GIMME SOME TRUTH
One of many reasons I dislike John Lennon's 'Imagine,' other than the fact it is a dreary dog of a song, is that many of the people who like it are moral, political, and intellectual cowards who affirm banalities and inanities that anyone can agree with - let's all live at one in peace etc - without addressing any of the hard questions that require an answer if we are to move from the divided here to the unified there. The thing they love most of about the song is the invitation to stop thinking.
'Gimme some truth!' Lennon also screamed, damning politics, money, and religion in the process. These are all obvious and easy targets. It is the easiest thing in the world to reject conventions and institutions; the hard part is to identify that truth yourself, and embody it and live it in relation to others. Don't demand of others that they give you the truth, you seek it and find it yourself, express it and offer it - and address the hard questions of embodiment and institutionalization. Fail to do that, and I'll presume that you are a six-year old demanding all nice things from others, a comsumer of others' efforts, never putting a shift in and being a producer yourself.
I don't much care for Lennon and Lennonists, they have the smell of narcissism and entitlement all over them. The same with respect to those in the autism community who claim to stand on some external Archimedean vantage point of superior logic, denouncing the impurity and inauthenticity of the social world and all who contribute to it. It's a superiority complex that allows people to claim to alone to want and see the truth, without having to the hard part and live it in the practical social world of institutions and systems.
I don't let people use theoretical reason as an impossible standard by which to denounce those who live by practical reason - I insist that they address the hard questions of bringing the former into the world of the latter. If they can't do it, then their truth is empty, idle, and passive, their claims at superiority mere pretence. There is some consolation in being able to claim, in one's impotence, that one has truth and logic on one's side, something that is beyond the comprehension of the ignorant herd. But it's not serious politics and ethics. The demand for the 'unfiltered truth' is indeed autistic, at a rather early and unaware stage of development. You have a long way to go from here before seeing what social living entails. If you want a politics and ethics of truth, you have a long way to go. All the hard work begins here.
