Was listening to a conversation (podcast, so I won't bother you with the details) where they disscussed the idea that Gen Z-ers are the first generation to completely abandon the idea of an objective truth, a deconstruction that started after the boomers. That it's all about which ideas are useful, more than which ideas are true, and that Millennials are the last generation to still cling to the idea of some model of the world that'll make sense. I don't know if that's accurate but I found it an interesting thought to entertain nonetheless.One of the many, many poignant aspects of going to school with a bunch of surly Running Start kids in my mid '40s was hearing a 17-year-old mutter "goddamn millennials" under his breath while talking about his instructor. I did a spit take and he said "what? They're indecisive, they're always on their fucking phones and they have no idea how to get anything done because they're so wishy-washy!"
"Live my truth" is a phrase I heard a lot this summer, constantly on the lips of 20-somethings who had been caught in lies or who had found their beliefs of events to be unquestionably incorrect. Ann (to Bob): Carrie says you called her a gutterslut. Bob: I would never say something like that. Dave: I mean, I was there, Bob. you totally called Carrie a gutterslut. Bob: Look, it is what it is. Carrie can believe that but all I can do is live my truth. This works for Bob - he doesn't have to acknowledge being caught in a lie, and he doesn't have to acknowledge that he has spoken ill of others that he is pretending to like. It does not work for Carrie - she's been called a gutterslut and Bob won't own up to it. The problem is, it doesn't resolve the problems Ann and Dave have because when they're with Bob, they're subscribing to Bob's truth. When they're with Carrie, they rely on the ethos of Bob vs. the ethos of Carrie. What's interesting is that the dynamic plays out with people who are willing to subscribe to the same shared hallucination about truth. In a direct confrontation, Carrie and Bob have to battle out who said what when and where and hope they can convince Ann and Dave as to their version of events. What's noteworthy is that these exchanges took place under the watchful eye of dozens of cameras as everything being said was streamed worldwide to the Internet in real time. Objective truth was not a construct - it was a constellation of media files reviewable by all. Nonetheless, there was a collective assent to honor the fiction that there was no objective truth. "Live my truth" was interchangeable with "live my best truth". A couple times I heard the phrase "the actual truth" as if every now and then, everyone had to acknowledge the game they were playing and the fact that there are verifiable facts in the universe but the more self-centered among our victims were generally dismissive of this verification. I think it's a comfortable fiction. By subscribing to the same reality, we have affinity despite the fact that we don't really know how to communicate anymore. It runs into dire difficulty when interacting with someone outside of that collective fiction. "You're late." "If you look at it from the perspective of the traffic I had to deal with and the condition of my car, I'm about as close to on time as anyone could reasonably expect." "You're fired." It's another example where those whose worlds have been bent to suit them are utterly and completely shit outta luck when they interface with the world at large.
It's more the breakdown of previously held social norms. It's not invalidating the law of gravity, it's accepting that what colour it's acceptable to dye your hair is not based in scientific truth. "Objective truth" as it pertains to social philosophy has never really existed. And pre-Socratic skeptics thought it was impossible to know anything to begin with. The idea is hardly new. Rather there is an entire slew of right-wing commentators who are conflating "breakdown of objective truth" with "breakdown of my ideology."
Maybe by people who understand the bounds of science and evidence. I have personally seen it used in the spirit of "I reject your reality and substitute my own" without the self-aware irony.It's not invalidating the law of gravity, it's accepting that what colour it's acceptable to dye your hair is not based in scientific truth.
Well that always sucks. But in the current political situation, people are claiming transgender people are invalidating "objective truth" about reality. They're not talking about science, they're talking about the fact they grew up in a world where a boy was a boy and a girl was a girl and therefore objective truth is somehow breaking down. It's not. They mean "objective truth" in the same way the king being the divine representative of God on Earth was "objective truth." I say a trans woman is a woman and my father says climate change is fake. I'm a bit more objective I think.
It's interesting: from your perspective, the concern is people clinging to the phrase "objective truth" to mean "tradition" and that anything that threatens tradition is a fundamental threat to reality. From my perspective, the concern is people rejecting the existence of an "objective truth" as something that oppresses their wants and needs. I'll bet your father believes in the greenhouse effect. He probably even believes in greenhouse gasses. Show him a picture of Antarctica with a pink blob over it and he'll know immediately he's looking at a hole in the ozone layer. The pieces are there, it's the ideology that ties it all together that he rejects. It's hard. My earliest memories of educational television include Mr. Wizard warning us of the impending new ice age. Weekly Reader was all about how acid rain was going to destroy all structures by 1990 and we'd all need to wear SPF1000 sunscreen outside of our silvered biodomes because gamma rays would have sunburned all living matter to death but it would only matter a little because by the year 2100 Venus would be a more hospitable climate than Van Nuys. The population explosion would lead to widespread famine by the early '90s and there would be no petroleum available by the year 2000 because we would hit peak oil by 1978. This, of course, is assuming that we wouldn't die in a nuclear holocaust brought on by the Contras. So I can see how someone could retreat into a belief that climate change is fake. This is probably the reason so many discussions of climate change have been so pedantic for so long: any consumer of media has seen so many nightmare scenarios that they don't bother sleeping anymore. And when we discuss "climate change" we're talking about a constellation of observations that lead to a damning conclusion. If you accept that damning conclusion the constellation makes sense. If you don't they're isolated incidents that you explain away as irrelevant. "Sex" and "gender", on the other hand, have not been widely acknowledged as individual concepts for long at all, at least not in the mainstream. Not only that, straight white males are invariably wrong in these discussions and generally subjected to ridicule. Someone expressing an "objective truth" about cisgender women is someone refusing to use the word "cisgender" because they've never had to before and no one has ever made them feel bad about it. In both cases, the party in question is saying "I'm not going to argue about this" (because it hurts my head). They're asserting that the argument is invalid because the subject is beyond argumentation. The problem is it's being conflated from the philosophical (what is girl if not female) to the practical (I paid you back the $20 I borrowed because I feel like I don't owe it to you anymore).
