The Fig, the Olive and the Peaceful Land: Stories of Senduro Flower: When the People Speak Up (5)

“Why is your dog growling at me while I’m eating?” Minnie Mouse asked Daisy Duck. 'Does he want me to give him some food?'
'No,' said Daisy. 'He’s just mad because you’re eating off his favorite plate.'"

"The Post-Truth phenomenon has gone global, including Indonesia, also known as Wakanda or Konoha when the people are talking about the 'edge of cliff' issue—you are guaranteed to be dealing with legal authorities. Indeed, this is something worrying that no one should be proud of, this 'Mother Prithvi's—she is said so sad—upbringing, is currently unhealthy. The land of Equatorial Belt, has become a land of Cosplay, in the morning, you act as a superhero, in the middle of the day you become an anti-hero, and in the afternoon you get ready to swap plays with Sulaeman Harsono, playing 'Bolot'—a man who can't hear except talking about women, money, and food—on the night stage," said Senduro while shuffling a bundle of playing cards, distributed it, picked one of them, and voila, the 'Joker'.

"Besides, leaders of Indonesia's vanguard and their supporters, march toward 'post-truth' politics. 'Truthiness' has been maintained to defend power. According to Elizabeth Suhay [et al], democratic governance rests on the assumption that citizens know what is true. A shared understanding of reality is critical to making sound decisions, both at the ballot box and in the political institutions. Suppose that assumption is wrong—that is, if peoples’ minds are filled with misinformation and 'alternative facts'—then citizens will have difficulty casting votes that reflect their interests and values and holding leaders accountable. Likewise, if truth often gives way to 'truthiness' in public discourse, then the mythical 'marketplace of ideas' may be more of a conceptual flea market. Instead of the best ideas rising to the top through vigorous but reasonable deliberation, the loudest and cheapest points of view are most likely to prevail.
If we look to the West, truth has been continually contested throughout Western history, says Alan Levine. Nietzsche described struggles over truth as 'truly grand politics,' because truth defines how people should live and the kind of political order that is justifiable. Once the key metaphysical truths are established, these constrain the range of possible answers to smaller questions. Every society has debates, but during ordinary times one conception of truth frames them, and society functions relatively smoothly because its struggles are contained within some shared parameters. Although the current American political debates are in the grand scheme of things relatively small—all sides, for the time being, seem committed to the republic—the horizon of our disagreements has expanded, making us feel that we have lost any community-based in truth.
Partisanship, culture wars, and the rise of illiberalism increasingly alienate us from one another, added Levine. Our separate realities are growing apart, with our commitment to a common understanding of truth itself in question. One side derides 'alternative facts' as a new low in shameless post-truth politics, the other denounces 'fake news' and the 'lamestream' media. Although the indignation on both sides shows that we still want to believe in a truth that transcends partisanship, the mutual recriminations have invested the question of truth with politically urgent passion.

The ancient and medieval thinkers sought to understand physical reality and the good and moral life. In short, they wanted to know how a human being should live. They were sure that questions of moral truth were essential, and this has led to charges of dogmatism against them. These charges are unfair because they were far from sure that the answers were attainable. They were open to the possibility that some few individuals might discover those truths (even this is uncertain), but they doubted a whole society could. They wanted to show what a full conception of truth would look like and urged attention to it as much as possible, while also offering politically useful advice on how to live in the absence of such truths. Above all, they insisted on the necessity of seeking the truth, as a human- izing practice, as a check on our worst impulses, as the most rational response to the paradoxes of justice and knowledge, and as itself the best life.
The emphasis on universal moral truth is generally considered to have begun with Socrates. Philosophers before Socrates distinguished between physis and nomos. Physis is the ancient Greek word for nature (from which we get physics) and nomos was their word for convention. The pre-Socratic thinkers noted that some things seemed to be universally true and others not. It is true everywhere that every living thing dies, fire flames up, and dropped objects fall down, but laws, religions, and moral codes vary from place to place. From these observations, they concluded that universal truth existed for physical but not moral things; moral things were made by human beings and existed only by convention. Socrates is credited as the first thinker to take seriously the existence of universal moral truth, moral truth for a human being as such.

Medieval thought also put truth above everything else, but unlike the ancient philosophers, medieval thinkers had to contend with the claims of revelation and of those who interpreted it. The religious traditions have a different standard of truth than the ancient pagan philosophers. Their touchstone is not nature but God. God was known through revelation, and His revelation truth to His prophets, recorded in scripture. In sum, the ancient and medieval philosophers take universal moral truth seriously based on humanity’s rational nature. Human virtues develop in political communities. Though individuals might transcend their community in terms of wisdom. The ancient and medieval thinkers exhort us to promote justice prudently, without undermining the community that is the source of so many human goods.
The modern turn away from the ancient and medieval conceptions of moral truth was prepared by Machiavelli, often considered the first modern political thinker because of his new attitude toward moral truth. Modern thinkers, like their ancient and medieval counterparts, indisputably loved truth, but the conceptions of truth in the different eras are quite different. The moderns prioritize human freedom and creativity and want to use their knowledge to make the world our own. The modern move to try to conquer nature contributed to the advances of science and technology but reduced moral truths to mere subjective values culminating in an age of moral nihilism.

