Things are interpreted relatively. If you’re traveling in a car at 100km/h and you throw an orange backward out your window at 25km/hr, the orange is traveling 75km/h, relative to the road. Your body is traveling 100km/h relative to the road, 0km/h relative to the car, and 25km/h relative to the orange. This analogy may ooze banality, but it holds true to the concept of relativity. Depending on the point of reference, things may exhibit varying characteristics; as in the former example, one’s body can be traveling 100, 25, or 0km/h. When applied to abstractions, such as the social relevancy of something, the point of reference is subjectively designated. However, social dynamics cannot be quantified like the speed of a car on a highway. They are intangible, highly variable, and subject to complete entropy. Our ability to conceptualize relativity and proportionality is rooted in perspective.
People see things relative to themselves, and relative to their community environment. I will not state this as an infallible truth, because it is not. People do stray from their community’s “point of reference”, borrowing new points of reference from other communities. For example, Billy thinks homosexuality is sin, because the white-supremacist, bible-thumping Baptist community in which he lives thinks so too. According to his community’s mindset on this point, relative to a heterosexual, homosexuals are un-godly. Billy may or may not begin to think otherwise, regardless if he is living in this community. Who knows what kind of epiphany he’ll have.
If Billy strays from the community mentality, he does not approach a more positive mindset, nor does he approach a negative one. The constancy of relativity still remains; subjectivity and perspective are the variable roots of all opinion.
I am suggesting that “facts” seen as truth based on a premise of relativity are never consistently factual due to these variable roots.
Mathnawi VI: 2955-2962 The spirit is like an ant, and the body like a grain of wheat
which the ant carries to and fro continually.
The ant knows that the grains of which it has taken charge
will change and become assimilated.
One ant picks up a grain of barley on the road;
another ant picks up a grain of wheat and runs away.
The barley doesn’t hurry to the wheat,
but the ant comes to the ant, yes it does.
The going of the barley to the wheat is merely consequential:
it’s the ant that returns to its own kind.
Don’t say, “Why did the wheat go to the barley?”
Fix your eye on the holder, not on that which is held.
As when a black ant moves along on a black felt cloth:
the ant is hidden from view; only the grain is visible on its way.
But Reason says: “Look well to your eye:
when does a grain ever move along without a carrier?”
– Rumi, Jewels of Remembrance –