"A pair of archaeologists were pondering the inscription at the foot of the mummy’s case. It read simply: 4135 BCE.'What can that possibly mean?' wondered the first archaeologist.'Hmm. It could be the license tag of the guy who ran him down,' replied the second.""Once upon a time, Prabu Baka had a beautiful daughter, the slender virgin Rara Jonggrang. Because of Roro's beauty, many young prabus melted, or at least became vertigo, and wanted to marry her. Still, they were rejected," Senduro went on looking at the statue of a slim woman, the slayer of Mahishasura, Durga Mahisashuramardini. It was said that Durga's face bore the characteristics of Shiva. Her spun hair was the darkness of Yama. Her eight hands with kankana were the universe of Vishnu. Her puffed-out chest was Candra's genre. Her stomach was Surya-shaped. Her fingers were configured from Vasu. Usha arranged her teeth. Meanwhile, her ears with kundala grew from the Bayu's breeze. You can find this Mahisashuramardini statue in the northern cell of Shiva temple, the main Prambanan temple."Meanwhile, Prabu Damar Maya, king of the Pengging kingdom, wanted to seize the Baka kingdom as a colony. Exercising dynastic politics, by sending his son, Bandung Bondowoso, to attack and killed Prabu Boko.The prince was captivated by Rara Jonggrang's beauty. He proposed to her and finally, she agreed to be married with two conditions, first, he had to build a well called Jalatunda. Second, he had to build a thousand temples in one night.With 'pork barrel politics', Bandung Bondowoso succeeded in building Jalatunda. And, with the help of 'Sirekap', Bandung Bondowoso has succeeded in building 999 temples— but history finds that there are only 249 temples, indeed one remains to fulfill.According to Patih Gudapala, the construction of Jalatunda and the temples violated the rules: structured, systematic and massive, but this was denied by commission of felony.Rara Jonggrang was still thinking about applying for the 'right of inquiry', but was also considering the existence of a pandemic called 'cold disease syndrome.' Outside the palace, people of the Baka staged a protest 'against the fraudulent construction of 1000 temples'. They support the right to inquiry which Rara Jonggrang was still considering; and of course, counter-action gets in the way, the same pattern as if there were a protest movement.Will there be an alternate ending to the legend of Rara Jonggrang, which is usually the same thing? Booriing! We are waiting for the play date.There are many sides to every story. To put the old saying another way, there is usually more than one truth to be drawn from any set of facts. There are a variety of genuinely–perhaps even equally–legitimate ways of describing a person, event, thing or policy.The concept of truth in philosophy goes back to Plato, who warned–through Socrates–of the dangers of false claims to knowledge. Ignorance, Socrates felt, was remediable; if one is ignorant, one can be taught. The greater threat comes from those who have the hubris to think that they already know the truth, for then one might be impetuous enough to act on a falsehood. It is important at this point to give at least a minimal definition of truth. Perhaps the most famous is that of Aristotle, who said, 'to say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true.'If someone maintains that truth does not matter, or that there is no such thing as truth, there is nothing much we can say to them. But is that what the post-truth phenomenon is really about? Post-truth amounts to a form of ideological supremacy, whereby its practitioners are trying to compel someone to believe in something whether there is good evidence for it or not.Do we want to live in a world where policy is made based on how it makes us feel rather than how well it will work in reality? The human animal may be wired to give some credence to our superstitions and fears, but this does not mean that we cannot train ourselves to embrace better standards of evidence. There may be legitimate theoretical questions about our ability to know objective truth, but this does not mean that epistemologists and critical theorists do not go to a physician when they get sick. Neither should governments build more prisons because they 'feel' that crime is going up.So what to do? The first step in fighting post-truth is to understand its genesis, says McIntyre. It may seem to some commentators that the idea of post-truth simply burst onto the scene in 2016, but that is not the case. The word 'post- truth' may have seen a recent uptick—as a result of Brexit and the US presidential election—but the phenomenon itself has deep roots that go back thousands of years, to the evolution of cognitive irrationalities that are shared by liberals and conservatives alike. It also has roots in academic debates over the impossibility of objective truth that has been used to attack the authority of science. And all of this has been exacerbated by recent changes in the media landscape. In the past two decades’ explosion of science denial on topics like climate change, vaccines, and evolution, we see the birth of tactics that are now being used for post-truth.Post-truth was foreshadowed by what has happened to science over the last several decades. Once respected for the authority of its method, scientific results are now openly questioned by legions of nonexperts who happen to disagree with them. Science denial can start from either an economic or an ideological agenda. Most commonly, it is kicked off by those who have something to lose, and is later carried on by those who get caught up in their campaign of misinformation. The link between economic interests and post-truth politics, by considering how corporate-funded lobbying (and lying) on a range of topics has influenced political positions on climate change, guns, immigration, health care, the national debt, voter reform, abortion, and gay marriage.The tactics that we see employed in the post-truth world of today were learned in the earlier campaigns of truth deniers who wanted to fight the scientific consensus and won. And if one can deny the facts about climate change, why not those about the murder rate? If the link between tobacco and cancer can be obscured by decades of misinformation and doubt, why not hope that the same could be true for any other issue that one wishes to politicize? It is the same strategy with the same roots; it now just has a larger target, which is reality itself.A central concept of human psychology is that we strive to avoid psychic discomfort. It is not a pleasant thing to think badly of oneself. Some psychologists call this 'ego defense', but whether we frame it within this paradigm or not, the concept is clear. It just feels better for us to think that we are smart, well-informed, capable people than that we are not. Only the strongest egos can stand up very long under a withering assault of self-criticism: 'What a fool I was! The answer was right there in front of me the whole time, but I never bothered to look. I must be an idiot.' So the tension is often