The idea of post-truth has become increasingly important in describing today’s political life in particular and some important societal changes more broadly. The concept itself is intended to refer to, depending on interpretation, the primacy of unverified or outright fabricated claims in political debate, lack of general regard for truth within contemporary societies, dominance of emotion at the expense of knowledge, etc. Likewise, the evaluation of the post-truth condition ranges from outright rejection to acquiescence to dramatic scaremongering.
Post-truth is an age where politics no longer functions through rational discourse but, instead, political statements are carefully calculated to get attention, says Ignas Kalpokas. It is clear that in the post-truth environment, ‘facts’ simply no longer provide a reality that can be agreed upon. Somewhat paradoxically, this development could be seen as a side-effect of ‘evidence-based politics’ and other fact-intensive ways of managing political debate and the decision-making process: there has simply been such a proliferation of facts and fact-producers that trivialisation was a natural consequence; oversupply has led to depreciation in value.
All this can be seen in a broader context of promotionalism, which signals a state of commodity relations and market values being extended to cover every single domain of life; once that logic dominates and promotion becomes the norm, the person themselves, their relationships with other people and the broader environment, and political candidates as well, become truly post-truth, since honesty and lie, authenticity and spin lose their definite meanings: after all, everything becomes self-promotion. This is not exclusively a political issue: in a society characterized by competition that necessitates ‘hyper-competitive self-branding, bragging, hyperbole’, everybody is immersed in a series of post-truth games that involve weaving narratives out of statements and representations that are made in order to induce a desired result rather than due to their relation to verifable facts. Social media, meanwhile, is itself based around self-promotion: you are what you present (i.e. how you promote yourself), and it is that constant self-promotion that drives content creation, making other users entertained.
With the rise of social media and growing partisan polarization, concerns about the spread of misinformation and 'fake news' have never been greater. The existence of political rumors, conspiracy theories, and factually incorrect information that freely circulate via websites of dubious credibility and social media platforms, the political environment is saturated with information likely to mislead citizens.

Humans regularly contest unjust rules and vary their moral behavior in different circumstances. Sometimes we get it right, sometimes not. But the errors cannot be attributed to moral relativism. Hannah Arendt, was on to something very important when she wrote that the only convincing argument against murder is that 'I would not want to live in the presence of a murderer.' It is how we live with our moral acts that matter just as much as anything else, if not more so. Our condition is interpretive, and since we cannot escape from this condition, and our condition also involves a life among others in political communities, it seems perfectly sensible to embrace it in how we think about politics.
Political choices are about not keeping silent and recognizing that as members of a diverse society, it is incumbent upon us all to listen to each other’s narratives and to appreciate how our actions have consequences that are not direct. Political responsibility requires that we take the first kind of responsibility concerning our actions (we are accountable for our decisions and behaviour) but also that our choices implicate us in a wider range of societal and political effects. In this sense, who we align ourselves with requires that we accept the non-linear consequences of doing so.

In politics, it is the decision that transforms the activity of thinking and makes it public. It is through the decision that one enters into the hermeneutic circle, and in a public way. Since politics is about acting with other people and cannot only be in the activity of thinking, it does not matter that we might think of ourselves differently from how our actions suggest.
Our largely broken political system is a consequence of the distance by which the system exists from the lives of ordinary people. It is very hard to get involved. We have to make it easier for the public to participate in politics, to remove the role of private money and corporate influence. We need to empower the citizenry but also ensure that our citizenry has the resources and the tools to participate.
Our political class is a failure because we have enabled liars and cheats to ends up participating in politics and whether or not we actually think they are the right people. There is no equality of opportunity without also some equality of condition. We need to provide for a robust and universal system of care so that the greatest number of people possible have the opportunity to participate in a meaningful way.

Participatory aspects have long been present in theorizing about democracy and social movements, according to Donatella della Porta. Decisional processes in which, under conditions of equality, inclusiveness, and transparency, a communicative process based on reason (the strength of a good argument) may transform individual preferences, leading to decisions oriented to the public good referred to as Deliberative participatory democracy. In particular, deliberative democracy ‘requires some forms of apparent equality among citizens’; in fact, deliberation takes place among free and equal citizens (as ‘free deliberation among equals’). At a minimum, ‘all citizens must be able to develop those capacities that give them effective access to the public sphere’, and ‘once in public, they must be given sufﬁcient respect and recognition so as to be able to inﬂuence decisions that affect them in a favourable direction’. Deliberation must exclude power deriving from coercion but also an unequal weighting of the participants as representatives of organizations of different sizes or as more inﬂuential individuals.
Also common to traditional conceptions of participatory democracy is the emphasis on inclusiveness. All citizens with a stake in the decisions to be taken must be included in the process and able to express their views. This means that the deliberative process takes place under conditions of plurality of values, including people with different perspectives but facing common problems. This is also a central premise of deliberative conceptions, as deliberation (or even communication) is based upon the belief. Moreover, transparency resonates with direct, participatory democracy: assemblies are typically open, public spheres. A deliberative democracy is an association whose affairs are governed by the public deliberation of its members.

Deliberative democracy requires the transformation of preferences in interaction’; it is a process through which initial preferences are transformed in order to take into account the points of view of the others. In this sense, deliberative democracy differs from conceptions of democracy as the aggregation of (exogenously generated) preferences. A deliberative setting facilitates the search for a common end or good. In this model of democracy, the political debate is organized around alternative conceptions of the public good, and, above all, it draws identities and citizens interests in ways that contribute to public building of public good.
In particular, deliberative democracy stresses reason, argumentation, and dialogue: people are convinced by the force of the better argument. Deliberation is based on horizontal ﬂows of communication, multiple producers of content, wide opportunities for interactivity, confrontation based on rational argumentation, and attitude to reciprocal listening. Decisions rely upon arguments that participants recognize as reasonable. These conceptions also often refer to practices of consensus, with decisions approvable by all participants–in contrast with majority rule, where decisions are legitimated by vote.

We'll continue this kind of Democracy in the next fragment. Bi 'idhnillah."

And before getting into the next episode, Senduro lifted up her voice,

In the day, in the night
Say it right, say it all
You either got it or you don't
You either stand or you fall *)