‘To Hell With The Truth’ The Unparalleled Epistemic Crisis within the NDP

By Dr Garrey Michael Dennie, SMCM

In a remarkable passage in his book, The Iceman Cometh, the author Eugene O’Neill proclaims, “to hell with the truth. As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It is irrelevant and immaterial.”

This absolute rejection of truth as the means through which human beings can know the world and act in the world is sometimes referred to as “an epistemic crisis.”

And today, this phrase properly describes the New Democratic Party (NDP) of Dr Lorraine Friday that has continued to insist with no proof whatsoever that Dr Ralph Gonsalves and his Unity Labour Party (ULP) stole the December 2015 elections.

Equally importantly, they reject as false any and all evidence, and any and all witnesses, that confirm the legitimacy of the ULP’s victory. Indeed, in the language of The Iceman, the NDP’s position has become, “To Hell with The Truth.”

The NDP’s descent into this pit of unreason is without parallel in the history of St Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG), and perhaps the broader Caribbean. A mountain of evidence sustains this view. For over the past three years a cascade of decisions has buttressed the proposition that the ULP is the rightful government of SVG.

First, the voters spoke on election night to the same. The ULP did not simply win eight seats to the NDP’s seven.

Crucially, they also won the popular vote by nearly five percentage points, in and of itself the greatest guarantor that the ULP acts with the authority of the Vincentian people. Thus, across the expanse of the Vincentian history of adult suffrage, the NDP stands as the first and only party to attack the popular will of the Vincentian electorate.

Second, however, the NDP’s challenge to the election results is completely destroyed by a series of independent observers who have affirmed the integrity of the election results.

These include the Organization of American States, CARICOM, and the National Monitoring and Consultative Mechanism. And merely two weeks ago, the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court repudiated the NDP’s challenge and thereby re-affirmed the supremacy of the Vincentian voters’ intent in re-electing the ULP.

Not surprisingly, the learned judge’s reasoning is impenetrable to and resisted by the NDP. And they have an indisputable right to appeal the judgement.

But it clearly defies logic that all of the election monitoring parties and the learned Judge independently of each other could have arrived at the same conclusion without this being the truth. However, it is also true that this epistemic collapse of the NDP deserves our attention for after all, a party that aspires to govern SVG should be able to distinguish between fact and fiction, between truth and falsehood, and between the world as it is, and the world as they would like it to be.

This the NDP can no longer do.

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy which confines itself to what on the surface appears to be simple questions: how do we know what we know?

What is true, and what is false? What is accurate, and what is inaccurate? Hence, fundamental to this discipline is the proposition that all claims of knowledge can be subjected to rigorous systems of proof to verify or falsify their truthfulness, and that the institutions and practices we invest with that authority – the courts, the academy, science, and other duly constituted experts – can indeed provide us with the confidence that we can arrive at the truth of things. Broadly speaking then, this intellectual edifice developed over centuries of scientific exploration has allowed us to have a shared understanding of what constitutes truth. And what is a lie.

The NDP now stands outside of this consensus that truth is attainable, or even desirable. Indeed, their insidious assault on our capacity to separate truth from falsehood extends far beyond their rejection of the conclusions of independent bodies that the NDP lost the elections fair and square. And it goes deeper than the fundamental conflict I exposed in an earlier article between their legal strategy and their political strategy. Rather, the NDP’s headlong descent into this pit of unreason can be best exemplified by a deeper exploration of their lawyers’ claims of the precise injury the NDP sustained in the December 2015 election, and the balm they seek to heal this wound.

The simplest statement of their case is this: that election officials violated several ballots in multiple ways and therefore those ballots should have been excluded from the final counts in one or more of the two contested constituencies. The NDP’s political leaders have therefore argued that to count those ballots would be to disenfranchise the Vincentian electorate.

That is the injury the NDP claims it has sustained in the December elections. And the remedy they have sought we already know: the Courts must vacate the results of the election.

The sheer absurdity of this position is without limit. Nowhere in the histories of democracies has anyone ever advanced the notion that refusing to count the vote is itself a protection of the right of the voter. It is in fact the very opposite.

The most fundamental principle undergirding every democratic election is that the right of the voters to have their votes counted is sacred and can only be voided absent the capacity of election officials to divine the voters’ intent.

In essence, the NDP transformed themselves into defenders of the proposition that the election officials who “mutilated” ballots must be allowed to block Vincentian voters from having their vote counted.

No one in the NDP seems to have understood that you disenfranchise voters only when you do not count their votes. Hence, when the NDP declared that election officials had “mutilated” the ballots, it was the NDP who had mutilated the English language by claiming that the actual counting of the vote had harmed the voters. Nothing could be further from the truth.

And the Court rejected this corruption of the language when it ruled against the very idea that the ballots were “mutilated.”

And so we must return to The Iceman Cometh. Eugene O’Neill proclaims, “the lie of a pipe dream is what gives life of the whole misbegotten lot of us.” Yet it is precisely this lie that the NDP must abandon, the pipe dream that a court would vacate the results of the “stolen” election.

And until it does so, it will remain lost in the fog of ignorance that presents the truth as lies, and the lies as the truth.