Truth: The Codification

One of the dangers of Truth … it is fundamentally corrosive to authority. If there is a truth, and it’s independent of creator, counsel, king, and kin, then the ability of the boss to tell you what to think — and thus what to do — it falls off rather sharply.

Tyrants and bureaucracies hate the idea that the party line can be challenged … except sometimes when it’s them challenging someone else’s party line.

So we had Thales, Pythagoras, Socrates and Plato arguing for Truth. Socrates was killed for it … and then Aristotle codified the truth everyone ought to believe in, with Alexander spreading the gospel, and Rome reverting to boss-ism.

Jesus came and built a different notion of Truth, built from a new start. For hundreds of years, there was a practice of killing Christians who believed in a Truth, rather than state opinion. And then Constantine converted, and brought a theory of Truth to Rome.

Unfortunately, the cost of Truth being inside government is that the idea of Searching for truth dies rather fast. There is a truth, we know what it is, and believe-or-die. Apostasy is not tolerated. Rome as a Truthy empire, even after its fall, took us all the way to the 1400s.

But the shift in truth was massive.

Yes. Truth mattered.
Yes, everyone insisted that TRUTH is the thing.
But the truth was defined for the proles.

Yes. There was dispute, among the clerisy, over the truth, behind closed-ish doors.
But dispute after claim from the top is subject to sanction up to death, for disputing the authoritative truth.

There aren’t many historical instances of Truth, and its corruption. But there are a few, with a standard model.

Some folks introduce the idea of Truth. Later, some folks try to codify truth, and prosecute folks for being against the codified truth.

And the middle ages … 400-1400 in Europe … were a model of that.

Truth and its codification.