John Steinbeck Honesty

2000-2001 #6 ‘Truth is that to which the community ultimately settles down’ (Charles Peirce). Analyse and evaluate this claim. Truth can be the ultimate opiate, however that is not the case with every society. Communities often have their sense of truth altered, making every effort put towards achieving and maintaining that truth futile. These manipulations in mindsets are usually set in place by leaders who want people to follow their ideas so they could gain power, and the ideology isn’t seen by the community as manipulated until after that leader falls. Truth is a form of objectivity, yet people still think it is subjective to a person's morals, if truth was subjective then everyone would be right all the time even when they’re wrong,
so if truth isn’t subjective then how do different societies settle on different idea? They settle for false truths because that is what the rest of society thinks. Communities can settle on the truth, however most do not because they have their perception of truth manipulated or they deny information before it can be evaluated as truth.
The Nazi party thought they built their society on the truth that white non-jewish people were the superior race and so that’s what their society settled on, but there is no definitive evidence that any race is superior to another. The population developed a schema towards all other races and religions that made them seem inferior to them, this mindset could possibly derive from their leader, Adolf Hitler. In his book, Mein Kampf, he outlines the problems of German society and he places all the blame on the jewish people. “I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord” (Hitler, Mein Kampf). The German people's’ ideology is based off one man’s political plan that if he could blame all of their problems one race then eliminated them then all of their problems would be solved. The truth in this case is that there is no definitive evidence that any race is superior to another but the schema of the German people made them accept it as truth. The society went against all common reason and made themselves believe that one group of people who share the same religion is responsible for all of their problems. However, in another sense the German people could have been right what if there schema was right? What if there is a superior race to all the other races and the world was just too strong for them to fight off? The Hegelian Dialectic about which race is better was completely denied in this case because everyone in the world had a different schema. The German people would have found the ultimate truth but the rest of the world saw that their truth challenged ours so they had to be eliminated. We will not understand which side is better because truth can always be manipulated by someone’s schema. In this case the community settled on information that was not truth which is why the statement is false with its claim. In the novel The Grapes of Wrath the author, John Steinbeck, talks about the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, while the book gives accurate perspectives of the lower class society from this time period when released it had an uproarious reaction from the rest of the nation.
The other Americans thought john steinbeck was a liar and falsified all of the information and experience he mentioned in the novel. In this case society deliberately denied the truth behind Steinbeck’s writing and they settled upon their conclusion that he was a liar for a good while after the book was published. Through this experience the opportunity to recognize the problems with the nation was shattered and society settled on the false truth that Steinbeck was a liar. Objectively it is known that Steinbeck was telling the truth because he investigated the lower class before writing The Grapes of Wrath but the rest of the Americans choose to deem the authenticity of his writing subjective even though it wasn’t. This is yet another case where society settled on information that is not the
truth. The American people often think their country is the ultimate goal for everyone in the world to achieve when in reality we’re definitely not perfect.
The false truth that America is the greatest nation on earth can be found to come from our childhood, as children Americans are raised to be diehard patriots, we even make them pledge to the flag every single day. But our nation suffers from the same problems other countries such as our problems with racism, poverty, or even the recession. Objectively there is no evidence to show that America is the greatest nation on earth it’s all subjective to the person’s schema, an American veteran almost always will defend the statement but anyone who sees that Donald Trump is still a presidential candidate may put that statement under the same category with the statement “the earth is flat”. Our nation has taken on the job of manipulating the American people's judgement, with every war we win we automatically assume that the other team was wrong when in all actuality they may have been right but since they were weaker than us they got eliminated. The American people choose to sit on a throne of lies and they’re settled there because they believe that the false truth is America is the greatest country on
earth. The truth that communities settle upon may not be objectively true but subjectively anything is possible. The leaders of every community will manipulate their followers in one way or another just so they can follow their political agenda, but the truth of weather they’re right or not with subjective to everyone’s schemas. People of the communities in the aforementioned paragraphs legitimately thought they were striving for the truth and to defend their ideas, but really they are following the political agendas of their leaders. The statement of ‘Truth is that to which the community ultimately settles down’ is therefore false.