© Adaptive Curmudgeon. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author is prohibited. Also it's lame.
Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
“Coimhéad fearg fhear na foighde”
Beware of the anger of a patient man.
I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.
In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.
With the greatest of respect to the original author and to yourself, that quotation leaves out one very important point.
Truth isn’t subjective, but objective. It has an existence, a reality, independent of the world-view, or perspective, or ideological limitations, of anyone seeking it. If it’s not objective, it isn’t universally true, but only true in certain situations or for a given combination of factors – in other words, it’s not true all the time for everyone.
So, for an ‘honest man’ to ‘see the truth’, this necessarily implies that:
1. He is capable of ‘seeing’ a ‘truth’ that has, until now, been outside his perspective or frame of reference;
2. He is able to make the conceptual leap that will allow him to recognize (1) as the truth;
3. He is able to overcome the prior ‘conditioning’ (childhood upbringing, limitations of his present world-view, cultural constraints, etc.) that have previously prevented him from accepting the existence of an alternate ‘truth’, and adopting that ‘truth’ in preference to the ‘truths’ he had previously accepted as true.
This also means that religious ‘truth’, being non-scientific and therefore non-objective in a physical sense (i.e. it can’t be evaluated outside the human mind and the theological/ideological framework of that religion’s particular ‘revelation’ or frame of reference), can’t be something that can be independently, objectively assessed and declared to be THE ‘truth’. Tricky, that . . . but it also applies to many non-religious fields. Witness, for example, the climate change debate! “We can’t wait for science to prove or disprove our claims – this is too important! We must act NOW!”
Sheesh . . . !!!