User:KostaToronto/Scraps

uncertainty: This (paradigm or type of thinking?) has been around in various forms and extremes since ancient times (e.g., the Skeptics), but it is only since the 19th century (and especially since the 1960s with the work of Foucault, Derrida, etc.) that the age-old notion of capital-T Truth (along with context-bound small-t truths) have been exposed as totally arbitrary. As Foucault writes in The Order of Things, the early 19th-century saw uncertainty flare up with the loss of confidence in the social sciences' ability to define a single, collectively agreed-upon, capital-T Truth, once it was witnessed that these fields, unlike the pure sciences, were so easily splintered into contradictory schools of thought, each with its own small-t truth and respected proponents thereof. Socialist economists' and historians' writings (e.g., Marx), Darwin's Theory of Evolution, Nietszche's writings, Freud's (and others') discoveries about the instability of the human mind, and, at the level of our most fundamental units of understanding, Saussure's writings on the arbitrariness of language--all these developments have shattered previously accepted/respected notions of truth. Today, contingency, randomness, variability, and anxiety are increasingly being acknowledged as "normal" and "inescapable" by mainstream society. Interestingly, such notions have sometimes been manipulated in order to legitimize questionable practices, such as planning (often excessively) for the "uncertainties of the future," as seen in excessively conservative budgets in which massive debt reduction and tax cuts are justified ("just in case," or "to be safe") at the expense of the desparate need for spending in social service sectors, such as health care, lest we report a budget deficit.