Where is Truth

What I hate the most about grand narratives is that they are often misinterpreted as a justification for atrocities and stupidity. A good example is the classic defense of Stalin: his killings and atrocities are necessary for the communist cause—it's the bloodshed necessary for a certain end. Another example would be the blood and oppression during the Victorian ages being the sacrifices needed for the world to progress. To me, the problem with such grand narratives is not that they justify amoral actions, but that they block a true sublation of history—it, in other words, opens a path to the worship of the past. In defending Stalin in such a manner, we are effectively saying there is nothing wrong with Stalinism (i.e., all its definite atrocities are necessary), at least in this aspect, which blocks the path for us to move to a deeper understanding of killing and sacrifice in revolution.

Yet, if such grand narratives are “correct” in the Augustinian sense, where the concept aligns with its referent, there could be some merit to them. But I find no such correctness in the grand narratives according to Deleuze: all stories, all grand narratives, all theories assume a factorial method to the comprehension of this chaotic and rhizomatic world. Then, the grand narrative of a crooked necessity (of Stalin’s atrocities being justified in the “long term”) is no more than a story; it is simply an ideological story spun for a belief, and it is a belief that suppresses further development in leftist theories.

In philosophy, who is more “grand narratively” than Hegel? Is not his dialectical method the grandest narrative of all—the unraveling of history eventually resulting in a utopic world or the manifestation of the Absolute Spirit (both in the traditional Hegelian sense and the Marxist-Hegelian sense)? Similarly, the political grand narratives of Stalinism, we can also see the grand narratives of Hegel suppressing our development. Isn’t the dialectic a perfect justification for the exclusion of analysis: the atrocities all work toward a certain good end, relieving them of responsibility on a broad scale? Does this mean we should reject Hegel and all his legacy (both the positive—Hegelian tradition—and the negative—those traditions founded on the critique of Hegel)?

Maybe not.

I find the reading of Hegel and the interpretation of grand narratives, in general, to be inapt: it ignores a crucial fact, sometimes (and many such as Slavoj Žižek would argue most of the time), truth is reconstructed. One crucial step to move past Deleuze’s recognition of the chaos of this world into Lacan’s reason with that particular chaos: though we are sure such chaos exists, we are also equally sure that we are a constituent of that particular chaos. In this sense, our beliefs, which generate our actions both consciously and unconsciously, have the ability to generate elements of this world, including truths.

In reality, when we believe in a particular grand narrative, a particular “lie,” we align our beliefs and actions toward it. It is just like Goebbels said: “A lie repeated a thousand times becomes the truth.” Though he was talking about the power of propaganda, in this sense, he is correct in a twisted fashion: when Nazi Germany repeats the threat of the Jews as the threat to Germany, the Jews did become the threat to Germany because now, after most Germans believed this outrageous lie, they began to commit genocide and war crimes, bringing about the end of their Germany—Nazi Germany—by arousing the Allies to join forces and defeat them (or putting a drug-crazed madman on the seat of power because they believed in it). So, we now see how grand narratives create truth: it creates something that becomes truth retrospectively, after it is believed.

This is also perhaps why theory and propaganda are really important: if there had been a potent challenger to Goebbels and Hitler, perhaps the doom upon Germany may not have walked toward its end. 

Yet, there is one aspect that eludes our grasp here: nihilism. If grand narratives create truths, through what do we judge the narratives of Marxism and the narratives of fascism? Or, more precisely formulated: is there or is there not a judgment, a metaphysics, that works toward the truth we create, or do we have to walk back to vulgarly read Hegel’s particular nihilism—nothing is worthy to be judged as all will manifest into the benign and far-away greatest good, the absolute spirit?