Truth is a strange thing. How do you know something is true? Clearly, most people would say that they can prove it. But then they also believe in things like God that they can’t prove, so it can’t be just that. Truth, interestingly enough, is gaining two entirely separate definitions: the truth (i.e., what is objectively correct) and your truth (i.e., what you know or believe to be true about reality that might not be true or observable to someone else). So what is going on here?
Well, it all comes down to what you define to be true and what your relationship is with that truth. The former is what we discussed a moment ago: what is real or what is real for you (including the “honesty” definition of truth meaning that you are speaking what is real/correct/true for you). The latter is much more fascinating because everyone says that they want to know the truth and yet there are many examples of that not being the case at all.
So let’s talk about that in this post. There are many relationships between you and the truth:
There are probably more, but let’s go through these in this post because they are interesting—specifically, we’ll cover what each one is and how to identify and manage them if you are worried about them negatively affecting your life.
You know the truth and want everyone else to know.
This is the primary one that people think is true about them. They know what is true and tell anyone who will listen. Examples include Jehovah’s Witnesses, gossipers, journalists, and professors (“profess” is in the name!). They seek the truth—they are truth seekers! And once they discover the truth, they must bestow the truth upon the world! Scientists and philosophers are examples of people trying to discover new-to-world truths. The action items are pretty straightforward: if you know things that others don’t and there would be benefit (and not too much cost) to communicating that to others, then you can choose to do it. If someone knows something you don’t, then you can be receptive to that new information (however, since you haven’t verified it, you might have to get more proof before believing it yourself).
You know the truth and want everyone else to agree with you, trying to correct them.
This is derisively known as the “know-it-all” and refers to people who love to insert their knowledge into conversations and love to argue and debate with others. You may just wish to avoid these people if you don’t like those kinds of conversations; if you are that kind of person, then you might want to make sure that the other person is open to your information before dumping it on them—especially on controversial topics like religion, politics, abortion, etc. But sometimes even minor things like correcting people’s grammar might annoy them, though others might appreciate it. It’s all about the audience. You may think that you’re open to getting the truth in whatever form it manifests, but run into the wrong person and you might have been happier before you received the information…and not because the information was a bummer but the interaction was annoying or obnoxious.
You know the truth but are influenced by others’ lies and need reminders to reinforce against people who say otherwise.
There is a famous experiment where they had a group of people take a test where they matched the length of a line with its equal in a multiple-choice structure. Nearly everyone got it right when taking the test alone, but the majority got it wrong when among a group of peers (they were all in on the study) who said the wrong answer. The point being that you will state what you know to be false to go along with the group. As such, if you are constantly bombarded by biased news sources that spout what you know to be nonsense, you might have to call a friend, search YouTube, or perform some other sanity-checking ritual to hear someone verbalize your opinion back to you so that you feel better. It might be best to avoid things that will upset you with no upside (if you’re not going to change your mind), but the “need to hear my opinion spouted back at me” is a double-edged sword that can help you feel better but put you into an echo chamber if you are actually wrong.
You know the truth and only want to associate with others who know the truth.
You might call this the dreaded “Thanksgiving Dinner” problem: you spend so much time with people who agree with you that you dread even talking to someone who disagrees. As such, you might only associate with people who agree with you. It might be good for your health, like the previous situation, but it might turn you into a hateful person if you never have to get along with anyone who thinks differently than you. On the other hand, if someone won’t associate you because of your opinions (or might not if they found out what your beliefs were), then you have a decision to make about whether to be forthcoming with that information. Remember that lying and omitting are different things and that there is nothing wrong with omitting information if it provides no benefit and only detracts from a relationship. Just like you don’t talk about your bowel movements or disgusting medical conditions in polite company, you have to decide what personal information and opinions that you share with others.
You know the truth and are neither bothered by others’ ignorance nor influenced by them.
Everyone wishes to be the former and thinks that they are the latter, but most have neither. It’s not a personal weakness—we are social creatures. We want the people that we associate with to be like us (see: racial and cultural areas of cities), and so we immediately want to convey information that causes us to think the way that we do to them. Additionally, there are only so many times you can resist being told anything before getting tired and just going along with it. This has been done throughout history, from normalizing other sexualities to changing technical terms that have become offensive (e.g., retarded, moron, illegal alien) to other terms. You can believe that you are not influenced by others, but—for example—if you use “undocumented immigrant” when the official, legal term written into law is “illegal alien”, then you are influenced by others over what is factually correct in the law book (not saying whether that is right or wrong; just that people are influenced by others’ “truth”). It demonstrates that truth vs. feeling good is often the real dilemma. Similarly, you might think that you don’t care what others think, but hear someone of your political opposition go on a diatribe about your side, and you’ll look like Roger Rabbit trying to resist finishing the “Shave and a haircut” jingle (“…twoooooooo biiiiiiiiiitttttttts!”).
