to me is that I believe many sectors of society may converge into a unified movement within the next few years: A global revolt against technocracy. But the ideology of such a movement still needs to be more explicitly defined and mapped out.

According to one early Amazon review: “Perhaps one of the most level-headed and insightful analyses of our dysfunctional dystopia looming on social collapse that I have read. Both pertinent and un-biased, this essay, a codex to truth, has the potential to elucidate many a reader, be they a bewildered time traveler trying to make sense of the mayhemical digression from our pursuit of liberty, justice and human rights for all...”

Ciao for now,

Daniel