How groupthink replaces truth

When did facts or verifiable evidence get replaced by consensus within a specific community that continually repeats collectively held ideas or feelings? And is this trend why, everywhere we look, demonstrable truth is becoming subservient to imagination? Do we now live in a world where truth-seeking is taking a back seat to groupthink?

As far back as the 1980s, when regular folks were confronted with mics and asked for their man-on-the-street opinions on everything from when life begins to tactical strategy for war, I remember thinking, “This practice is going to be a problem.”

What happens to the fabric of society if what one personally believes attains precedence over what is proven to be true?

Why?

Because for the past 40 years or so, subjective constructs have been elevated to the status of fact and given far more credibility than verifiable truth. As if fallible human feelings determine what is true — they do not.

Granted, opinions are relative; we all have them, and in America, we can still freely express our point of view. This is also true of individual preferences and judgments, which remain relative. But more and more, people treat fictional beliefs and unsubstantiated claims as factual simply because large, loud, and strongly opinionated groups adopt and agree upon them.

Thus culture has become a delusional world where definitions can be altered to protect belief and political identity determines what is considered true or false.

This penchant for self-determined reality makes healthy debate almost impossible because what’s considered correct becomes tainted by distinctions shaped by a consensus around feelings rather than by credible substantiation.

The perversion of truth is increasingly evident in definitions of male and female, as well as in criteria defining human life.

Contemporary progressives seem most culpable for elevating subjectivism, self-perceived identity, and personal opinion above facts. Partisans on the left are so committed to redefining everything that moral or political debate has devolved into a one-way assault of accusations, denial, and the exaltation of fantastical beliefs.

One skill set missing from the relativists’ playbook is logic.

Viewed logically, calling something “my truth” concedes that whatever you believe or promote is personal rather than universally established as a certainty. The fallacy of “my truth” becomes most heated around topics like the dignity of life in the womb, biological sex, and who should ultimately bear personal responsibility when an “oppressed” woman commits a criminal act.

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That is where we have witnessed the tendency to promote personal opinion over what is morally, biologically, historically, legally, and philosophically accepted.

This is especially true when pro-life and pro-choice opinions clash. One side aligns with 95% of 5,502 biologists who agreed that human life begins at fertilization. Despite biological assurance, however, one side insists that a woman’s choice supersedes truth.

The looming danger is that if moral relativism continues to gain credibility, right and wrong vanish and opinion rules. The bad news is that opinions change, which means that on a collective whim, every life at whatever stage could become justifiably disposable.

What happens to the fabric of society if what one personally believes attains precedence over what is proven to be true?

What we have seen lately is that morally relativistic people are so steeped in the certainty that their opinions are correct that they applaud themselves for exposing those they view as evil, which seems not only an estimable goal but also a justification for violence.

Societal relativism has reached a boiling point and has put innocent individuals in the literal crosshairs of vigilantes responding to sentiments widely accepted as true.

According to this moral barometer, a conservative influencer can be assassinated publicly, and some who feel morally convicted by his views on biblical matters, politics, and traditional male and female roles think it’s fitting to cheer his death.

And these are the people who fancy themselves kindness warriors?

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Among progressives, this pattern has evolved to the point that a devoted husband and father like Charlie Kirk is derided, while a woman who admitted to strangling her three children is defended and supported by female activists who have convinced themselves that children are disposable and women are an oppressed class.

Because of political differences, these same women feel justified in demonizing Kirk’s grieving widow merely because she holds the same conservative convictions as her dead husband.

These people have convinced themselves that, based on personal opinion alone, Patrick Clancy should be strung up, drawn, and quartered and that one black, male juror, who they have collectively concluded is also guilty by reason of maleness, deserves condemnation.

As if feelings and thoughts were evidence, some online defenders have made extraordinary accusations against Patrick Clancy, not on demonstrable proof but solely on a fairy tale they have concocted in their own toxic minds.

So the kind of psychosis that accompanies the delusional reality our culture is currently steeped in — especially in political debate — has now been deemed the authority to determine who is considered insane by the insane?

If carried to its logical conclusion, a relativistic mind meld can lead to mob rule, which is now depicted as “democracy,” a political system in which the potential exists to have an innocent individual dragged to the guillotine merely because the crowd believed he or she deserved it.

We see this now when evidentiary truth is automatically dismissed as coming from the wrong source. Yet the truth remains true even if no one believes it; reality cannot be reinvented to suit our fallible human proclivities.

As Flannery O’Connor once wrote, “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally,” a more than 70-year-old observation that supports the contemporary idea that the clash between human self-deception and moral reality is nothing new.