Certainly. Veen mentioned podcasts so my brain immediately thought "big intellectuals" trying to claim their normative beliefs are objective reality. It's become a trope in popular media. Charles Murray thought his studies were "objective truth." Jordan Peterson tried to come up with his own definition of "truth" to justify why his beliefs were correct. It didn't make sense, but apparently society will collapse without metaphorical, objective "truth" that apparently goes beyond science. https://www.amazon.ca/Nihilism-Root-Revolution-Modern-Age/dp/1887904069 That's the fucking king of Truth right there. Priest made me read that when I was 14. That dude legitimately argues that objective truth comes from God, that medieval peasants were happier because they knew exactly where they were. And once Nietzsche said God is Dead, Truth was Dead and now the world is chaos. There is certainly an urge people have to try and see the world as more logical and objective than it is. He says "oh, the climate has always been changing." I'm not really sure what to make of that. He seems to think whatever humans are doing is having next to no impact - if the Earth is getting hotter it was just as inevitable as the end of the last Ice Age. That human greenhouse gas emissions aren't responsible for anything. I think he's just wrapping his head around what's easy. Banning CFC's? Easy. Stopping emissions? Hard, and detrimental to conservative politics. Almost certainly. But my issue comes from outright denial rather than people saying "oh, it's not that bad" or "we'll get through this" or "doomsday scenarios are overblown and repeated to death." He might believe in the greenhouse effect, but he doesn't think it's doing anything. That just doesn't make sense. These people can't just say "it's not that bad," they have to actively deny the basic mechanism. It depends who you're arguing with. Nailing someone to the cross because they didn't use the word "cisgender" is ridiculous and I would call them ridiculous. I would never discount someone's opinion because they're a straight white man. But these people are outright trying to claim that calling someone a "boy" means their sex (not gender) is male, period. That's objective. We can have an argument whether it's reasonable for people to think that or if we should change language or introduce the concept of gender as separate from sex but regardless, calling something a "boy" is just a decision people made. It's not reality. It's not objective. It's a social convention. There are languages without gendered pronouns and there are languages like French where there are masculine and feminine words. So that's where the deconstruction happens. You have sex, and then you have language where nouns can have genders. And those are associated with all kinds of stereotypes. Ben Shapiro thinks it's objective. So I'm coming at it from politics. People telling lies at your workplace? Fuck 'em. edit: and the practical aspect, the lying, I don't think is increasing under gen Z. Shittiness moves through all ages I think.From my perspective, the concern is people rejecting the existence of an "objective truth" as something that oppresses their wants and needs.
I'll bet your father believes in the greenhouse effect. He probably even believes in greenhouse gasses. Show him a picture of Antarctica with a pink blob over it and he'll know immediately he's looking at a hole in the ozone layer. The pieces are there, it's the ideology that ties it all together that he rejects.
This is probably the reason so many discussions of climate change have been so pedantic for so long: any consumer of media has seen so many nightmare scenarios that they don't bother sleeping anymore.
"Sex" and "gender", on the other hand, have not been widely acknowledged as individual concepts for long at all, at least not in the mainstream. Not only that, straight white males are invariably wrong in these discussions and generally subjected to ridicule. Someone expressing an "objective truth" about cisgender women is someone refusing to use the word "cisgender" because they've never had to before and no one has ever made them feel bad about it.
This deserves a longer response than I can give it because I had to stand up to a judge today and then do construction for five hours and I'm tired. I'll say this: "cognitive dissonance" didn't used to mean "being stupid." It used to mean "the mental discomfort and physical pain of holding two competing ideas at once." Clinically speaking, it's something we all try to avoid. We will believe a falsehood over a truth if that falsehood prevents cognitive dissonance. SO: global warming is a lie because it's been a lie all these years and all the data we see is just more noise that will eventually get disproven. The alternative is me and everyone I know are contributing to the destruction of the planet and there's no way out unless we align with all those people who have been calling us monsters lo these many years. Ever met an ex-mormon? They go through this phase where they're dead inside. Mormonism is keenly inclusive and insular; this makes it easy to align with others who believe as you do and difficult to develop a large group of friends outside your religion. It also means that when you've had enough and can no longer swallow the party line, you are lost. Your whole world is has been lost. You've been cast out. And everyone who aligns with a political movement risks this whenever their core beliefs are challenged. And we're all guilty. We're here arguing about objective truths and you can assert that criticism for not using the word "cisgender" is ridiculous but I mean, that's my reality. My wife got my daughter a doll when she was a baby. Same hair color, same eye color. My daughter outgrew it. So my wife brought it to the birth center (which she owns). And told this story about how she wanted her daughter to relate to this doll so she got her with the same hair color, same eye color. And still got an eyeroll. Because my daughter has blonde hair and blue eyes. So this doll? It's fuckin' evil. What's happening is the people who think my daughter shouldn't play with blue-eyed dolls are in a pissing match with the people who think that "boy" means "male" because the future has yet to be decided. I just wish we could do it without ripping each other to shreds. Except Ben Shapiro. I'd totally rip that fucker to shreds. I don't think the lying is increasing under genZ. It was surprising to me, however, to see the rhetorical instrument "it's not a lie if truth is subjective" employed. Over. And over.