The Crisis of Truth and the MAGA Phenomenon
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 19 May 2025
Glen T. Martin, Ph.D. – TRANSCEND Media Service
Ultimate Denial Inevitably Leading to Genocide
17 May 2025 – Our age is the age of untruth. In the 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, harbinger of the future, declared, Es gibt keine Wahrheit (There is no truth). This no-truth future has arrived. MAGA is a no-truth movement as we shall see. Nietzsche proclaimed that when there is no truth, then “everything is permitted.” This does not mean that followers of MAGA do not embrace values, but that there is no concern for truth in their embrace of values. If my embrace of certain values contradicts yours, then, since there is no truth to arbitrate, the only arbiter is power. Who has the power?
Hence, whatever appears to disagree with Donald Trump’s ideology is “fake news.” Whatever disagrees with MAGA dogmatism is a “Woke ideology” that needs to be eliminated. Meanwhile, institutions like Fox News operate as an explicitly and overtly dogmatized narrative. Each day, the higher-ups at Fox dictate to their “reporters” the ideological slant they are required to place on events that transpire in the public domain. This is not even kept secret. There is no longer any shame in being a perverter of the truth, for, ultimately, arbitrary belief supersedes truth. Whatever is not MAGA dogma is to be dismissed openly by most of its followers: “Truth is only what I want it to be. My ideology is as good as any and I assert it both regardless of the facts and regardless of other ideologies that I simply do not like.”
The history of how we arrived at this condition is complex, intricate, and well worth studying. But this is not the place to explore this history regarding the concept of truth and its tragic fate in the current state of affairs. Ken Wilber has written a book titled A Post-Truth World (2017, updated 2024) that may be a good starting place for exploring our current situation. Nevertheless, a deeper account can be found in books like On the Pragmatics of Communication (1979) by Jürgen Habermas, and even more general cosmological views of the advance of human knowledge can be found in books like The End of Certainty (1997) by Nobel Prize winning scientist Ilya Prigogine. (The certainty of universal causality is ended as science discovers how nature produces human freedom.)
When we look at our everyday human situation (in which we live with the ordinary concerns of living and operate using ordinary language) we find that there is in everyday language an assumption of a distinction between truth and falsehood, that is, to put it differently, there is a common distinction between genuine knowledge and mere belief. These distinctions are found in every language. On the pre-theoretical level, within any ordinary language, there is the assumption that some things are true and others false, and that knowledge is possible and not everything is “mere belief.”
Analysis of this distinction, such as that of Habermas, discovers not that the distinction between truth and falsehood is defensible in ordinary language, but that it presupposes an “ideal speech situation.” When I make a belief claim to you that I assert as true, there is the presupposition that this could be defended and justified in a public forum under ideal circumstances in which the persons in that public forum were authentically committed to determining the truth or falsity of my claim. This is something of what actually takes place today in many scientific or judicial proceedings.
Habermas shows that such a situation includes the presupposition of the very possibility of their being language at all. Speech (in any language at all) would not be possible if it were not for this presupposition. There is no space to go further into his analysis here. Nevertheless, this presupposition concerning truth and falsity is what makes language possible. The ideal of universal truth, therefore, is embedded within the very heart of our human situation.
Notice the additional assumptions behind this theory of truth. First, there is an ideal set of possible circumstances that are presupposed. Second, that truth is a function of a community, since it is ultimately posited within everyday, ordinary language (which is necessarily a community phenomenon). The community presupposed here is the actual community required for language as well as an ideal community in which its participants are willing to bracket their own prejudices and beliefs in order to together examine the truth or falsity of the claims under examination. Finally, since all human beings speak a language (and all languages are translatable into one another), and every language carries these same assumptions, the ultimate presupposed community involves our common humanity everywhere on Earth.
Our “no-truth era” is only possible as an age that denies these presuppositions of ordinary language. It is an age that denies the assumption that lies within all natural languages that distinguishes between truth and falsehood. It is an age of fragmentation—not preliminary fragmentation in which the fragments await a possible process of unification, but absolute fragmentation that denies, against the presuppositions of ordinary language and common human rationality, that any unification of the fragments is possible. All values become relative.
In The Restitution of Metaphysics (2000), philosopher Errol E. Harris writes: “If all standards are purely relative, none can claim the necessary authority, and there can be no obligation to respect any one more than any other. Personal choice then becomes arbitrary, and in politics might takes the place of right” (81). If no unification of fragments is possible, then the dynamic of intercourse among persons changes from one of reasoned debate directed toward truth and mutual understanding to one justified by power, manipulation of language, and ultimately, war. Our age is an age of a war of all against all, as Thomas Hobbes proclaimed at the very dawn of the modern era in the 17th century. Hobbes held an atomistic view of human beings. Atomism (not holism and community) made humans mere aspects of the atomistic material reality: no God, no human unity, no universal values—simply war of all against all.
