Why We Must Never Abandon The Truth

 “In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it.”
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Book 1, Chapter VII

Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony explains how the ruling class, the bourgeoisie, maintained its power using the culture. According to him, cultural hegemony allowed the dominants to legitimize particular social norms for all. In other words, shared values are just tools created by the so-called oppressing class to keep the oppressed classes under control, and the same principle applies for rationalism and objective truth.

In his essay “Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison” (1975), the French postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault argues that human knowledge (e.g.: scientific knowledge, truths, etc) are ultimately only expressions of power, products of cultures as well as being inextricably linked with political, social, and economic power relations.

In “The Archaeology of Knowledge” (1969), Foucault affirms that each period has a structure of thought, an “épistémè” i.e. the way a society thinks at any given moment, which imposes the same inescapable norms and postulates to all in a particular time. Only the shift from one épistémè to another would allow for new discoveries, which previously would have been viewed as entirely illogical, while simultaneously limiting the formation of original ideas.

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In summary, power dictates the terms of knowledge. Therefore power dictates what is true. There is never mere power or mere knowledge but only power knowledge. Truths are socially constructed by the dominant (oppressive) structures of the time and used to maintain their supremacy.

In addition, our knowledge, rather than being universal and undeniably objective is in fact specific to a particular moment in history. Therefore, what is considered logical and reasonable might also be historically contingent.

And so, similarly to Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, Foucault’s idea of power-knowledge presupposed that what is regarded as being the truth is socially and politically validated by the prevalent power of the time.

In line with those theories, progressivist philosophers of the new left established that power is entrenched through accepted forms of knowledge. The dominant’s “design truths” to assert their control. In society, there is no such thing as shared values but only group values, specifically those imposed by the oppressive classes to maintain their authority e.g. whiteness, white supremacy, and patriarchy.

Gramsci believed that a cultural revolution needed to occur before a political revolution was possible.  The “long march through the institutions”, the infiltrations of schools, universities, churches, and the media. He called for a transformation of the consciousness of the masses, a counter-hegemony of some sort, and the transfusion of new values into society.

Nowadays, his ideological disciples have penetrated the cultural and scientific institutions. They began their war against rationalism and objective truth regarded as being nothing more than oppressive structures. 

Accordingly, they petition for “decolonization” of schools’ curricula. They turned history into a Manichean narrative in which the West is unconditionally guilty of all evils (slavery, colonization, racism, etc) and they taught with critical race theory that only white people can be racists.

Those woke militants have also reformed science into a propaganda tool. We are meant to believe that biological sex is not binary but a spectrum, that our gender is assigned at birth by doctors, and that it is down to an arbitrary decision, a social construct rather than a biological reality.

Yet, science clearly acknowledges that there are only two sexes determined by the kinds of gametes produced – large, immobile eggs for females and very small mobile sperm for males. Besides, hermaphrodite cases (people who simply combine both male and female gametes) are extremely rare (0.018%). 

We should also accept that the behavioral and biological differences between individuals, especially men and women, are only down to social consideration. For instance, maternal instinct is supposedly a misogynistic myth created by men. 

However, multiple studies show that in humans and thousands of animal species (thus not impacted by social pressure), oestrogen prompts the cells in the medial preoptic area (MPOA) of the female brain to produce oxytocin receptors and that an increase of this hormone’s level was significantly related to the affectionate attitudes observed in mothers. 

The variation of spatial ability between sexes is another example of disparities explained by biological causes. The superiority of men over women is indeed due to the structure of their parietal lobe.

Already, in the ’40s, the Soviet agronomist Trofim Denisovich Lysenko argued that there were two sciences: a capitalist science, inspired by Darwinism and based on genetics, and a revolutionary proletarian science, necessarily valid because morals, inspired by Lamarckism, presupposing adaptation in response to environmental change.

Lysenko refuted the theory of ​​natural selection and competition between individuals. He viewed the idea that only the strongest would survive as bourgeois science. He claimed that plants of the same species were on the contrary cooperating. Thus, he believed that in a hostile or arid ecosystem, thanks to their collaboration, seeds, and grains of identical varieties would grow better if sown in high density: they will triumph collectively by sharing resources.

Thanks to Stalin’s support, Lysenko became director of the Institute of Genetics, a position he would hold until 1965. He dismissed many Darwinist scholars, sending to the gulags those identified as enemies of the proletariat i.e. those discrediting his work.

Despite disappointing findings, Lysenko’s method was exported to China in 1958, the party privileging ideology over truth. As a result, a great famine caused 15 to 55 million deaths in the 3 years that followed.

Lysenko also attempted to change one species into another by transmutation (e.g.: wheat into rye and vice versa) without success. In addition, he asserted that the yields of dairy cows were not related to their genetic heritage but to their environment and the way farmers treated them.

Lysenko’s failures were hidden behind falsified data. Darwinist evidence was ignored in order to put science in the service of the Soviet ideology and impose a consensus.

Similarly, nowadays, for the neo-Lysenkists from the new left, there is good and bad science: An oppressive science based on genetics claiming for instance that only women can get pregnant, and a progressive science, manipulating facts, claiming for instance that transwomen are real women.

However, in this war against the truth, only strict repressive legislation may enforce the acceptance of the illogical, and shape the law of nature to fit the ideology. And so, in order to survive, the postmodern dogmas need to impose the gradual disappearance of truth to the masses … by will or by force.

In his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell warned us that in order to protect ourselves from the authoritarian, we must never abandon the truth.

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Book 1, Chapter VII.