resolved by changing one of one’s beliefs.Systematic cognitive dispositions or inclinations in human thinking and reasoning often do not comply with the tenets of logic, probability reasoning, and plausibility is called Cognitive bias, and it is part of our human inheritance. These intuitive and subconscious tendencies are at the basis of human judgment, decision-making, and the resulting behavior. Succumbing to cognitive bias can feel a lot like thinking. But especially when we are emotionally invested in a subject, all of the experimental evidence shows that our ability to reason well will probably be affected. Our inherent cognitive biases make us ripe for manipulation and exploitation by those who have an agenda to push, especially if they can discredit all other sources of information.If we look back throughout history, we realize that the rich and powerful have always had an interest (and usually a means) for getting the 'little people' to think what they wanted. How ironic that the Internet, which allows for immediate access to reliable information by anyone who bothers to look for it, has for some become nothing but an echo chamber.We are all prone to the sorts of cognitive biases that can lead to post-truth. One should not assume that post-truth arises only from others, or that its results are somebody else’s problem. In an era of post-truth, we must challenge each and every attempt to obfuscate a factual matter and challenge falsehoods before they are allowed to fester.One must always fight back against lies. We should never assume that any claim is 'too outrageous to be believed.' A lie is told because the person telling it thinks there is a chance that someone will believe it. We might hope that the listener has enough common sense not to believe it, but in an age of partisan manipulation and fragmentation of our information sources, keyed to play on our motivated reasoning, we are no longer entitled to that assumption. The point of challenging a lie is not to convince the liar, who is likely too far gone in his or her dark purpose to be rehabilitated. But because every lie has an audience, there may still be time to do some good for others.It is our decision how we will react to a world in which someone is trying to pull the wool over our eyes. Truth still matters, as it always has. Whether we realize this in time is up to us.If we desire to know the truth, it might be assumed that what we most need is a method of enquiry or a set of rules for establishing facts. The history of ideas is not short of such principles and procedures, be it the deductive reasoning of Descartes, the scientific method of Bacon, the study of revealed scriptures or the attainment of insight by disciplines of meditation and concentration. Our history suggests that more important than any of these is something more like an attitude. Establishing the truth requires ‘epistemic virtues’ like modesty, skepticism, openness to other perspectives, a spirit of collective enquiry, a readiness to confront power, a desire to create better truths, a willingness to let our morals be guided by the facts.Truth is there if we are prepared to look for it even though it is far from plain or simple. We tend to think of truths as like shiny pebbles: hard, unchangeable, clearly defined, collected in the mind as though it were a kind of rock garden. Truth is actually more like a real garden, an organic, holistic system where everything relates to everything else. While some features are as good as permanent, others grow, change or die. And like a garden, truth needs nurturing or else it becomes overgrown with the weeds of myth, distortions, misunderstandings and lies.There are ten types of truth, according to Julian Baggini. Eternal Truth: a general and certain proposition, which depends on the congruence or incongruence occurring in abstract ideas.. Authoritative truths: authority usually rests on some claim to expertise, claiming to be a kind of spiritual expertise, manifested in his miracles and clairvoyance. Esoteric truths: knowledge that is outside and independent from a person's experience and can be fully appreciated or understood by anyone (related to common sense), in contrast to esoteric knowledge (understood or appreciated by few). Sometimes, however, the purpose is no more than self-interest. Reasoned truths: truths based on logic and deduction. Empirical truths: exact conformity as learned by observation or experiment between judgments or propositions and externally existent things in their actual status and relations. Creative truths: you can make something true just by saying it strikes many as just the kind of nonsense the post-truth world has led us to. Creativity requires imagination but in order to create new truths, imagination is not enough. Being ‘creative with the truth’ is no more than a euphemism for not telling the truth at all. But because truth can indeed be created–sometimes merely by saying the right thing at the right time–it is not always easy to distinguish those who are creating truth and those who are creatively hiding or disfiguring it. Indeed, sometimes there is a grey area between the two, one that dissemblers exploit. Relative truths: conditional, subjective, varying and contradictory, so it's capable of changing over time. Powerful truths: linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it. Truth is nothing more than the exercise of power. Moral truths: when a moral statement accurately corresponds to reality. Holistic truths: when you can talk consistently about the truth of a model (that is, when you are in a more powerful formal system), that truth depends not only on the substructure, but on the entire structure you're immersed in.The defense of truth often takes the form of battles to defend particular truths that divide us. This is sometimes necessary but as the military metaphor suggests, it feeds antagonism. The greater, unifying enterprise is to defend the shared value we place on truth, the virtues that lead us towards it, and the principles that help us to identify it. Those who stand up for this are pushing at an open door because ultimately we all recognize that truth is not a philosophical abstraction. Rather it is central to how we live and make sense of ourselves, the world and each other, day by day. And at its peak, it all comes back to 'Values.'In the next session, we'll continue about more this topic and other. Bi 'idhnillah."As usual, before continuing to the next episode, Senduro sang a song,In my mind, in my head,this is where we all came fromThe dreams we had, the love we shared,this is what we're waiting for *)
Citations & Reference:
- Julian Baggini, A Short History of Truth, 2017, Quercus
- Hector Macdonald, Truth: How the Many Sides to Every Story Shape Our Reality, 2018, Hachette
- Matthew d’Ancona, Post-Truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back, 2017, Penguin
- James Ball, Post-Truth: How Bullshit Conquered the World, 2017, Biteback Publishing
*) "In My Mind" written by Georgina Kingsley, Ivan Gough, Robert Conley, Aden Forte & Joshua Soon