Let us remind ourselves of the bigger picture. The journey toward human civilizational unity perhaps began with the founding of the world’s great religions during the Axial Age of human history between the 8th and the 2nd centuries BCE. For example, the three Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) affirmed that all humans are made in God’s image. And the Upanishadic group of religions coming out of India claimed that “the world is one family” (vasudhaiva kutumbakam). In practice the cultures harboring these religions over the centuries often tended to ethnocentrically favor their own religion and “objectify” practitioners of other religions. Hindus and Moslems often rejected one another, for example, and Christians tended to see non-Christians as “heathens.”
The Copernican Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries made possible a new universalism in Europe, a revolution that eventually spread to all humanity through the development of science, including physics, chemistry, biology, and astronomy. By the time of the Enlightenment in the 18th century, thinkers such as Rousseau, Kant, and Locke began speaking of “universal human rights” belonging equally to all human beings. The 19th century then gave us the Darwinian theory of evolution, ultimately showing by the 20th century that all human persons are the same species (homo sapiens), the other humanoid species having died out long ago.
The 20th century gave us a constellation of great thinkers who began articulating the lineaments of a world culture and global civilization that complemented our understanding of the oneness and common lineage of all human beings. Names like Arnold Toynbee, Albert Einstein, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in the West or Rabindranath Tagore, Swami Vivekananda, and Sri Aurobindo in India come to mind. Illya Prigogine sees an ideal of Western history and our common humanity as understood by science as “the importance of knowledge and objectivity, as well as individual responsibility and freedom of choice as implied by the ideal of democracy” (1997, 6).
It appeared to many that the civilizational journey toward human freedom and unity was well underway. In line with this growing understanding of the unity of human civilization, a number of thinkers called for a planetary constitutional government for the Earth, for example, Immanuel Kant in Germany, Mahatma Gandhi in India, and Albert Einstein in the United States. By 1991 the Constitution for the Federation of Earth had been completed by the World Constitution and Parliament Association (WCPA).
But what the movement toward human freedom and unity did not comprehend is that human consciousness needed to evolve concomitantly with the growth of human understanding. To an immature, egoistic person, the claims to universal human rights or universal truth or universal human dignity have very little meaning. People need to grow beyond personal and group egoism and their corresponding ethnocentrisms. To people on these levels of ethical maturity, the universalistic language sounds to them like another ethnocentric position (perhaps we could call it “wokeness”). They hear the words but cannot grasp anything that transcends ethnocentric presuppositions, thereby imagining that universalist claims must be an opposing ethnocentric perspective. The idea of a universal truth is thus similarly incomprehensible to them, as are human dignity and human rights.
Prior to the rise of the MAGA phenomenon in the USA, both traditional Republican Party values and Democratic Party values were a mixture of universalism and ethnocentrism. Universalism includes the understanding that truth exists as part of an on-going human developmental process that includes the natural and humanistic sciences. Their ethnocentrism showed up especially in their nationalistic foreign policy in which they were willing to massively violate the dignity of others around the world, from Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, to many other countries too numerous to mention here. Yet many of these Democrats or traditional Republicans allowed for the possibility of humanity moving to a higher level of civilization that was more humane, more respectful of human rights, and more universal (though always delayed, always in the future, to be sure). Nevertheless, the unity of humanity and the universality of truth were implicit in their values as possibilities.
With the rise of the MAGA phenomenon and its domination over the Republican Party, this latent civilizing element was abandoned. Egoism and ethnocentrism became a virtue, and these include the explicit denial of anything universal except power, domination, and lethal conflict among human beings. This is nihilism, with its consequences that “everything is permitted.” Indeed, this is the nature of all varieties of fascism, including the MAGA variety. Racism, nationalism, bigotry, and hatred for “illegal immigrants” are taken as “the way things are.” There is no ideal of truth imbedded in our human civilizational project that can serve as a regulative ideal for human freedom, dignity, democracy, or responsibility.
Their inability to even imagine the criteria for evolving truth as fundamental to our common human project is projected onto all others. Since they cannot comprehend the possibility of any truth that is truly universal (as they can only comprehend ideas egoistically and ethnocentrically), the opposition they feel against claims that disagree with their prejudices and dogmatisms can only be dealt with through power-relations. Fragmentation (atomism) is absolute (a position which is in direct conflict with contemporary scientific cosmology that emphasizes the holism of the cosmos and all its parts, including humanity).
This kind of immaturity among ordinary persons can be relatively harmless if it does not accede to positions of power. However, both capitalism and the system of sovereign nation states have institutionalized fragmentation. (Both are inherently fragmented systems deriving from the 17th century and before. See my recent book Human Dignity and World Order, 2024). Capitalism operates to make a few people very rich at the expense of the many, and its economic atomism (allowing the unlimited accumulation of private property adhering to individual persons) fosters arrogance, egoism, and immaturity among the rich and powerful. Just look at Elon Musk.
