A good question!

Father Martin Fox asks:

"Exit question:

Can a people live together in harmony if they do not agree on fundamental reality?"

That seems something that a lot of people are asking these days. Fake news. MSNBC. CNN. Brietbart. Maddow. Hannity. 

Each side has it sources. Each side has it's facts. A fact is a fact but how it is interpreted  determines what you believe. Take this trans-gendered nonsense.

President Trump has announced that it is his policy to not allow trans-gendered members of the armed forces. As usual with Trump it all comes down to money. He doesn't want to pay for some psycho to enlist and then demand a addadicktome. I doubt he cares all that much about trans-gendered. I doubt that most "normals" care either. Live and let live. We think about them about as much as we think about paranoid schizophrenics. Which is not at all unless you put them in our face on the subway screaming at us for loose change. That is the fundamental reality. 


Now a good and holy man like Father Fox would think of that person as a poor soul needed the comfort of Gods grace. An social justice warrior would think that he is a victim of white cisnormal privilege that drove him mad. A lout like me thinks he is just a bum who needs to be put in a Paddy Wagon and brought to the nuthouse. Facts. Facts that we all see differently.

I dashed off a quick response to the question that we can live with separate realities. There was a system for that. It was called different things at different times. Castes. Serfdom. Segregation. Apartheid. It could be economically based. Based on Race. National Origin. Sex. Religion. Throughout human history most societies were based on this model. Separate  realities for different classes of people. Some of the greatest human societies were based on that premise. Ancient Greece. Imperial Rome. The Ming Dynasty. The Edo period in Japan. The British Empire. 

Society was based on this provision. A separation between the "normals" and the elite.  The "normals" live their lives on the farm or in the factory. The elites continue to live their lives of depravity and vice. When they push out that behavior and the deviancy is defined down to "normal" society it is doomed. The "normals" have to revolt and turn everything upside down and destroy the elite. 

We are in the middle of that process now. Lot is leading us out of the city and if we turn and look back we will be turned into a pillar of salt. If we accept the deviancy that is being promulgated by the elite we are all doomed. We have our own facts. The facts that your parents and grand parents and forefathers taught you. If you throw  them aside for the fad of the moment all will be lost.

Can we live in harmony? Perhaps. Separately. Taking the path of Saint Benedict. Husbanding our resources for the conflagration that will come.