The Era of ‘Self-Evident’ Truth Is Over. Today’s America Is Founded on Belief Instead
Never has an article been more appropriate & timely for Political Discussions. At least each of us may be able to draw some reasonable understanding as to why we are so polarized & devoted to what we post in these political threads. Therefore, I thought maybe we all could take some time to read the article and post our OWN opinion as to it's points.
It takes NO SIDES, it simply tries to explain & make sense as to why we are all so much in disagreement & hostile to the opposite side's posts. The only thing I ask is that everyone read it BEFORE starting to post opinion(s).
The Era of 'Self-Evident' Truth Is Over
Today's America is oriented toward belief instead of fact
It’s the most famous sentence in the Declaration of Independence, and perhaps in all of American history: “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1776, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Governments exist to secure people’s rights, Jefferson continued. When governments no longer do so, the people have a right to cast those governments aside and form new ones. “To prove this,” the document says, “let facts be submitted to a candid world.”
Truths. Self-evident. Facts. Yet, on Independence Day 2022, these words also stand out as starkly anachronistic. In an era of social media, misinformation, disinformation, “fake news,” and extreme partisanship, what “truths” can be considered “self-evident”? Can “facts” simply be submitted to a candid world? What do such sentences mean for us in today’s political climate?
Today, the information about the past we encounter online is increasingly shaped by algorithms, platform designs, crowd-sourcing, and disinformation campaigns. The success of these pieces of e–history often has little to do with facts or truths. Indeed, an argument can be made that a world of facts has been superseded by a world of beliefs. With so much information available to each of us, we no longer require—and, indeed it may not be possible to have—a shared set of facts or self-evident truths. We each re-write our personalized realities each day, curated from fragments of information scattered across the web and surfaced to us by recommendation engines. We forge our own realties, finding ample justifications for why we believe each reality is self-evident.
To expert-centric fields of knowledge, such a world poses many threats. As historian Jill Lepore wrote in The New Yorker in 2016, so much of our modern world—from law and science to history and journalism—has been shaped and ordered by “the fact,” the notion that something could be definitively known. Our independence, Jefferson made clear, also relies on that premise. As Lepore wrote, “the origins of no other nation are… as answerable to evidence,” as the United States.
If the world of facts is collapsing, perhaps that is also why the very foundations of the American experiment feel on shaky ground. Our very existence is tied to a world of facts and self-evident truths. A national history is, after all, an imagined agreement on facts shared by a diverse group of people. When those agreements become unraveled, we must find new ones—and, indeed, we are in the midst of such a tumultuous process.
In the public sphere each day we argue about which pieces of information, assembled in which order, reveal which self-evident truths that should become the basis for our actions. Depending on what evidence you assemble in what order, conservatives and progressives can each demonstrate to each other a compelling belief system that is self-evident, supported by facts, and threatened by “repeated injuries,” “usurpations,” and “tyranny” of the other side—words that Jefferson used 246 years ago.
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Also, found this article very interesting .... again, its not directed to either political side but tries to make sense of why we accept fake news.
How Your Brain Tricks You Into Believing Fake News
'It’s the equivalent of a public health crisis.’
time.com
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