I've started reading an interesting book - Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free - by Charles P. Pierce. His main premise is that because we live in a free country, we have the absolute freedom to become idiots if we want to, believing whatever we want to, and yelling our beliefs into each other's face.
"Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units. Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough. Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is determined by how fervently they believe it."
Priceless.
That's what spin, and publicity are all about... Even a complete lie, if told long enough and loud enough becomes truth.
ReplyDeleteBasic salesmanship.. find out what the customer wants and expects from a product. Then point out how your product meets those expectations while acknowledging, but countering or dismissing where it doesn't.
"Truth is determined by how fervently they believe it."
ReplyDeleteThis is what the author of the book is saying? If so, what nonsense! Truth is not determined by man, it is determined by GOD who saw it all happen, knows the facts, and knows the motivations and hearts of all men. Truth is what GOD saw, what GOD knows to be true.
The statement that the author wrote is a bunch of bunk.
SCC
ReplyDeleteGod's truth and man's percieved truth are two different things
Hitler, Lenin and Mao all knew that if enough people people believed something to be true, that something could be used as a basis for law and policy,
SCC - sorry if I misled you - there is man's "truth" and the absolute truth of God. The author is talking about people determining their own truth and then making others believe it is really true.
ReplyDeleteI guess I am weird. I think that GOD's truth and man's truth are (in my world) the same thing. Truth is truth is truth. There is no other definition of truth. "Man's truth" is a convenient misnomer. It allows us to say that X is true but it is neither truth nor reality. "Man's truth" is usually a lie.
ReplyDeleteSaying that enough people believe something to be true is not truth. When people thought the world was flat that did not make it true. When it was discovered otherwise, and proofs were offered, those people who knew the truth were persecuted. Were they lying, wrong or committing any crime? No. The truth was being stifled in order to provide power for those who did not have the truth.
The truth is not what man can convince others of: it is GOD's truth and my truth. When we forget that GOD's truth should be the same as our truth, then we allow ourselves the convenience of distortions and half-truths. The truth is that the truth is not man's decision, man's choice, man's ideas, man's knowledge: it is GOD's province and we must learn to understand it, to acknowledge it and to comply with it.
That's what is wrong with the world today. Not enough truth. Too many people allow themselves to get into the world of "gray areas" of "the truth" instead of sticking to "black and white". If we stick with "black and white" truth (not racism here, just a phrase that gives good delineations), then we make our lives easier and we make the world clearer and we make it more difficult for others to lie.