Postmodern philosophy declares that all truth is valid truth. Since every person’s particular definition of truth is considered to be, in fact, true, there can be no competing ideologies. In other words, everyone can hold to their own personal ideology, regardless of whether or not it can be proven true, because it is true in the mind of the beholder. Since it is true to the person holding it, it is not necessary to actually prove or defend said truth, as it does not have to be true in the eyes of any other person. This results in creating a personal echo chamber wherein truth holders surrounds themselves with only that information which affirms their belief and never allows anything in that could challenge their thoughts.
The problem with the postmodern belief system is that it still allows other persons or groups to belief and espouse truths that contradict our own. Despite the fact that multitudes of people attempt to live in their personal echo chambers, opposing belief systems will ultimately crash into each other. To use an extreme example, if a person believed that traffic laws did not apply to them, and that they could drive on any side of the road they chose, a person who believed the opposite would one day have a face to face meeting with them. Likewise, our individual belief systems impact how we think, speak, and act. No matter how much culture says your beliefs can only be your own, and hence, should not impact others, the reality is that we will act out on our beliefs in our interactions with other people. Therefore, our personal echo chambers cannot filter out other belief systems no matter how hard we try to plug our ears.
Once we are confronted with truths that contradict our thinking, especially if we hear those truths espoused en masse, we are forced to defend what we believe. This is one of the most difficult aspects of the post modern philosophy to deal with in practicality. We cannot isolate ourselves from the rest of society, so we must live with the reality that ideas have consequences. Our personal truths do not exist in a vacuum. They impact our lives in how we live, how we work, how we vote, and so forth. When people are allowed to pursue whatever truth they wish, they ultimately we live out those truths around us. They will speak to us and act toward us in ways that are inconsistent with our personal truths. We are then forced into a series of options: we can remain consistent with post-modernism, allowing their actions to impact our lives in uncomfortable ways; we can abandon postmodernism, returning to the search for truth by debating which belief is actually true; or we can determine that competing belief systems are intolerant and offensive, thus are not deserving of protection in the postmodern philosophy. It is this last option that has been resoundingly accepted in our current culture.
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