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The Truth, The Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth

Today is July 17th in the year 2011. According to the Gregorian Calendar, the truth is I am forty-six years old. But of course the Gregorian Calendar, like the Julian Calendar before it, which is still used by the Berber people of North Africa and on Mount Athos a.k.a. the “Holy Mountain’ of Greece, and the multitude of other calendars found in cultural traditions other than western civilization, its truth is based on what was believed about seasons and their cycles in that era humankind. However, according to my personal truth that is based on understandings of my energetic constitution and my beliefs around that, my age, which refers to a length of time that an organism has lived (or existed) is not quantifiable, since my human life is merely a cycle in a grander scale of transforming energy that Einstein helped us to understand is neither created nor destroyed.

So then the question becomes “What is the truth?” When this question is asked, most are trying to come up with an objective construct that holds across the subjectivity of human belief (i.e., something that exists absolutely regardless of a believe system that is experiencing it). In modern social science it is understood that this is not possible because all constructs are socially defined by the humans that experience them. This has also been the understanding for students of eastern thought since the beginning of time. Thus, truth is relegated to what is believed to be true because regardless of what may or may not be absolute, one cannot experience this free from their belief of it to be so. In my teaching, I have taken this a bit further and argued that truth is of two types: (1) the personal kind, which is what ONE believes to be true and (2) the collective kind, which is a belief that is corroborated by MANY. This is clearly the foundation for such familiar statements as:

One man’s truth is another man’s lies. – Anonymous

There are always four sides to a story: your side, their side, the truth and what really happened. – Jean-Jacques Rousseau

That said, recent events in my life, illustrated that my truth of offering meditation in honor of and as memorial to the victims of the January 8th, 2011 shooting outside of my home Safeway Store was certainly not the same truth perceived by the institutional agents of the Safeway Corporation and the Pima County Sheriff’s Department who had me arrested for doing so. This experience has led me to contemplate a few further questions that I extend to my local community and to all of my website visitors.

The first question I have is when did we get to a point in our society that the truth of a living, breathing, thinking, and feeling “natural persons” is less valid and/or important than the truth of institutional “corporate persons?” Many people have argued that the Declaration of Independence of the United States did not mean corporate persons when it said that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Furthermore the Constitution of the United States that has been used on several occasions by artificial institutional corporate persons to claim rights never mentioned corporate persons.

It was not until the 1819 case of Dartmouth College v. Woodward that courts, not the United States citizenry, that corporations were recognized as having rights to contract, and to have those contracts honored the same as contracts entered into by natural persons. It should be noted that this decision does NOT say that corporations are people but only that they have a right to enter into a contract and have that contract honored as people do.

It was not until later in the 1886 case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, 118 U.S. 394, that the Supreme Court ruleed that corporations should be recognized as persons by way of citizenship for purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment, which defines citizens, affords due process to citizens, and guarantees equal protections of all citizens.

So then my second question is how are natural persons being equally protected when their rights are being usurped without due process by corporate persons? In my case, I am a natural person who is a citizen of the community that was solely denied the right to engage in political discourse and religious expression on semi-public property after those rights were extended to the community by a corporate person, which did not absolutely deny that right to all citizenry. In my eyes, this is an act of discrimination, since all citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment are protected from both the abridging of freedom of speech and prevention of free exercise of religion under the First Amendment of the the U. S. Constitution and no citizen can deny any other citizen those rights.

This site is dedicated to people telling and people hearing the truth of the everyday citizen. Although I can’t answer everything or say anything without thinking about what effect it will have on events going on in my life, I am committed to offering you “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” in terms of my own situations when I do offer it. Similarly, no personal truth offered here will be dismissed but it is important to note once again that your truth may not be my truth or the truth of another.

So this site is not for my colleagues who are seeking statistical power to support external validity or the ability to generalize one experience to predict experiences for the larger populations. The methodological emphasis of this site is merely to offer the personal truth of individual experiences on a case by case basis and then to look at the larger picture by comparing the consistency across experiences in order to develop conclusions about collective truth via corroboration.

That said, I would love to hear some of your thoughts on my personal truth that I post here. In the mean time here are some thoughts on corporate persons from Noam Chomsky.

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