ovowz017 ‘Truth and Pretext
Truth and Pretext
by Olavo de Carvalho
‘0 Globo, Rio de Janeiro, May 27'", 2000
‘Translated by Daniel Brilhante de Brito
(http://www.dbb.com.br)
Sceptics, relativists and pragmatists, who champion the idea
that knowledge is something merely functional, operational
have the grandest of pretences, namely that in a democracy
rigorous, proven truth will undermine the health of the body
politic. They suggest that if you claim to know the truth itis
because you are utterly intolerant of adverse opinion. Such is
their point. They then set out to argue that you can prove
nothing whatever; and will go on to claim that the world will
not be happy until all the theories have cancelled out one
another, and mankind has finally acknowledged that there is no
such thing as truth; that whatever goes under this name are just
figments. These, again, are only provisional, if useful in nature.
Once you have abolished the test of truth, all ideas have just
about the same value. At this stage, you will have perfect
democracy.
People used to judging ideas by their face value, and this means
nearly the whole of the human race, will not think twice before
jumping to this conclusion, if only because from their
s
ndpoint they are flattered to find out that their opinions
being as useful and as provisional as any other these can
justifiably be ranked beside those of Aristotle and Leibnitz,
But this persuasive set of appearances leaves out the plain,
brutal fact that neither of this century's major brands of
totalitarianism - Communism or Nazism — accepted the
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“ruthand Preto
existence of an objective truth; much to the contrary their tenet
was that ideas, rather than instrumental to the knowledge of
the real world were just tools that could be used to change it.
Karl Marx was explicit on his head in his “Theses on
Feuerbach". One odd peculiarity of the Marxist view is the
notion that History cannot be approached ‘from the outside’;
nor for that matter can its unfathomable depths be explored
theoretically other than by a subject who as a preliminary step
has himself joined the cause of the proletariat; for not until the
subject is personally engaged in the working class struggle is he
expected to grasp the revolutionary process from within, in
other words, the dialectic process itself through which this
process evolves. When he claimed that class war was
inextricably both a scientific theory and the rule of thumb for
the revolutionary praxis, Marx distorted the very idea of,
‘scientific theory’. Stripped of its role as an intellectual
synthesis of objective findings, scientific theory was no more
than a means of producing or modifying these findings in
retrospect to fit the theory.
Nobody grasped this notion so thoroughly as did Lenin when
he found that a proletarian revolution was conceivable in a
nation where no proletariat existed; all that was needed was for
a self-appointed élite of future proletarians to take over, and
once in power to set about creating a proletariat.
Even more blatantly instrumental and pragmatic was Adolf
Hitler’s idea of truth. As reported by Hermann Rauschning in
his "Conversations with Hitler"(1940), he said, "am quite
aware that in a scientific sense there is no such thing as ‘races’.
But as a politician I must have a concept to justify the
destruction of the existing order to give place to a new one."
This is as though the ghost of Karl Marx were haunting his
surroundings ~ the world, after all, is not meant to be
described, but changed.
He who would believe an objective truth will look for one and
put it to the test of proof. Conversely, he who will reduce the
truth to a tool of change for the world cannot abide the onus of,
proof, all he has to do is to eliminate whoever stands in the way
as an obstacle to change.ovowz017
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‘Truth and Pretext
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