The Relationship Between Truth and Courage

Nietzsche recognized that without courage we cannot have truth:

How much truth can a spirit stand, how much truth does it dare? For me that became more and more the real measure of value. Error (belief in the ideal) is not blindness, error is cowardice.

Every achievement, every step forward in knowledge, comes from courage, from harshness towards yourself, from cleanliness with respect to yourself. ..

Bari Weiss' newest article discusses the relationship between courage and truth. The title: "Some Thoughts About Courage We are living through an epidemic of cowardice. The antidote is courage."

Courage means, first off, the unqualified rejection of lies. Do not speak untruths, either about yourself or anyone else, no matter the comfort offered by the mob. And do not genially accept the lies told to you. If possible, be vocal in rejecting claims you know to be false. Courage can be contagious, and your example may serve as a means of transmission.

When you’re told that traits such as industriousness and punctuality are the legacy of white supremacy, don’t hesitate to reject it. When you’re told that statues of figures such as Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass are offensive, explain that they are national heroes. When you’re told that “nothing has changed” in this country for minorities, don’t dishonor the memory of civil-rights pioneers by agreeing. And when you’re told that America was founded in order to perpetuate slavery, don’t take part in rewriting the country’s history

. . . .

As Douglas Murray has put it: “The problem is not that the sacrificial victim is selected. The problem is that the people who destroy his reputation are permitted to do so by the complicity, silence and slinking away of everybody else.”

What caused our leaders to buckle under? To say things they don't believe and to refuse to say things that they know are true? Weiss blames the lack of courage:
There are a lot of factors that are relevant to the answer: institutional decay; the tech revolution and the monopolies it created; the arrogance of our elites; poverty; the death of trust. And all of these must be examined, because without them we would have neither the far right nor the cultural revolutionaries now clamoring at America’s gates.

But there is one word we should linger on, because every moment of radical victory turned on it. The word is cowardice.

The revolution has been met with almost no resistance by those who have the title CEO or leader or president or principal in front of their names. The refusal of the adults in the room to speak the truth, their refusal to say no to efforts to undermine the mission of their institutions, their fear of being called a bad name and that fear trumping their responsibility — that is how we got here.

I'll conclude with this excerpt from a conversation between Bari Weiss and Brian Stelter:

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2021: When it was Necessary for Experts to Argue that there are Only Two Sexes.

This letter should not have been necessary. There are two, and only two, sexes. That should be the starting point for all discussions of transgender issues. Here's an excerpt from an Irish Journal of Medical Science letter titled: "The Reality of Sex":

We regard the claim that sex is neither fixed nor binary to be entirely without scientific merit—there are two sexes, male and female, and in humans, sex is immutable (disorders of sexual development are very rare and, in any event, do not result in any additional sexes). Such politically motivated policies and statements have no place in scientific journals. It is essential that impartiality be maintained in order to preserve public trust in science as a process dedicated to producing shared knowledge.

We call upon authors and editors to resist non-scientific pressures to suppress honest and accurate discussion of these matters, particularly in the field of medicine where diagnosis, prognosis and treatment can depend on a patient’s sex.

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Tourette Symptoms: Possibly a New Social Contagion

Are Tourette Symptoms a new form of social contagion? A new article from the Wall Street Journal intrigued me.  The title: "Teen Girls Are Developing Tics. Doctors Say TikTok Could Be a Factor." Here are the opening paragraphs:

Teenage girls across the globe have been showing up at doctors’ offices with tics—physical jerking movements and verbal outbursts—since the start of the pandemic.

Movement-disorder doctors were stumped at first. Girls with tics are rare, and these teens had an unusually high number of them, which had developed suddenly. After months of studying the patients and consulting with one another, experts at top pediatric hospitals in the U.S., Canada, Australia and the U.K. discovered that most of the girls had something in common: TikTok.

According to a spate of recent medical journal articles, doctors say the girls had been watching videos of TikTok influencers who said they had Tourette syndrome, a nervous-system disorder that causes people to make repetitive, involuntary movements or sounds.

No one has tracked these cases nationally, but pediatric movement-disorder centers across the U.S. are reporting an influx of teen girls with similar tics. Donald Gilbert, a neurologist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center who specializes in pediatric movement disorders and Tourette syndrome, has seen about 10 new teens with tics a month since March 2020. Before the pandemic, his clinic had seen at most one a month.

I'm intrigued for a couple reasons. Back in college I spent some timing hanging around with guy who was smart and funny. He was also a really good tennis player and he had an easy going confidence.I was a several years younger than he was and I was not feeling confident about who I was at age 17. He also had a tic. Occasionally, his head suddenly jerked while he talked. This happened every couple minutes. After a while, I noticed that I was starting to do that too. The fact that I started doing this seemed odd, because I didn't decide to do it. It just started happening. I consciously clamped down on that behavior and I stopped doing it a few after I noticed myself doing it.

I'm also interested in this article because of the social contagion angle related to the sudden spike in teenaged girls who claim they were born in the wrong bodies. I'm speaking of the transgender social contagion phenomenon discussed extensively by Abigail Shrier (and see here).

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How to Respond When a Wokeness Warrior Dares to Mention “Evidence” When Making Arguments

I do like this Tweet:

"Just tell him, "Your reference to 'evidence' reflects a discourse rooted in logic, critical thinking, and Enlightenment values. As such it is a problematic manifestation of whiteness." You have to know how to talk to these people."

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