The “Death of Truth”. A new book by Steven Brill

 

The “Death of Truth”.  A new book by Steven Brill

RE:  This 4^th of July...2024 and the 2-5-0 Celebration of the Declaration’s universal wisdom offered 11 years before the creation of the United States Constitution.

Brill blames our bad media diets for the current state of the world.   This assertion may not be true, but this free blog book “Truths be told: Failing the Seven Cs” is an attempt to answer the January 2017 Time magazine cover page story on Trump was inaugurated, “Is Truth Dead?”.  Exactly 50 years earlier TIME used exactly same unique cover page with the words “Is God Dead? in white letters, on an entirely black page thinly boarded in red.  After the Fact checkers verified all the lies, misinformation, and pure poppycock spewing from mostly one candidate in the recent Presidential contest its truthful to say that if Trump is elected truth will be on increasingly critical life support.  And a sustainable remedy is urgently needed.

What many Americans and much of humanity fails to grasp is the ‘one sidedness’ of truth.  Neil deGrasse Tyson wisely and correctly asserted that our minds possess three kinds of truth.   The first is our personal truth. What God do we believe in or not.  There are plenty of sides to this truth that may never be agreed upon.   The second is our political truths.  And again, there is no limit to the sides of this increasingly polarizing species of truth.  The globally accepted ‘one sided truth’ is determined by objective analysis. It has provided all of humanity with profoundly useful technologies, lifesaving, profitable, and applicable for good or bad.  Communication, transportation, medicine, banking, and life prolonging preventive health measures along with unprecedentedly powerful weapon systems enabling any one disgruntled nation or leader to affordably and globally end all life as we know it.  Because “Everything is connected, everything is interdependent, so everything is vulnerable.... And that’s why this has to be a more than whole of government, a more than whole of nation [effort]. It really has to be a global effort....” Jen Easterly. CISA director.  Oct. 29, 2021. [the Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency is our nation’s newest federal agency established by the Trump Administration in 2018].  Don’t forget that earth’s natural environment is the most fundamental and essential infrastructure for all life on this increasingly troubled planet.

So, after this past Fourth of July, instead of celebrating our mental delusion of independence, we should be thinking hard and deep about the profound words beginning the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, “WE hold these truths to be self-evident”.   

While most Americans and others around the world are blessed with abundance, we have taken it for granted for too long while redefining happiness.  It is not about a fleeting ‘feeling good”.  Humanity will never truly achieve the deeper and longer lasting happiness that was imagined when that word was written.  Then it was a deep contentment with finding, creating, and applying one’s talents and using them in service to those they loved and others in their community.  With the most fundamental intent of ensuring the protection of their freedom, security, prosperity, and posterity as Thomas Paine wrote about in his “Common Sense” pamphlet that predated the writing of the Declaration of Independence.

Today our global community allows wars, genocides, violent extremism, extreme lethal weather events, hunger, starvation, economic instability, unsustainable national debts, and the global spread of pandemics along with other lethal and debilitating infectious diseases.   Most of which are affordably preventable.   But our existing global governance system created after the Second World War was never given the power to do this.  

Humanities’ greatest success remains the global eradicate the Smallpox.   That 10-year effort saved more lives in last century than all the lives lost in all the wars, revolutions, and genocides combined during the same century.   Given that everything is connected interdependent and vulnerable, such a global effort is increasingly and urgently needed for nearly all the threats we all face today. 

Our 2024 Fourth of July Americans did not celebrate any commitment to prevention.  Or a plan for achieving any of the seven intentions in our Constitution’s preamble.   We must not remain intentionally ignorant of the most profound set of laws offered in the first sentence of our Declaration of Independence.  This comprehensive set of laws can sustainably protect everyone’s alienable rights.   The most basic rights based on “the Laws of Nature and Nature‘s God” and the profound truth that humanity must take care of nature and each other if we intend to preserve our freedoms and security.  And achieve each of the seven intentions in our U.S. Constitution’s preamble.  The same intentions that every population in every nation aspires to achieve. 

The Declaration was made in north America but as Abraham Lincoln said, “the Declaration” is “For all People, at All Times, Everywhere.”.   In fact, every major religion in the world is founded on the primary law of God -the Golden Rule.” 

Abraham Lincoln once wrote that our Declaration of Independence is our “Apple of Gold” and our constitution its “Frame of Silver”.   Unfortunately, our Constitution is based on the illusion of independence between nations.  And we believe we are independent of each other.  But this is a mental delusion.  Independence exists nowhere in the known universe.  And living with this illusion we can only expect increasing chaos at every level.   

Humanity all exists in an entirely interdependent reality.  And until we accept this fundamental truth nothing is safe, secure, or sustainable.   It is our lack of virtue that killing us, others, and the planet’s natural life support systems.  

Benjimen Franklin said “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”   Artificial Intelligence might is not the master we want but if we fail to gain wisdom from our collective intelligence and actions, AI may be our species only hope, or greatest error.

"We have no government armed in power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our Constitution was made only for a religious and moral people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other."  -- John Adams   (1735-1826) Founding Father, 2nd US President Source: Oct. 11, 1798; Address to the military

“Our Constitution is in actual operation; everything appears to promise that it will last; but in this world nothing is certain but death taxes.”  -- Benjamin Franklin

Our national and global governance systems based on the illusion of independence was created 400 years ago.   It’s way past time we created a global governance system that is true to our reality of interdependence and our flag pledge of “liberty and Justice for all”.

“A great part of that order which reigns among mankind is not the effect of government. It had its origin in the principles of society and the natural constitution of man. It existed prior to government, and would exist if the formality of government was abolished. The mutual dependence and reciprocal interest which man has upon man, and all parts of a civilized community upon each other, create that great chain of connection which holds it together. The landholder, the farmer, the manufacturer, the merchant, the tradesman, and every occupation, prospers by the aid which each receives from the other, and from the whole. Common interest regulates their concerns, and forms their laws; and the laws which common usage ordains, have a greater influence than the laws of government. In fine, society performs for itself almost everything which is ascribed to government.  – Thomas Paine, Rights of Man [1791]

If we truly intend to achieve each of the seven intentions in our Constitution, we need to amend it to codify this fundamental truth.  ‘Everything is connected, interdependent, and vulnerable.  And a global effort is needed.’   Only this will make America Great Again and prevent our republic from meeting the same end as Rome.   “We the people” need to rethink and do more than react to this fundamental truth.  It’s this or prepare for the consequences.

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” 

James Baldwin

 

If you have any doubts left that our Declaration of Independence is not a universal document applicable to all people, in all places, for all time - please watch this seven-minute video regarding Abraham Lincoln’s persistent belief  “The Declaration - For all People, at All Times, Everywhere.”  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcxysVRmy5Q

And when he wrote that the Declaration is our “Apple of Gold” and the our Constitution its “Frame of Silver” was inspired by a proverb “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver” ~Proverbs 25:11