The Only Truth In This Society

Canadian culture has erected many seeming barriers to the truth, and to these we turn with the naïve optimism of a sand castle before a tsunami. Welfare, unions, national parks. Sidewalks, shelters, and national healthcare. All won with bloodied, hopeful hands. But these archipelagos that seem to form a breakwater, all float in the same bottomless sea – tools to keep the waters churning. They make no attempt to drain the pool, merely prevent it from draining itself. The extensive damage of capitalism is the greatest threat to its survival. In this metaphor, government itself is no life-raft, no buoy, let alone sanctuary: government is the lifeguard from within, hired to keep the patrons swimming. Our seeming barriers to the truth – our progressivisms, our environmentalisms, our diets – strive to make the system sustainable. They present no challenge to its cosmology. Radicals, indeed, are merely surrogates; at best groundskeepers. Knowing its immensity does nothing for the future, but re-encodes the past. We can witness the broad sweep of societies perfecting the marketplace, releasing it slowly – from the emperors, from the holy men, from the lords, from the corporations themselves – until the consumer is unfettered, released into the totality where all beliefs are permitted, all fanaticisms scorned. Our neighbours to the south have salvaged a second truth from the bogs of the past, namely the fantasy of the nationstate. They erect America as a compliment to the totality of capitalism: synecdoche, metonymy, and metaphor. Indeed, America is the ultimate empty signifier of our day. Meaning nothing, it consumes the most audacious contradictions, swallows all but that which contests its own totality. It is good for nothing except to destroy that which it is not. It’s battles retread the ground capitalism has long since gained. Excepting a handful of giddy utopianists, Canadians permit themselves no such indulgence or willed collective blindness. We watch as old orders – the decommissioned relics – struggle to inscribe meaning into this para-truth with their older renditions, but we resist their romantic allure, mock their failures. Religion is not the opiate of the people; it is the ghost of competition of order. With no genuine utopians amongst us, Canadians accept the truth stoically, set to work in its midst. To know the truth is not to challenge it, nor is it to admit defeat. To know the truth is to begin to ask questions of its intentions. If we are to challenge it, we must ask questions of imputed, potential orders, ask what are the intentions that will supplant or modify the existing order. Marx, in attempting to imagine an alterior society, recognized that the current mode could not be modified by degree. We must either admit the truth and begin to reject it, or succumb to its momentum and continue to protect it from itself. Gregory Betts [Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on August 11, 2005]