Similarly, the system of sovereign nation-states recognizing no binding laws above themselves necessarily generates immaturity in the peoples of the world. A natural and possibly healthy pride in local or national cultures morphs (through this system of absolute sovereignty) into political and military powers used to crush those with whom we may disagree, both within and without. The system selects for immature people who often rise to positions of power, even heads of state. How many of today’s heads of state strike us as truly mature human beings? We could count them on one hand. We recall the child-like egoism and ethnocentrism of an Adolph Hitler or a Donald Trump. At the head of a powerful nation-state, such persons spell disaster for humanity.
Once in power, they can attempt to put a stop to the civilizational-scientific process of universalizing our human condition. They can censor books, cancel media they do not like, jail people who protest the genocides that they support, wreck institutions perceived to be “Woke,” etc. Once this fragmented ethnocentric mentality is in power, the destruction of “the other” becomes inevitable. Take the infantile Zionists and their stooge, Donald Trump, who plan the complete extermination of the Palestinian people in Gaza and elsewhere. They have no compunction, no compassion, for the ideas of human dignity and human rights have zero emotional and ethical meaning for them. Genocide (destruction of the other) is built into the very foundations of the MAGA or Zionist phenomena.
The same is true of so-called “MAGA Christians.” In defiance of the entire civilizational movement that has taught us about the symbolical and universalist nature of all traditional religious language, they take literally, for example, Jesus’ statement, “No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). Beginning in the second century CE and perhaps earlier, Christians came to understand that the second person of the Trinity (Christ)—the “Logos” through whom all things were made as declared in the Prologue to the Gospel of John)—both was and was not identical with the historical Jesus. And many of them understood that the grace of salvation could come to anyone anywhere through the cosmic Christ, even if they had never heard of the historical Jesus. As St. Paul puts it in Romans 2:14: “when Gentiles who do not have the law do by nature as the law requires, they show that the law is written on their hearts.” The Cosmic Christ is there in the hearts of all.
Nevertheless, MAGA Christians insist on a literal reading of the Bible, something that was surpassed almost two millennium ago by the founding Christian thinkers and their Medieval descendants. From the point of view of MAGA immaturity, the dimensions of this sophisticated Christian tradition mean nothing to them. For them, in their ethnocentric arrogance, we human beings have nothing to learn from history, just as we learn nothing from science (like the reality of climate change). They clearly know nothing of the on-going civilizational quest for truth. Nothing of authentic spiritual growth and transformation. Their dogmatic fragmentation knows only power and power-over whatever appears different from themselves. The “Jesus that comes into their lives” (if this includes the MAGA dogma) is a power-god, a form of idolatry pure and simple.
For Hitler, it was the Jews and non-Aryan races. A scapegoat was needed around which the nihilistic fascist hatred could crystalize. For Trump and MAGA, it is the Palestinians and the Axis of Resistance against the US Zionist colony in the Middle East. It is non-white races, as well as “enemy” nations, such as Russia, China, and Iran. Whoever resists their powers of domination and exploitation is fair game for extermination. Existential struggle is all they understand. Their fragmented assumptions dictate their emotional response to existence. Like the fundamentalist Christians, the Zionists often draw on a literal reading of the scriptures and deny the entire progress of human civilization that began to crystallize during the past century in such documents as the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Earth Charter, or the Earth Constitution.
The whole of humanity and all human history are taken to be just as small-minded, dogmatic, and bigoted as they are. They deny the unity of humanity and our emerging planetary civilization. The only real issue is—who has the power? And when that power is placed in the hands of militarized nation-states or other huge institutions (of concentrated wealth and power), the result is inevitably genocide—they eliminate or crush whoever and whatever appears to oppose their totalitarian dogmatism.
Human civilization—like the future of truth—lies here in ruins. With nuclear weapons in its hands, in the hands of a Donald Trump, MAGA may be willing to destroy human civilization as we know it. Their nihilism (denial of truth) means a denial of our common human dignity. Their intrinsic fragmentation and corresponding fascism (dogmatic imposition of power-over) go hand in hand. Intrinsic to its very nature, MAGA is ultimately willing not only to commit genocide in Gaza, but to wipe out all of humanity.
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Dr. Glen T. Martin:
– Member, TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment
– Professor of Philosophy Emeritus
– Founder/Chairperson Emeritus, Program in Peace Studies, Radford University
– President, World Constitution and Parliament Association (WCPA);
– President, Earth Constitution Institute (ECI)
– Author of twelve books and hundreds of articles concerning global issues, human spirituality, and democratic world government; a recipient of many peace awards.
www.earthconstitution.world – Email: gmartin@radford.edu
Tags: Trump, USA
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 19 May 2025.
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