I wasn’t able to make it to the showing of Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control, as I had a previous commitment, but I wasn’t able to make it that either because I was suddenly stricken with the plague at just about 7 o’clock on the dot. I believe I managed to get a wicked case of food poisoning from OFF-CAMPUS FOOD!, What has the world come to? I also missed what I hear was an excellent presentation Friday recovering from said plague. My apologies to the group. I did, however, look at Brad’s post
and video about truth. I’m not entirely sure I understood what he was trying to get at, and he ended up recanting quite a bit of it, but it intrigued me nonetheless. I wonder what makes the video (which is REALLY cool, by the way) the truth, or not the truth. Some would say it’s not the truth as it is biased. Why? Because it has been manipulated from its original format. But documentaries are manipulated versions of the truth no matter how honest they try to be, and they are usually accepted by popular society to be showing something considered as the “truth.” If we want to say truth breads corruption, we have to first know what truth is, which, it seems to me, is pretty impossible to do. In a later post, Brad stated the video is not meant to show truth ”but to manipulate truth to create an entirely new truth, one which exists without explicitly having ever existed at all”. But, I think, isn’t every truth something that has never existed until it is found? To use the age-old example, the “truth” that the universe revolves around the sun, not the earth, was considered a blasphemous manipulation of empirical science. Now we know now that’s not true, but here’s an excellent example of truth coming out of something that previously never existed in the minds of men. Maybe truth then isn’t the empirical measure it is often considered, but a measure of the capacity of men’s minds to understand and interact with the world around them. I think that’s a bit of a stretch, but its hard to pin down what truth is since it always seems to be tied to biases, emotions, opinions and, sadly, corruption (Brad, I think you were right on this one – truth often becomes corrupt in usage in certain, and several, contexts. Or maybe this is just me jumping on the “Negative Nancy” train).