Thank you for addressing what truth really is. I live in a state in which telling the truth is against the law. If I say my daughter is not a male, I am breaking the law. If I use her beloved given name, I am breaking the law. As I have stood in truth from the beginning, I am now censored, shamed, and shunned. Truth tellers are threats to be silenced by those who perform and pretend and rewrite history. I appreciate those who still believe in truth and courageously speak it. Thank you.
I can’t imagine how stifling that must be — to be punished for telling the truth about your own child. It’s maddening, the level of coercion at play, fully endorsed by culture, law, institutions, and media alike.
I’ve been trying to understand this human compulsion to weaponise language under the guise of kindness. Especially as it plays out in gender ideology, where something deeper is happening.
There’s something vampiric about the way “compassionate” adults drain the spirit from the young. Not out of malice, but through a kind of moral hunger — feeding off obedience, fragility, and borrowed virtue.
Thank you. We need a revival of this. Following on your building metaphors (I'm a blue-collar scholar from a family of self-taught engineers, mechanics, builders) -- truth is carborundum. It's evident, stable, and demonstrable. And you hone things, meaning new ideas, upon it; its function is to sharpen workable concepts and make them incisive and useful.
There was a similar metaphor about truth-as-criterion in the long-lost liberal arts (ars liberalis, originally "that made by human hands which liberates one from ignorance") about touchstones -- dark jasper or basalt used to test the purity of precious metals by scraping. Another concept given the boot by Postmodernism.
Absolutely love this. I’d never heard of carborundum before. Truth isn’t a comfort blanket, it’s a whetstone. This really hits home with my core belief: that pursuit of truth means struggling honestly — reading, learning, sparring, risking being wrong. Truth isn’t fixed. It’s requires forging. It demands contact, friction, and humility.
Absolutely! Beautifully said. There's no reason for pointless struggle, but some level of struggle is the point -- it's how we learn and progress, individually and collectively.
Aiming to live in truth is so brilliant and so hard and so worth it. But I do think you can have compassion as a companion to truth (not its master). Truth first though. Thank you for a great essay.
Thank you for addressing what truth really is. I live in a state in which telling the truth is against the law. If I say my daughter is not a male, I am breaking the law. If I use her beloved given name, I am breaking the law. As I have stood in truth from the beginning, I am now censored, shamed, and shunned. Truth tellers are threats to be silenced by those who perform and pretend and rewrite history. I appreciate those who still believe in truth and courageously speak it. Thank you.
I can’t imagine how stifling that must be — to be punished for telling the truth about your own child. It’s maddening, the level of coercion at play, fully endorsed by culture, law, institutions, and media alike.
I’ve been trying to understand this human compulsion to weaponise language under the guise of kindness. Especially as it plays out in gender ideology, where something deeper is happening.
There’s something vampiric about the way “compassionate” adults drain the spirit from the young. Not out of malice, but through a kind of moral hunger — feeding off obedience, fragility, and borrowed virtue.
It’s a form of soul theft.
Thank you for trying to understand and write about it. I have an inside look, and it isn't pretty. The worst of humanity actually.
Thank you. We need a revival of this. Following on your building metaphors (I'm a blue-collar scholar from a family of self-taught engineers, mechanics, builders) -- truth is carborundum. It's evident, stable, and demonstrable. And you hone things, meaning new ideas, upon it; its function is to sharpen workable concepts and make them incisive and useful.
There was a similar metaphor about truth-as-criterion in the long-lost liberal arts (ars liberalis, originally "that made by human hands which liberates one from ignorance") about touchstones -- dark jasper or basalt used to test the purity of precious metals by scraping. Another concept given the boot by Postmodernism.
Absolutely love this. I’d never heard of carborundum before. Truth isn’t a comfort blanket, it’s a whetstone. This really hits home with my core belief: that pursuit of truth means struggling honestly — reading, learning, sparring, risking being wrong. Truth isn’t fixed. It’s requires forging. It demands contact, friction, and humility.
Thank you for this.
Absolutely! Beautifully said. There's no reason for pointless struggle, but some level of struggle is the point -- it's how we learn and progress, individually and collectively.
Aiming to live in truth is so brilliant and so hard and so worth it. But I do think you can have compassion as a companion to truth (not its master). Truth first though. Thank you for a great essay.