Um I’m not someone who depends on institutions for change. I’m a revolutionary Marxist who wants to tear down the system of capitalism and the imperialist state, not some liberal.

So I can tell you’ve spent some time thinking about these problems of philosophy, which is great! But I’m afraid there are telltale signs of your unfamiliarity with these topics. Its okay, I’m also a great admirer of the Tao Te Ching and the I Ching, both of which deal directly with the dialectical form of reason that I’ll try to describe here briefly as I can, though its a huge topic I’m still wrapping my mind around and actively learning. As such, I can recognize and hope that our “ways” are similar since you are asking many questions that I have asked and sought answers for. But you aren’t there yet and I’ll show you where you are tripping up.

You make this case that there is no objective truth, and on that we certainly agree. But where you are mistaken is the empiricist fallacy that because the subject, in this case truth, lacks empirical objectivity, it therefore lacks realness. This is the problem with Kantian dualism which is the main way that we assemble meaning out of our experience, since the industrial revolution in the modern era. It is too common for sophists like Sam Harris to point to a blurry objectivity and claim nonexistence, and also for people who are seeking education on this topic to buy into this ridiculous modern myth.

You see it is dualism that compulsively categorizes, evaluates, alienates objects so that our reality appears as an assemblage of discreet things interacting with one another. This particular ontology (which is the name for the problem you have solved by flushing it down the intellectual toilet like one of your shits, the word means “theory of being”) struggles to find real subjects. So unless you want to throw away all subjectivity, which by quoting Descartes you claim is the only provable subject, you can’t dispense with truth, because you rely on a version of it for your own arguments, except you make a strawman of mine due to the shallowness of your own understanding. So I’m sorry, there is truth and meaning even if its inconvenient for your ego. Idk if this works on other people but you’re barking up the wrong tree. The philosophy you describe is like a characature of a fictional villain supergenius, who upon revealing their master plan also revels their philosophical motive which is actually extremely dumb and shallow. It doesn’t matter how sinisterly you laugh, I ain’t buying it. You didn’t do the reading, I can tell dude.

The philosopher you were trying to quote about Truth/Power is Michel Foucault. Who is an interesting thinker! I’ve read Power/Knowledge and I’m reading history of sexuality.

Anyway, what if we have different ontologies? What if we use the same words but they have different meanings which create an epistemological crisis? Another failure of popular reasoning is the Greek idea that a logical contradiction is a sign of error. However, it has been mathematically proven (mathematics itself a theory of formal, if abstract, knowledge) that every logical system contains breaking contradictions, and any attempts to “fix” these contradictions leads only to new sets of contradictions (Gödel’s incompleteness theorem.) Even formal arithmetic can he exploited cleverly in order to make an equation where 1 = 0. When I learned this, I thought much the way that you do because I was still locked into my dualist way of thinking that turns reality into objects. How can contradictions in every logical system and every ontology lead to any conclusion other than there is no objective truth?

And the answer is that objectivity is not all there is to reality, as you so thoroughly pointed out. The contradiction that you made in your theory of no truth can be rectified by uniting the subject and the object and understanding that instead of separating these things as the dualists do, that actually the subject and object are united in contradiction. Lao Tsu was the master at this, which is why i have hope for you.

As soon as beauty is known by the world as beautiful, it becomes ugly.

As soon as virtue is being known as something good, it becomes evil.

Therefore being and non-being give birth to each other.

Difficult and easy accomplish each other.

Long and short form each other.

High and low distinguish each other.

Sound and tone harmonize each other

Before and after follow each other as a sequence.

Realizing this, the master performs effortlessly according to the natural Way

You are finding the pieces of the puzzle but haven’t put them together quite yet, there are still missing pieces. But with intellectual work often these gaps are invisible to us until we have enough of the facts uncovered so that the limits of our knowledge stop appearing as the edges of reality and begin to appear as gaps in understanding. You not only don’t understand my ideas, you don’t understand what you think are your own ideas. That’s okay, it just means we have work to do.

The word for this kind of reasoning, this ontology, is dialectics, and it has a long history both in eastern religion but also esoteric hermeticism which influenced much of Hegel’s philosophy. Hegel reforged dialectical reasoning and developed a theory of history that surpassed Kant’s dualist libertarianism. In the subsequent century Hegel scholars elaborated on Hegels theory of history and oneness, and began to fuse his dialectical reasoning with French materialism which was in vogue at the time but suffered from the same limitations of dualism which it had failed to surpass. Feuerbach managed to make a lot of extraordinary conclusions from this unity and coined the term dialectical materialism, but the master of dialectical materialism was certainly Karl Marx. However it was his collaborator Engels who penned the work Anti-Duhring which laid the foundation for future generations of dialectical materialists. In it he puts forward a few rules which I might describe for you but you can also look them up yourself, they are described in the first section of the book, on philosophy. If you want to know more I’d be happy to go into more detail. He’s a pretty digestible author, and I think you’ll like his seething disdain for the illusions and idealism of the ruling class. That is who we need to surpass, not each other, but them. Or maybe who we were yesterday, as rise and grind of a mentality as that is, nothing is static and everything, including our selves, is becoming something else. What it is that we become is a matter for free will and circumstances to decide.

I won’t make an exhaustive case for the efficacy and predictive power of this kind of analysis, for that I would encourage you to read Engel’s Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, particularly the last two sections on dialectics and Historical Materialism. Without that shared basis on which to discuss we will likely talk past each other from this point on.

Its also easy to assert that I’m just saying that the form of logic that I like is the one that determines truth. That’s not it, but I do believe that it is possible to determine what is true and real from a particular logical system, only that certain systems are better than others for solving certain problems. We have a scientific method (which also has limits) for determining the efficacy of any methodology, and without relying on the truth and realness of its conclusions we couldn’t have the advanced society that we have. Here is where we differ. You still subscribe to idealism, which implies that our thoughts change our environment, but you’ve found the limits of idealism and its made you determine there is no truth. Materialism asserts that the environment affects our ideas, which seems self evident in one regard but is almost completely alien to our popular conceptions. You haven’t even begun to explore this, at least you’ve given no indication of it. This is where you might continue your journey. I would choose the intellectual tools I need to solve a particular problem, not claim the tools are worthless because it can’t solve this particular problem, or that the problem is unsolvable. If I’m looking at history I use a historical perspective, if looking at figures, mathematical; this is something you can do and have done, but because you haven’t sufficiently questioned the overarching ontology of our era (and all ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class, consider this!) its led you to the negation of meaning. But instead of stopping your inquiry at the discovery of a contradiction, this is where we would start our inquiry, since the presence of a contradiction implies the presence of a dialectical opposite, such that our subject is merely a part of a system, a monistic whole, which modern logic utterly sucks at detecting even though it is apparent to anyone with sense abilities and a subjective mind to experience them.

I appreciate your comments, and apologize for any “intellectual arrogance” I don’t mean to be like patronizing, I’m just having a bit of fun. Bourdieu once wrote something like, when you express any strong opinion you make a clown out of yourself, and so that’s all I’m doing, a bit of clowning. However the assertion that I havent though as deeply as you have on this issue, or that I’m adhering to some orthodoxy that blinds me to the truth that there is no truth (lol) is perhaps the biggest clown of all.

There’s likely much you could school me on, but not this, at least, not yet! But I also believe that discussion is the medium through which much personal growth becomes possible, which is why I actually like to discuss this stuff, not to clown or debate but to grow.