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This is really interesting to me because it's rare to see somebody openly work from a foundation that social harmony is of higher moral value than truth. (Elsewhere you wrote: "You can't tell the black people the truth because that's ugly and no one has the stomach for it, so where do you go?")
I don't think this works philosophically in the long run to ultimately produce anything but gobbledygook, unless you take the Noble Lie stance of "ok, between you and me, we can speak truth, but it must be contained within this room and we must lie to the masses," which IMO still has its problems but at least it allows truth to flourish somewhere which seems a hard prerequisite to making any sense in the long run.
Speaking personally the idea that compromising truth in the name of not making people mad is an objective moral good is alien to me. I do it at times but always with a sense that I am selling out my integrity. Mostly just fascinated to run into somebody who's like "Yeah F it tell people what they want to hear, this is the moral thing to do."
I am not convinced a society earnestly built on this principle doesn't ultimately implode but time will tell I guess.
I had a therapist who strongly believed this, and considered having anything other than "fitting in" with one's peer group as highest priority in determining one's beliefs to itself constitute some manner of psychological disorder. Her go-to defense for any view was to cite its popularity, and even more so her go-to criticism of a position is that it's "unpopular" or "weird." She was a firm believer in vox populi, vox Dei, and when I pointed out that this was the framework of her arguments and that I, as a monarchist, rejected it utterly, she was completely at a loss. I mean, stunned silence for quite a noticeable length. It seemed so deeply imbedded in her worldview, so base an assumption, that she didn't seem to know how to respond to having it so bluntly challenged.
(I'm also once reminded of a blog comment exchange — I think it was pre-disqus The American Conservative — involving the Japanese honne/tatemae distinction, that also included something like a defense of "social harmony over truth." Though, there the argument was that Westerners have an "overly simplistic" and "narrow" view of what "truth" is, thanks mostly to Plato (this is the main part that made this exchange memorable), and thus fail to grasp that "social consensus" is "truth," just as much as personal understanding of the facts is also "truth," they're just different kinds of truth. Needless to say, most everyone else commenting at TAC disagreed with this view.)
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