What matters?
Truth without virtue is sterile; logic without love is cold.
Narcissism always means love only of self. Not, naturally, that narcissists understand this.
Truth without relation is vanity; virtue without others is illusion.
But truth is often warped. Subjective. Partial.
Truth lives only in relation; fixed, it becomes a weapon.
This ain’t it, either. Because pathological liberalism, reformist thinkers and self gratification reframe fixed truths situationally. Or sensationally. Breaking ‘their’ own rules (of course).
When truth serves likeness, it becomes vanity; when it faces difference, it becomes justice.
Or perhaps, to challenge some assholes to be better.
When truth serves comfort, it becomes propaganda; when it serves accountability, it becomes justice.
Those assholes, particularly in the case of extremism — rife, tend to distort the world to their whim. To tell themselves and others ‘stories’.
At the same time those filled with unprocessed rage and juvenile emotional skills who coalesce those assholes become them. Or worse, shallower clones of them.
The louder the echo, the smaller the world it encloses.
Echo chambers promise safety but deliver solitude. They trade belonging for blindness. Or just betray known and felt truth for personal gain. Gotta make the money, they often say.
Truth lives not in agreement but in encounter. And diverse encounter. But how, we’ve just squared on:
Communities polluted, flooded with anger, self-interest, and manipulative affect. Then, I’d gesture, staying true becomes an act of discipline, tenderness, and vigilance. For self, with others.
So, without wanting to wax narcissistic, maybe our questions to self could be: Is this reaction defending life, or ego? Does this strengthen relation, or fracture it?
Stay open enough to be changed by love, and steady enough not to be changed by hate.
Online, the architecture rewards immediacy and agreement: likes, shares, reactions. Truth becomes performative resonance: what travels fastest feels truest. And we know violent extremists are famous in social media forums, not storytellers. Relational ethics collapse into visibility metrics. Reciprocity turns into feedback.
Or in formal structures of “knowledge” (yuck):
Scholarship without relation becomes bureaucracy; knowledge without reciprocal humility becomes empire.
But we can keep following these turns and twists. Because community offers more robust wisdom.
We don’t seek truth; we keep sense alive between us, and through the fabric of place.
Or I suppose, meaning gathers; truth divides. Because the ‘weight’ truth gathers from (‘enlightenment’) relics positions it as universal. Perhaps something on integrity but even this is lost in ‘morality’ and conquest with vainglorious epitaphs.
Need for truth misbalances; relation seeks homes with balance.
To be human is to err and to stay human is to make repair(s). Be faithful to what exceeds you, listen, return, repair again. I think may be as close as we can get in one sitting, I’m clearly losing the plot… lol
But I will say this as a closing thought, bookshelves are tombs of conquest’s knowledge. Taking fresh breath, returning from the dead 🧟, I suppose, is answering back to the world that made you, in your reciprocity and responsibility.
Then, knowing is not owning. To know humbly is to listen, to share, to build with. Living is to keep the circle open, to let knowledge breathe as relation, not remain as record.
Dialogue and reciprocity. All in a days work.
