Speaking from truth vs speaking from power

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ti-3M04eW4 

 

When I claim to be a genuine truthseeker, and when I make truth claims like: There is no God, Christianity is false, there is no free will, morality works in such and such way, and so on, it's worth asking the question: What do I take myself to be doing when I make these kinds of truth claims?

A similar question: What do I take truth to be for?

Per the video above (52:50), Alasdair MacIntyre, a critic of postmodernism, says that, per postmodernism, whenever someone makes a truth claim they are always making a power claim (my paraphrase) – they are trying to influence people to gain power. MacIntyre says of postmodernism: "Any profession of truth is nothing more than a reflection of the political ideology of the person who is making it." The podcast hosts go on to push against this characterization of postmodernism. In any case, I want to consider the view, whether it's postmodern or not, that truth claims are always power claims.

 

I could say truth is worth pursuing for its own sake, and that's why I make truth claims. But I don't believe that truth or knowledge is intrinsically valuable. (Is visual knowledge about the gruesome details of certain crimes or medical emergencies valuable in and of itself? Not only is it not, but it's extrinsically disvaluable!)  

 

I think the ultimate pursuit is to be more happy and to be less miserable. Truth is only valuable insofar as it helps us become happier and less miserable.

 

That might sound like I advocate for "noble lies" – lies that make people happy and thus are worth telling. But that's not quite right.

 

I don't think people can deliberately believe falsehoods. If you know something is false or suspect that it's false, but choose to believe it anyway because it is a "noble lie", that would mean believing and not believing in something – a contradiction that our rationality blocks us from making. Contradictions bother us to the point that we reject them. The idea of believing something false bothers us to the point that we can't believe something we worry is false. We can't help but desire to believe what's true and to reject what's false.

 

The idea that I believe something false is a painful idea for me, so my happiness very much depends on my being convinced that I don't believe false things. That motivates me to reduce my false beliefs as far as I can, either by withdrawing beliefs and becoming more agnostic, or by investigating the truth of my beliefs until I can continue believing them confidently.

 

So even if my final goal is happiness, that does not mean I place happiness above truth. Being convinced that the truth is on our side is often a prerequisite for our happiness. So even if our ultimate goal is happiness, that doesn't mean we can set truth aside for the sake of happiness. Truth is still required to get there, so there is a genuine desire for truth. Put another way, if my ultimate goal is happiness, and truth is necessary to achieve that goal, then truth is part of my ultimate goal.

 

What about ugly truths that we don't want to accept or can't accept because they are too painful? That's the thing – if you desire truth to the point that the idea of holding false beliefs is painful to you to the point that you would rather face ugly truths than live in blissful ignorance, then the ugly truth / happiness dichotomy won't apply to you. Ugly truth is still the path for optimal happiness for the genuine truthseeker, even if ugly truth makes the genuine truthseeker miserable in its own right.

It's also true that power is needed for happiness. Perhaps the single greatest driver for misery is powerlessness. At the core of misery is a lack of freedom. Truth gives us understanding, which is itself a power, and this is one way truth leads to happiness.

So: truth -> understanding -> power -> freedom -> happiness.

That sounds like truth IS subordinate to power. The quest for truth just is a quest for power. So does that mean truth claims are power claims after all? No. We must translate the above key question to: Do I make truth claims not because I believe them myself but purely because of the effect making these claims will have?

The answer is no. My claims come from a place of curiosity and desire for understanding rather than a desire to influence.

An obvious proof of this: I have no influence. If I were trying to influence others, I don't think I'd be using a blog that gets zero views. The purpose of my writing is just personal improvement of my worldview and understanding, purely out of genuine curiosity and desire for truth.

 

There are different kinds of power, which is why "knowledge is power" is true in some ways and false in others.

 

Knowledge is power in the sense that by understanding your environment, you can manipulate it to suit your needs and fulfill your desires.

 

Knowledge is not power in the sense that when you speak truth to power, you can be destroyed for it. Whistleblowers can be sued and buried by legal fees by the corrupt company. Dietrich Bonhoeffer opposed the Nazis and was killed for it. When an innocent person is wrongly convicted and sent to prison, their knowledge of their innocence has no power at all.

 

So a better, more pointed question than Are your truth claims power claims? is: When you make claims, what kind of power are you after? 

 

If you are after powers related to social capital, manipulation, money, optics, political strategy, and things like that, then you are a power seeker, not a truth seeker. Politicians, pathological liars, and narcissists are known to occupy this psychological space.

 

If you are after powers related to understanding how the world works, then your truth claims are honest truth claims.

If someone asks me the question of what my intentions are when I make truth claims, what are they after? Are they asking from a place of power, or a place of curiosity? It seems obvious that they are asking from a place of curiosity, a place of a desire for knowledge and to understand what my intentions are. So the very internal state of the questioner proves that people can and do have this internal state of curiosity and desire for truth. It's not necessarily the case that every truth claim comes from a place of power or word games. Indeed, some brave individuals, like whistleblowers or martyrs, trade powers related to survival and comfort for powers related to truth, morality, duty, understanding, value, legacy, self-respect, and virtue.

 

It's a matter of what powers you are after, of which powers are essential to your happiness. For some of us, powers of understanding are essential to our happiness, to the point that we are willing to sacrifice powers of survival for them. There is, thus, something of a dichotomy between survival and truth.

