The Truth About Truth?

It's Complicated

Enjoy this essay read by the writer!

Allegory of Truth (Verità) from Cesare Ripa's Iconologia, Rome, Appresso Lepido Facij, 1603 PUBLIC DOMAIN WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Hello, Friend,

There is no singular truth, there are an infinite array of truths circling around something more nebulous and elusive. We alter reality by observing it or recalling it, therefore our attempts to define the truth make it slip further away. Our perspectives are filtered through our lenses, which are formed by our experiences and therefore unique to each of us. Our confidence in knowing the absolute truth is faulty. We only know our version of the truth, or a version of the truth we’ve been provided by someone else.

When we feel confident that we ‘know the truth’ it might be wise to ask ourselves a few questions: Where did we discover this truth? How do we prove its veracity? Is it possible that we only know some of the truth or we don’t know the truth at all?

People talk about a lot of things with a level of authority that is perhaps misguided. Unless you know first hand, you only know what you know and often what you know is filtered through someone else’s lenses and agendas. Even knowing first hand is an illusion, because you are filtering that first hand knowledge through your lenses and likely bending it to fit into the world view you’ve chosen to embrace.

There is no one truth.

This is both comforting and unsettling.

I’m less inclined to claim my version of the truth is the real truth these days. Any advice I might have to provide is relevant to me and maybe slightly relevant to you or perhaps not even a little relevant. Any insight I might share is an opinion. If I’m following my intuition in search of the truth, I’m fully aware that my search will never reveal one definitive truth. Even scientific theories are just theories, and only accepted as the most logical current truths until someone pushes against them and finds a new, better, more logical truth.

I needed this reminder today as I’ve been feeling a little frustrated by the prevailing mainstream and alternative media narratives. There are a lot of experts claiming to know the truth, a lot of voices in my inbox insisting they know the things that no one else knows and if you give them five or seven or ten or eighty dollars a month they’ll share the fundamental, incontrovertible truths with you. This is good marketing. People want to know the truth and they want to believe that someone must know the things that “they” don’t want us to know.

You know “they”, the ones who don’t want us to know things. What’s up with that? Why “they” gotta keep us in the dark?

The truth is, there is so much we will never know. We’re lucky to catch a glimpse of a fragment of the truth. None of us know any more than what we know and what we know is a version of the truth.

There are facts:

The Man with the Golden Toilet and the people who surround him are grifters.

Then there is the truth about the facts and that’s where things get stickier.

What’s the angle? Who is it benefitting? What is happening behind closed doors that we’re not hearing about while we’re being misdirected with the latest chaos? Which chaos is chaos and which chaos is the thing “they” don’t want us to know?

Most of us are making educated (or ill informed or purposefully deceitful) guesses.

Everything I write here is opinion about the truth about the facts based on the information I have gathered to support my hypothesis. I’m never going to claim to know the whole truth. Anyone who does is a liar.

The truth about truth?

It’s complicated.

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