feeling threatened?

There are those who think that nothing is real; that every claim to truth is simply an empty postulation or what they term "an interpretation". Perhaps this is a misreading of certain strands of Continental philosophy or theory, which seek to move the individual away from assuming that there is only one universal truth for all time, that applies to everybody. To understand that truth is relative, that is it perspectival, that it is based on variable aspects concerning the viewer and their situation, however, does not amount to truth being merely an interpretation. It is by no means just this. That is like assuming that because you cannot have your fixed and eternal truth, you must succumb to sophistry and yourself be a sophist. You must be the victim of having no truth at all.

I have mentioned earlier in various posts that those who are prone to binary thinking are not the most well advised cookies in the container. If you move from an idea of the absolute unassailable nature of truth to a position that truth is absolutely relative, your cookie starts to crumble. (Actually in a way you are just switching the on-off switch within the same paradigm you started with. You haven't actually gone anywhere, in terms of your intellectual development.)

I see that those how have of late felt the encroachment on their social space of various progressive movements -- feminism, for instance -- tend to try to defend their threatened feelings by flicking the light switch. Having no idea how feminism is addressing real issues, these defenders of the status quo are inclined to feel, for the first time, a threat to their sense of the "absolute truth" concerning the righteousness of the status quo. Instead of understanding WHY it is necessary for feminist to attack the status quo, these individuals, feeling threatened, revert to the adopting an absolute relativism concerning their "truths". (It becomes "your opinion" versus "my opinion" in their own minds.)

To have such an undeveloped approach to truth and reality is to remain in a very shaky position. Without an understanding of truth that goes way beyond opinion, you face the world like a boxer who has not learned how to develop his or her stance.

This is why so many of those whose first inclination it is to defend the status quo feel threatened. They haven't put the intellectual work in to afford not to.