 

This dichotomy appears in the conversation of natural selection. We are selected to be quite good at believing truths related to basic survival; of course we are: if we weren't we would be extinct. But the same survival pressures do not apply for more abstract and philosophical truths, and so it's basically a trivial truth that we are bad at discovering truths about metaphysical things. So you can have Scientologists, Mormons, Baptists, Catholics, atheists, Muslims, etc., all surviving roughly equally well despite having radically different philosophical beliefs. Having true beliefs about morality, God, etc., need not grant any serious survival advantage, and having horrendously false beliefs about morality, God, etc., need not grant any serious survival disadvantage. Truth and survival very much come apart when it comes to more abstract truths.

 

The topic of power versus truth also appears when it comes to the deep difference between propaganda and philosophy:

 

Propaganda:

 

-Discourages asking 'why' questions, ignores 'why' questions, and even treats 'why' questions with hostility, judgment, and punishment;

 

-Commands you to believe something or attempts to deceive or manipulate you into believing something, something that empowers whoever administers the propaganda. Just as deception needn't be all that conscious or deliberate of an act, neither does spreading propaganda.

 

Philosophy:

 

-Encourages asking 'why' questions, takes 'why' questions seriously, and offers praise to those who ask questions;

 

-Gives you the tools to discover the truth for yourself rather than relying on the word of authorities. 

 

This is one of the reasons why philosophy is a good and necessary thing.

09 June 2025 - Thoughts

• Today I'm working on post #2 in my series on intellectual virtue. This will examine the words of Michael Huemer.
• Yesterday I posted quotes and some responses to Joe Schmid's words on intellectual virtue. I'm basically in total agreement, especially with the idea that virtue is the foundation of critical thinking. Where does philosophy begin? It begins with psychology, with the kind of person you are. If you are the kind of person who wants answers to philosophical questions, then you are the right kind of person for doing philosophy. If you are the kind of person who wants truth, then there are certain practices and attitudes you will take on to maximize your chances of finding the truth and ensuring that you are not stuck in falsehoods. 
• Disagreements: I will probably take a different approach to defining virtue, and I also clashed somewhat with the idea that there is always room for rational disagreement (even on complex topics). Depending on how we define rationality, rational disagreement is not possible; at least one person believes on the basis of false reasons. But you cannot blame someone for believing on the basis of false reasons, especially when the person is not believing on the basis of intellectual vices like wishful thinking or social pressure.
• There are two senses of blame here. On the first sense, you cannot blame anyone at all ever for any of their beliefs, because you cannot blame someone for their intelligence, knowledge, and so on. We do not choose our beliefs and we do not choose what makes sense to us. On the second sense, you can "blame" someone in the sense of acknowledging that there is something this person lacks. Some kinds of believing will reveal more of a lack than others. There is rational disagreement in the sense that people can disagree without lacking anything other than knowledge, which doesn't speak badly about the person qua truthseeker. Other kinds of disagreement involve a lack of intellectual virtue, which does speak badly about the person qua truthseeker.
• I had written some on tribalism in general and tribalism within Christianity, inspired by Joe's remarks on tribalism, but those writings have been lost. I think the gist of what I had to say was that 1) Tribalism involves us-versus-them thinking, echo chambers, socially reinforced beliefs (believing not because something makes sense, but because you will be socially punished otherwise), sophistry (saying words for the effect the words have on others, not for the truth of the words), heuristics, group psychology, ego, defensiveness, identity, group identity, doing things not because they are good or true but because they help the tribe and help your standing within the tribe, and a number of other pernicious things that I don't currently remember. 2) Tribalism thus causes intellectual vice and thus impedes truthseeking. 3) Tribalism is a problem that cannot be solved because humans depend on tribes for their survival. Even being a truthseeker runs the risk of falling into tribalist traps with "us truthseekers vs those irrational non-truthseekers" way of thinking. 4) The closest to a solution is to be radically socially independent. But this is impossible in most cases. Either you depend on family for survival, or you depend on a job. Both cases involve social structures and social structures are tribes. Survival and (philosophical) truthseeking sadly come apart in many ways, which is why humans are so overwhelmingly bad at philosophy. 5) You can try to select or procure a tribe that is the least tribalistic, but it's hard to see how tribalism can be fully eliminated. Being aware of tribalism and selecting or procuring a tribe in a strategic way can mitigate or even eliminate some of tribalism's worst effects. But how far can that go? It seems to me that tribalism is a fundamental feature of human nature. You could say that ego death is necessary to defeat tribalism. But how can someone undergo an ego death and continue living in this world as if you are concerned about your own survival? To live just is to live as a surviving thing, a thing concerned about its survival. How can you both undergo an ego death and be a thing concerned about its survival? 
• I will discuss virtue more broadly when I get to Aristotle.
• After this series I would like to do a brief series on Plato and Aristotle. That will be quick to put together as I've already done most of the work.
• I have Huemer's new book on knowledge, so that's on the to-read list. I will probably go into knowledge after mistakes and autonomous facts. Some things to discuss there: a priori vs a posteriori knowledge; analyticity vs tautology; laws of logic; justification.
• I gave a definition of justification that said a belief is justified when there are good reasons to believe it. Reasons are answers to why questions. I also said explanations are answers to why questions too, and so reasons and explanations are connected. (On one reading of 'reason', reasons are more internal, something the self is aware of. On a reading of 'explanation', explanations are external, existing independently of someone's awareness. There's an explanation for why fire is hot even if no one knows it. But there is an externalist reading of reasons too.)
• This means there's probably some way to reconcile explanationism—the view that knowledge is when you believe something because it's true—with the view that justification is based on reasons.
• Both explanationism and justification-by-reasons can probably be reconciled with some kind of foundationalism, and indeed might depend on some kind of foundationalism. I'm aware that Huemer is a foundationalist. I find the view attractive, as alternatives like skepticism and coherentism seem mistaken.