The classics believed that truth, goodness and beauty are expressions of reality and are therefore aligned in such a way that discovering beauty can lead you to to truth and thereby goodness[1]. Popular modernity (or what Charles Taylor calls 'Exclusive humanism') shares a similar belief that freedom, happiness, and morality are perfectly aligned forever, and that discovery of one can point you to the others. Robert Pippin's 'The Persistence of Subjectivity' is an exploration of this theme in modern thought.

These values are like senses working together to give a 'simple believer' of liberal modernity his integrated view of reality, and whenever there's a split in this reality (e.g. a democratic genocide), the political propagands leans on existence of one and the dogma of their perfect alignment to help us take moral leaps of faith and manufacture his consent. Just like Plato's conflation of beauty and goodness leads to 'Halo/Horn Effect', the modern subject is constantly blinded and asked to use his hands to see. When faced with moral dilemmas, as long as he can see one of these values even remotely and relatively in a side, he's asked to believe they're all in there somewhere even though he sees the opposite.

  1. "In the region of the known the last thing to be seen and hardly seen is the idea of Good, and that when seen it must needs point us to the conclusion that this is indeed the cause for all things of all that is right and beautiful, giving birth in the visible world to light, and the author of light and itself in the intelligible world being the authentic course of truth and reason." - Plato, Republic 517b–c, in Plato in Twelve Volumes, vols. 5 and 6, trans. Paul Shorey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969). ↩︎