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The Question That Should’ve Stayed Dead
If a tree falls in a forest, and nobody is around to hear it… does it make a sound? On its face, it’s a stupid question. Not clever. Not deep. Just cleverly stupid. Anyone who lingers on it for too long probably shouldn’t be in charge of very much.
Because once the answer becomes malleable, everything else follows. If sound only exists when witnessed, maybe trees don’t fall unless they’re observed. Maybe nothing happens beyond your line of sight. Maybe reality negotiates.
Maybe you are the center of the universe.
This is how a parlor riddle becomes a worldview.
Let’s reset.
Trees fall whether you know about them or not. They displace air. They generate vibrations. They obey gravity and decay and entropy. Reality does not wait for your awareness.
Things are happening… right now… that have nothing to do with you. Constantly. You are not the center of the universe. You’re not even the center of your own city block. Cosmically speaking, you barely register. And yet, inside the narrow slice of reality you do touch… you matter profoundly.
That tension is where truth lives.
The Seduction of Relativism
Relativism sells itself as humility.
Who am I to say what’s true for you? Everyone has their own truth. Truth is subjective.
It sounds compassionate. It sounds enlightened. It sounds tolerant.
It isn’t. It’s intellectual laziness dressed up as virtue.
Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, often misused as a patron saint of relativism, warned that when societies abandon objective truth, they don’t become freer—they become manipulable. Power rushes in to fill the vacuum.
What Nietzsche was diagnosing wasn’t liberation… it was danger. When truth becomes negotiable, the loudest voice wins. When reality bends to belief, force replaces reason. When nothing is true, anything can be justified.
Relativism doesn’t remove authority. It just hides it.
Science Does Not Care About Your Feelings
Sound is not an opinion.
Sound is a mechanical wave… pressure oscillations moving through a medium. Whether a human ear converts those oscillations into experience is irrelevant to whether the oscillations exist.
This is not controversial. This is middle-school physics.
Reality does not ask how you feel about it. Gravity doesn’t pause for belief systems. Entropy doesn’t care about cultural context. Biology doesn’t consult Twitter before acting. Science works because truth is not personal.
The moment we pretend otherwise, we don’t become open-minded—we become untethered.
Moral Relativism Is Where This Gets Dangerous
Here’s where people get nervous.
They’ll concede physics.
They’ll concede chemistry.
But morality? That’s different, they say.
Is it?
If morality is entirely subjective… if there is no underlying order, then no moral claim is stronger than any other. Genocide and charity become just… personal preference.
This isn’t hypothetical.
Anthropologist C. S. Lewis addressed this directly in The Abolition of Man:
“A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.”
Without an objective moral truth, power becomes the only referee. History is unambiguous on this point. When societies abandon shared moral grounding, they do not drift into peace. They fracture. Then they harden. Then they break.
Relativism doesn’t protect minorities. It doesn’t restrain tyrants. It doesn’t liberate minds. It dissolves the floor.
Order Without Consensus
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: You don’t have to believe in God to live inside an ordered reality. But belief in God has historically been one of the clearest ways human beings have understood why that order exists… and why truth matters at all.
Natural law existed before your opinion of it. Conscience precedes cultural explanation. Cause and effect do not require consensus. These things don’t emerge because we vote on them.
They don’t persist because we agree they should.
They simply are.
Some people call this order nature. Some call it evolutionary psychology. Some describe it as emergent systems or biological necessity. These names are secondary. What matters is recognition. Because for most of human history, this structure was not treated as accidental.
It was understood as authored.
The idea that truth exists independent of human perception… that reality has an underlying moral and logical coherence, was not originally a scientific assumption. It was a theological one.
If you are a Christian, this matters.
Because Christianity does not claim that God merely possesses truth. It claims that God is truth. That order is not random. That moral reality is not improvised. That the universe is intelligible because it was spoken into being, not discovered by accident.
You may reject that explanation. But you cannot escape the structure it describes. And here’s the key point that modern relativism tries desperately to ignore:
You do not need to believe in God to obey truth. But belief in God makes it far harder to pretend truth is optional.
As psychologist Jordan Peterson often argues, even societies that claim moral relativism still punish theft, reward cooperation, and condemn betrayal.
Why?
Because reality enforces structure whether we articulate it or not. People behave as if truth is real, even when they claim it isn’t. They live inside a moral architecture they refuse to name. They benefit from an order they insist no one designed. You can call that coincidence if you want. But you still live by its rules.
You can deny gravity… but you still fall.
And you can deny God… but you will still collide with truth.
The Ego Trap No One Wants to Name
Let’s stop pretending this is about philosophy. Moral relativism is rarely an intellectual conclusion. It is a psychological defense mechanism. It exists to protect the ego from accountability.
When truth is framed as personal, what is really being asserted is not openness, but exemption—an attempt to place the self beyond evaluation by anything that did not originate internally.
That posture isn’t curiosity.
It’s insulation.
Relativism collapses the world inward. It crowns personal perception as the highest authority. It treats looking inward as wisdom and treats disagreement not as a signal to examine reality… but as an act of aggression.
This is why relativists speak endlessly about how things feel and almost never about what things are.
Feelings can’t be falsified.
Reality can.
So the ego retreats. It builds a custom reality where nothing can be wrong, nothing can be corrected, and nothing can demand growth. Language becomes elastic. Standards become oppressive. And truth becomes whatever allows the self to remain unchallenged.
And here is the part rarely spoken aloud: This posture is not admired. It is tolerated. It is nodded at politely and then quietly navigated around. It is encountered in conversations that never quite land, in relationships that never quite deepen, in workplaces where trust stalls out at the surface level.
People recognize it instinctively as an absence of grounding, a refusal to stand on anything solid. A sense that someone is operating inside a private reality that doesn’t fully connect to the shared one everyone else is navigating.
Relativism doesn’t produce enlightenment. It produces isolation. Because the moment truth becomes personal, meaning fractures. And fractured meaning cannot sustain trust, cooperation, or intimacy.
A society cannot be built on “my truth.” A life cannot be anchored to it. At best, it produces fragile individuals who confuse self-expression with wisdom.
At worst, it produces people who mistake disagreement for violence and accountability for oppression.
This is not compassion.
It is the slow erosion of reality beginning at the center of the self and spreading outward until nothing solid remains.
Reality Is Not Waiting for You
So let’s put the riddle where it belongs.
A tree falls. The air moves. The ground vibrates. The sound exists.
Not because someone heard it, but because reality does not require witnesses. The idea that truth only exists when perceived is not profound. It’s childish.
It’s the worldview of someone who never emotionally matured past believing the room disappears when they close their eyes.
Reality existed before you. It will exist after you. And it does not bend to protect your self-image.
That doesn’t make you meaningless. It makes you responsible. Because if truth is real—if order exists—then your actions matter whether you feel like they do or not.
Your beliefs don’t rewrite consequence. Your sincerity doesn’t absolve error. Your intention doesn’t override impact. This is the part relativism can’t survive.
So no…
“Does a falling tree make a sound if nobody hears it?” is not the right question.
The right question is this:
If reality does not require your awareness to exist, why are you still living as if it revolves around you?
That question doesn’t flatter.
It confronts.
And whether you reject it or accept it will determine whether you stay trapped inside yourself… or finally step into the real world.
