IIT Kanpur: Is there anything called universal truth or universal beauty?

The following is an excerpt from a samvaad (dialogue) session with Acharya Prashant.

Questioner (Q): If positive and negative, good and bad, beauty and ugliness are all a matter of personal perspective, then can universal positivity, universal goodness, or universal beauty exist? If it is the majority that decides, then is the majority the judge of the deeds to be done by one in a communal setting? Or is it better for an individual to believe in oneself and proceed with his own beliefs?

Acharya Prashant (AP): That which you call a personal perspective obviously belongs to the person, right? And as you have pointed out, the person is a bundle of conditioning; the perspective of the person comes from his illusions. Don’t you see that that which you think of as good for yourself so frequently turns out to be harmful? That which appears beautiful right now probably is merely a shadow of the ugly. But we have a lot of confidence in our beliefs. We say, “I think of something in a particular way, therefore that thing is the way I look at it.”

Now, what is it that you call universal positivity or goodness or beauty? Probably you mean to say that if a lot of people agree, that if they have a shared belief that something is good or beautiful or positive, then that something can…