On the Terror of the Solid Ground

There is a tremor that runs through the digital commons, a low, persistent hum of anxiety. It manifests in declarations of certainty, in weary dismissals of complexity, in the ever-more-desperate search for a solid place to stand. The argument is almost always the same. It is a story told by men who fear the ground has given way beneath their feet, who mistake the vertigo of a shifting world for the dawn of a new nihilism. The story goes like this: once, we had Truth. We had Evidence. We had a shared reality. Then, the saboteurs arrived, the academics, the postmodernists, the relativists and proclaimed that everything was mere interpretation. They unleashed a plague of meaninglessness, leaving us with nothing but stylistic assertions in a void where nothing can be confirmed.

This narrative is seductive because it offers a clear villain and a simple moral. It is a comforting story for a confusing time. But it is a profound misreading, not of academic history, but of the existential condition it seeks to diagnose. The terror is not that we have lost the Truth. The terror is the dawning realisation that we never had it in the first place, not in the way we imagined. The solid ground was always an illusion, a carefully constructed stage. And now, the floorboards are beginning to creak.

The longing for a singular, objective ‘Truth’ is a profoundly human ache. It is the desire for an external guarantor, a cosmic authority that can relieve us of the terrifying burden of judgment. It is the fantasy of a world that is simply given, a set of facts waiting to be discovered, as unambiguous as the numbers in a ledger. This vision of Truth is the partner to the vision of the world as a database, a reality that can be measured, quantified, and definitively known. It promises an end to ambiguity. It promises that if we just gather enough ‘evidence’, we can solve the problem of what to believe and how to live.

This desire is not an intellectual position; it is a psychological defence. It is a fortress built against the howling chaos of existence. Inside its walls, one is safe from the disorienting winds of paradox and contradiction. The problem is that the fortress is also a prison. To pledge allegiance to this kind of Truth is to outsource one’s own conscience. It is to trade the difficult, soul-making work of discernment for the thin comfort of dogma. The evidence one is permitted to see is only that which confirms the pre-existing structure of the walls. Everything else is dismissed as noise, heresy, or ‘mere interpretation’.

But what is interpretation if not the very medium of human existence? We are not minds suspended in a vacuum, receiving pure data from an unmediated world. We are embodied, historical, linguistic creatures, thrown into a world that always precedes us and always exceeds our grasp. Our access to reality is never direct; it is shaped by the architecture of our language, the ghosts of our history, the blind spots of our psyche, and the scaffolding of power in which we are enmeshed. To acknowledge this is not to disrespect evidence. It is to respect the overwhelming evidence of our own finitude. It is the beginning of intellectual and moral honesty.

The caricature of this position, that it champions a world where ‘nothing can be confirmed’ and any interpretation is as good as any other, is a deliberate strawman. It is a projection of the very nihilism it purports to condemn. The point is not that all interpretations are equal. The point is that all interpretations are not innocent. They arise from somewhere. They serve some purpose. They have consequences. The task is not to abandon the act of judgment, but to become fiercely, rigorously accountable for it. The demand is not for less rigour, but for more. It requires us to analyse not just the object of our study, but our own position as the observer. To ask: what are the limits of my perspective? Whose interests does my interpretation serve? What does it make visible, and what does it render invisible? This is an infinitely more demanding task than simply claiming to be on the side of ‘evidence’.

The most telling phrase in this common critique is the sneer at a world where things are only ‘asserted with whatever style you can muster’. This reveals the deep mistake at the heart of the argument. It pretends that its own position is not a style. The pose of the clear-eyed, no-nonsense empiricist, bravely standing against the tide of obscurantist jargon, is one of the most powerful and pervasive stylistic choices of our time. It is a performance of authority that works by concealing its own artistry, its own rhetorical choices, its own interpretive framework. It presents itself as a transparent window onto reality, when it is, in fact, a carefully ground and polished lens.

The most dangerous style is the one that claims to be no style at all. It is the style of the technocrat, the ideologue, the demagogue. It is the voice that says, ‘These are not my interpretations; these are simply the facts.’ This is the assertion that short-circuits conversation, that delegitimises dissent, that closes down the possibility of a shared world built through the difficult, ongoing negotiation of our differing perspectives. The real nihilism is not the admission that we are always interpreting; it is the dogmatic insistence on a single interpretation that seeks to annihilate all others.

So we are left in the fracture. On one side, the alluring promise of solid ground, a return to a capital-T Truth that, upon closer inspection, often looks like a codename for the prevailing structures of power. On the other, the terrifying freedom of the open sea, a world of interpretations where we are solely responsible for the meanings we create and the worlds those meanings bring into being. To flee back to the shore is to embrace a comforting illusion. To surrender to the waves in a fit of cynical relativism is to abdicate our humanity.

The task is to learn to sail. It is to build a vessel sturdy enough to navigate the uncertainty, to tack against the winds of dogma, and to hold a course guided by a moral compass we must calibrate ourselves, again and again, in darkness. It is to accept that we are interpretive creatures all the way down. This is not a problem. It is the very signature of our existence. The challenge is not to find our way back to a truth that was never there, but to bear the truth of our condition: that we are condemned to meaning, and therefore, to the endless, perilous, and sacred task of making it.