Of course there does exist an absolute truth but can it be known by man when there is yet much to be known.
Look at any period in history and the absolutes of the time have turned out to be relative to the time. So from history we learn that what we believe to be the truth in our time is likely to be relative to our time. So the absolute truth is that our present truths will be judged relative when viewed as history .
Thats not to say we should sit on our hands, we must make decisions from this relative truth as best we can during our times.
Human nature has emerged along a developmental path from one equilibrium state to the next. These can be viewed as stages wherein each layer adds new elements to all that came before; in turn, each stands in preparation for a next phase which may or may not come.
Every "level of human existence" offers a particular viewing point for 'the real world' as defined by its unique set of perceptual filters, our concepts of truth are just one form of how this reality might differ from individual to individual, society to society, generation to generation.
These diverse views of the realtive truth lead to very different decision-making approaches, organizing principles for business, economic and governance models, and ideas of what appropriate, effective living means.
Witness the changing values, mores and outlooks of any decade in American history and you will see these factors of change at work. People talk of capitalism, wealth, money, happiness in different ways depending on where and when they came and what environment they came into. These concepts are relative to the context of their times
Clare Graves built "the emergent, cyclical, double-helix model of adult biopsychosocial systems of development. He used pairs of letters to designate the interaction of conditions-without and latent systems-within known as Memes. Memes grouped together the conditional and latent systems that seem to collect together from one social sphere to another back through the ages.
So in the context truth is different to different people and times and American capitalism defines its ideas of wealth at level 5 in graves model.
One of the interesting things about the emergence of the memes and their parallel expressions in the exteriors such as civilization forms, economic systems etc, is how, they are emerging at an ever increasing speed. Rough estimates are that Level One Survival Clans emerged around 100,000 years ago, Tribes around 10,000 years ago, Nation States around 1,000 years ago, Value Communities around 100 years ago and we beginning to see Harmony patterns emerge about 30 years ago. If that is the case, then we can be pretty sure that Mutuality and Wisdom already within our our structures.
For instance you might define wealth by a Level 5 criteria and I might define wealth along the lines of Level 8 . Many of the troubles we have in the world are between Level 4 Truth and Force Absolutistic (the Muslims) rub up against Level 5 Strive (Drive Materialistic) (unfortunately GWB seems to have allot in common with 4). . There are many of these models and this serve as but one illustrative function , that is to speculates on the nature of social evolution and integrative manner that of adaption and innovation . One can speculate that the environment and energy issues might well place all of society in a position where it is compelled to seek equilibrium and shelter in civilization managed upon the principles of the Humanistic Level 6 value set.
Vaihinger argued that the primary purpose of mind and mental processes is not to portray or mirror reality, but to serve individuals in their navigations through life circumstances. Vaihinger said that we live our lives by means of "functional fictions." These functional fictions are the schemer by which our opinions, ideas and ideals are founded upon. The materialistic free market capitalism of America serves as one but functional fiction that's usefluness is all but at an end.
World-economies, then, present a pattern of concentric spirals around a center, defined by relations of subordination. Besides this spatial structure, Wallerstein and Braudel add a temporal one: a world-economy expands and contracts in a variety of rhythms of different lengths: from short term business cycles to longer term Kondratiev. While the domination by core cities gives a world-economy its spatial unity, these cycles give it a temporal coherence: prices and wages move in unison over the entire area.
Prices are, of course, much higher at the center than at the periphery, and this makes everything flow towards the core: Venice, Amsterdam, London and New York, as they took their turn as dominant centers, became "universal warehouses" where one could find any product from anywhere in the world. And yet, while respecting these differences, all prices moved up and down following these nonlinear rhythms, affecting even those firms belonging to the antimarket, which needed to consider those fluctuations when setting their own prices.
It reached a bifurcation and a periodic attractor emerged in the system, which began pulsing to a fifty year beat. The crucial element in this dynamics seems to be the capital goods sector, the part of the industry that creates the machines that the rest of the economy uses. Whenever an intense rise in global demand occurs, firms need to expand and so need to order new machines. But when the capital goods sector in turn expands to meet this demand it needs to order from itself.
In the first core of the European world-economy, thirteenth century Venice, the alliance between monopoly power and military might was already in evidence. The Venetian arsenal, where all the merchant ships were built, was the largest industrial complex of its time. We can think of these ships as the fixed capital, the productive machinery of Venice, since they were used to do all the trade that kept her powerful; but at the same time, they were military machines used to enforce her monopolistic practices. When the turn of Amsterdam and London came to be the core, the famous Companies of Indias with which they conquered the Asian world-economy were also hybrid military-economic institutions.
Not to mention the role that French armories and arsenals in the eighteenth century, and American ones in the nineteenth, played in the birth of mass production techniques. Frederick Taylor, the creator of the modern system for the control the labor process, learned his craft in military arsenals.
We we are today is at the beginning of a new evolution in capitalism that has no parallel, that the Americans have arguable military might while the Japanese, Europeans and increasingly the Chinese and Indian have the wealth. Clearly the inability of the US to act militarily (I would argue that the US has less "will" to act than almost any military power of the past).
The concept of wealth (or the asset base) as "the foundation of generating well-being". This definition of national wealth takes on a much broader definition and is embodied in natural capital, social capital, and produced assets.
Empirical studies of the consumption-wealth relationship often assume a framework in which aggregate household spending depends linearly on wealth, the underlying state variable. These studies have given rise to many estimates of the wealth effect. In a general equilibrium setting, however, both consumption and wealth react to "shocks" impacting the economy. Therefore, without any independent movements in wealth, the marginal propensity to consume out of wealth is hard to define.
Clarification of this point can be found in the relationship between consumption, savings, and equity within the framework of a real business cycle model with investment adjustment costs. The behavior of consumption and wealth depends crucially on the nature of the "shocks" affecting households, government and business.
The form of the shocks and whether they are anticipated alter not only the magnitude of the wealth effect but also the direction of the response. That is, in the context of this conventional model, net worth (or wealth) and consumption actually move in opposite directions.
So truth or BS is whatever your intelligence, social and ethical stage has reached. Its different in every case and that's why we have economic revolution and evolution . New product, place, markets and ways are contextual to the civilization they are realized in the mistake I think allot make assumes that we have found the 'ideal' within so called 'free market' capitalism.
When I reality this re defined by each generation. One generation of American's were savers and the next generation are consumers then they might learn to save again, they each saw "wealth" spiritually, materially and economically different.
Albert Einstein once said: "Strange is our situation here upon earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet Mutuality sometimes seem to divine a purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that man is here for the sake of other men - above all, for those upon whose smile and well-being our own happiness depends, and also for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy. Many times a day I realize how much my own outer and inner life is built upon the labors of my fellowmen, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received."
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