This is my latest attempt to confront TRUTH as a subject in itself. My first post was Feb 2020 titled “The Truth About TRUTH”. And a later attempt at defining TRUTH was my post from January 2021 called “Who Believes in TRUTH?”
So hopefully I won’t repeat myself in this one, but with such popular apps available now like Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) that visually and aurally manipulate what you do see and hear on media platforms making the ‘never really happened’ seems to have happened, it becomes hard to tell now what TRUTH actually is.
One media person this morning said, “If you see a lie often enough, it must be truth.” Well NO, a lie is still a lie, but the backers of the lie are betting on your limited resistance to over-saturated exposure to untrue propaganda. That’s why they keep pounding those lies into your brain’s neural network until you accept the lie as truth because the brain recognizes repetitions and is programmed to decipher patterns from perceived stimuli or inputted data. Repetitive lies eat away at your ‘sense-making’ apparatus until you start to question your own mind and your own knowing of ‘what is TRUTH?’ in general.
Why should this matter to you?
This entire blog is about “Finding Your Truth” so if you are reading it, it’s likely that you are interested in determining what TRUTH actually is; and likely more adamant about being able to differentiate the non-truth from it.
But let’s broaden our perspective a bit: A society is the union of random individuals into a cohesive group for the purposes of safety, sustenance, and efficient operation. (Wiki Definition: “the aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community”) And within that organized community there must be agreed upon rules of conduct—called LAWS, along with community members designated to enforce those laws, including those sent out to patrol the community to corral potential law-breakers.
Without a standard of recognized TRUTH upon which to base all legal decisions pertaining to law-breaking, there would be no determining factors as to the rightness or wrongness of individual and group actions within the community.
And without mutual or agreed upon TRUTH there would be NO cohesive society. So if all TRUTH were subjective and individually defined, there could be no determiners of rightness or wrongness to the actions of others.
For each of us, to ‘find your own truth’ means to understand yourself well enough to determine your own life path separate from the opinions of others. But for us as a society, we rely on mutual truths of not harming others, and not trying to destroy the inner workings of the community around us.
Our legal systems rely on TRUTH above all else; and if TRUTH is instead malleable and dependent on whoever can flood the media with personal falsehoods that might seem like truth if that’s what we WANT to believe, then there will be battles between those who want to believe one thing and those who want to believe something different.
There has to be ONE agreed upon TRUTH for any society to stand on to make important, life-changing decisions. That’s why every society has laws to govern it. That’s also why the United States has an established Constitution that defines the governance of the nation of individuals.
No one person is above the law. No one person can thwart the Constitution of the United States of America. We are a nation of laws and if those laws are violated, then the offender must be held to account for his actions.
THAT is the importance of TRUTH. Everyone is accountable to the society that they inhabit. Without those mutually agreed upon TRUTHs, there can be no stable society.
And without personal TRUTH there can be no determiner of right path and wrong path for each of us.
FINDING YOUR TRUTH 