You know the truth and don’t want anyone else to know.
Also known as a secret. You might be HIV positive, be secretly gay or conservative (or both!), or have just flunked out of college. At any rate, this is information that you have enough of a hard time coming to terms with yourself—let alone having to deal with others’ knowledge of it. So here you have the choice of whether to tell no one, tell only trusted parties (and risk it getting out), or swallowing your pride and being open about it. That is up to you what personal information you keep to yourself, but it shows that there are truths that you might not want to know and might not want others to know.
You “know enough to be dangerous”.
Famously demonstrated in what is now called the “Dunning-Kruger Effect”, this is where you don’t know a lot but feel like you know more than you do and so are subject to making information-based mistakes. My favorite example from my own life was when I learned the basics of DOS (the pre-Windows PC operating system) and then accidentally used the command “DELTREE” to basically wipe the entire hard drive. Oops. All you can do to avoid this is be willing to learn more and be more careful acting with incomplete knowledge or information if you feel a little too confident about it. If someone else has this issue, you have to be careful because they might not be willing to listen (see below for more on this), but the best you can do is either give them new information that they might be receptive to or do the “you’re right; here’s why you’re wrong” approach that I use in a bind. In the former, you can say something like, “Don’t forget X!” as if you are reminding them because you care and not because they don’t know. In the latter, you point out where they’re right (studies show that people are more willing to listen to you if you agree with them first) and then say something that might contradict their beliefs. By it not seeming like you’re telling them you’re wrong, they’re more likely to now believe the correct thing and no one has to acknowledge that it was a correction.
You are ignorant and want to know.
This is what posture everyone thinks they have toward knowledge, but they often don’t (more in a moment). In this example, you might be a beginner and want tips from an expert or not be looped in on some world event and want to learn more about it. This requires both the self-awareness and humility to admit that you don’t know something and the willingness to be educated by others—which is why it’s difficult when, say, an expert with 20 years in the field might not want to openly claim that they learned something from a first-year pupil. They always do afterwards (“I learn so much from my students!”), but tell me a time where a 20-year veteran admitted in public that they got outdone by a novice, and I’ll show you my large collection of unicorns and leprechauns. (kidding) For you to use this, it’s simple enough to always keep the humility of a novice and always be aware of when someone wants information vs. when they are not going to be receptive to it.
You are ignorant of the truth and don’t want to know.
This becomes much, much more common as someone gains more knowledge through age and/or experience. You don’t want to admit that you are getting forgetful, so you don’t want your family pointing it out to you. You don’t want to admit that after decades you might have made a relatively simple mistake, so you hide it or don’t want to hear about it. While some of this is being ignorant of certain facts or truths, some of it is ethics-based—i.e., you don’t want to hear information that contradicts your ethical conclusion. For example, if you believe that abortion is a human right, you don’t want to hear graphic stories about women who’ve had abortions and gone through years of trauma and regretted it. Why? Because it makes you feel bad and might change our mind on your ethical truth that it’s the right thing to do. It works both ways—if you think abortion is murder, you might not want to hear about the one exception of the incestuous rape victim whose life is at risk 20 weeks into the pregnancy. In both cases, the person who holds one ethic or the other will at best claim that they are the exceptions that prove the rule; at worst, they’d rather not hear about it at all because their mind is made up and it’s just a depressing topic after that (note: they might even argue that they’re false stories, as we saw recently with around half of Democrats believing that the Trump assassination attempt was staged—not to mention the large population of conspiracy theorists on both political sides (fun party trick: mention “George Soros” to conservatives or “The Koch Brothers” to liberals at your next social event and see how many claim that they’re responsible for everything bad in politics)). If you are susceptible to this situation, feel free to abide by the rule, “Don’t ask questions you don’t want to know the answer to.” There are millions of things you will never know about in your life…if it’s inconsequential, what’s one more? If you are facing someone like this and care about the relationship, let them be willfully ignorant. While I hate the way that most people say, “It’s not my job to educate you…” these days, it’s a good reminder if you’re in that situation (just say it more nicely to yourself and not condescendingly).
You are misinformed and don’t want to be corrected.
