"Perception Is Truth..."

people often say. No, it isn't. Truth is truth, and unless your perception coincides with what is true, then your perception is, quite simply, wrong.

This phrase, "perception is truth", was the maxim of my previous boss; outwardly, and being charitable, it is a nice, liberal, inclusive, all-encompassing idea. It's like the liberal idea of tolerance...which turns out to be fundamentally ILliberal: tolerating every opinion, every viewpoint, means de facto giving them all equal weight, equal validity which, in effect, means abandoning all criteria for judging between different opinions, and becoming unable, simply, to sort out the wheat from the chaff. When it comes to opinions about mayonnaise, it doesn't really matter; however, when it comes to anything substantial, the implications are enormous. You must (logically) en up tolerating the intolerable, accepting anything...even to the point of accepting those views which seek to suppress yours and you. "How do you see things? Let's listen to you and we'll talk about it." If other people en masse 'perceive' you to be wrong, then clearly you have a problem; if they 'perceive' you to be correct, it is because you are telling people what they already believe about things they already accept.So, it turns out, only certain 'perceptions' are 'truth.'

http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2005/percipi-est-esse/

In reality, it is a placebo, a way of inducing acceptance of the status quo. What is my perception of what is happening in Greece? In Thailand? It turns out that my perception of these events, if it doesn't accord with what economists want my perception to be, then I am somehow mis-perceiving; my viewpoint, my opinion, is still valid, of course, still welcomed, my voice is still listened to...but wrong. If, however, my perception does fall into line with what the clearing banks and the credit agencies, the IMF and the EU say, then I am seeing things clearly. John Pilger, then, must quite simply be wrong, but isn't it great that he's allowed to express his opinion. John Stuart Mill would be proud...

http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2010/05/greece-pilger-britain-imf

Eons ago, the Scottish Philosopher David Hume explained what he called the 'is/ought gap': facts are facts, and values are values. Ethical principles cannot be decided by appeal to empirical reality. Morality, in short, cannot be made a slave to what actually is the state of affairs in the world. The point of ethics is to determine what OUGHT to be the case, not to reflect what IS the case; once you even begin to allow facts to determine ethical principles, then you are caught up in the same logic as that expressed above, viz., that you have to accept that whatever IS happening must, by dint of the fact that it is happening, OUGHT to happen. Simply, however, irrespective of how things are, certain things are wrong, and certain things are right. No matter how many Palestinian bodies the Israelis pile up, killing is still wrong; statistics are not going to settle the issue. One life taken or a thousand will not change the morality of the issue. What is sauce for the goose, however, is sauce for the gander: state execution (with or without a 'fair' trial) is wrong, no matter how much under pressure Hamas feels it is, no matter how many Israeli collaborators they uncover. No matter how large the debt run up by the Greek government, an office worker in Lamia is still not responsible for it. Whether that debt is one euro or a billion, "austerity measures" that 'target' this office worker are wrong.

However...all of this is just my perception. It turns out that I have been listening to the Rong Radio Station....