I was once in a taxi in Boston and made the unfortunate mistake of bringing up Tom Brady’s Deflategate scandal to a huge fan. Of course, there was a decent amount of evidence that he knew about the deflated footballs, from texts about how he liked a lower-inflated ball to the fact that he destroyed his phone shortly after to his trainer being alone for a minute with the footballs in a room. Of course, this was a bad topic to bring up because he listed all of this stuff that wasn’t true about the event and said that I was completely wrong. Me being stupid, I e-mailed him the links to the verified news sources of what I was saying being true. This is similar to willful ignorance with one added layer: you believe you have facts supporting your case that are completely false if you’d do just the bare minimum investigation. You see that all the time, from the “great people on both sides” false claims (Trump clearly stated that he was not talking about Nazis in the same paragraph of that statement) to the “birtherism” theory that Barack Obama was born in Kenya (Barack Obama had released his birth certificate to end any concerns, but it didn’t stop the willingly misinformed). Again, the key difference is that what you believe is not true vs. having beliefs that are possibly partially true but incomplete or having no beliefs and just preferring to not know at all. If you are in this situation, you can either be willing to be corrected (just don’t be biased where your initial opinion was formed based on zero data and then claim “to be willing to change your mind—if they can prove it”…it requires multiple times more data to change a belief than form it, unfortunately) or prefer to believe what you want to believe for the sake of your emotional state. If you are facing someone in this situation, it might be best to leave them be and, in the worst-case scenario, maybe even cut ties with them if it’s a problem for you. Especially if they believe lies about you like if someone claimed you cheated on your spouse or something…it’s kind of hard to keep a bond with someone if they believe something so heinous about you that’s not true.
You know that there are multiple possible opinions and are willing to have civil dialogue about the various possibilities.
Again, this is a socially acceptable one, so everyone will say they have this posture. But they often don’t (more in a moment). The only thing you can do if you want to be more open to this is to tell yourself, “If I believed what they believed, then I would draw the same conclusion,” to at least understand where others are coming from. For example, if someone is a child of rape, then I’m sure that a completely rational conclusion is to be pro-life to argue for their own right to exist from the time they were conceived instead of there being an up to 9-month period where they could’ve been killed and much of society would’ve celebrated the ability to do it. Of course, they could also believe that it was their mother’s choice and they’re appreciative that they made the one that allowed them to be born. But the point is that most people follow the standard logical structure—look at both arguments being logically sound whether or not you agree with them:
Argument 1:
Argument 2:
Regardless of your opinion on any position, the idea that you could come to different conclusions based on the same information is one that you have to come to terms with because people prioritize information differently—in addition to having different ethics (or often because of their different ethics) as mentioned earlier.
You think that you have the “one true opinion” and conflate your opinion with fact or truth.
This is jokingly called the “you have the one true opinion” condition when there’s a contentious topic and you think you are the only one with the correct opinion on the matter. It’s becoming much more common these days, as there is a strange trend of conflating intellectualism with liberalism—likely because most higher education institutions are populated with left-leaning scholars. This is the inverse of the “I believed what they believed” point where people only think, “If they knew what I knew, they would know better than to think what they think.” And that is the ultimate in arrogance if you think that about everything (of course, when you are correct, that is a true statement; it’s the default to that position in every situation where the risk lies). But not everything you think is a fact. You might like broccoli and think that anyone who doesn’t like it is an idiot—and you’d be wrong. It could be that they experience broccoli differently than you, which is why they like it and you don’t. Taste is not an objective truth or reality; it is by definition subjective. So to conflate the subjective with the objective is a major mistake that someone who considers themself intelligent should be embarrassed to do (after all, if they knew what I know, they’d know better! - kidding). The truth is that everyone has their own opinion on how the world should work or how they should behave, and they all have a combination of their own facts and information plus their own opinions and beliefs, so you will never agree on everything. The only way to avoid this is to accept that you don’t know everything, that your ethics and preferences are not shared by all, and that, therefore, it’s possible for others to come to different conclusions without them being idiots.
So those are various relationships between yourself/others and the truth and how to handle them. Hopefully, you will be aware of these and equip yourself to handle them appropriately. As a final thought, I’ll leave you with a short note about Hanlon’s razor:
Hanlon’s razor in its original derivation was that one should never attribute to malice what could be properly attributed to ignorance. In more technical terms, the idea is that when you disagree with them, your mind immediately comes to three possible conclusions in this order:
Just knowing Hanlon’s razor will make you more aware of how you and others will argue and how civil arguments eventually escalate (they go from someone not knowing X to being too dumb to understand X to being too bad of a human to care about X). It also explains the saying about whoever accuses their debate opponent of being Hitler has lost it (because they have stopped arguing facts with their opponent to the audience and have now resorted to personal attacks on the other person’s character and intent in the debate). Most importantly, however, it might help you handle someone who is quickly escalating along that path with you so that, if you wish to save the relationship, you can deescalate before they begin to insult you.
The journey toward the truth is no easy task; I wish you well navigating life toward whatever it is that you seek.