Do People Care about the TRUTH?

This is a question that I did not consider when starting my newsletter, but I now think that it needs to be addressed.?There is increasing evidence that they do not.

How do you judge the truth? If you’re like most of us, you probably don’t do the hard work. With information on the internet, the hard work really isn’t so hard. You can check the sources, look at reliable ones. Apply certain tests or measures of truth. Checking these things only takes a few moments.

But none of us have the time or resources to check all the news we confront daily. Instead, we rely on other methods of assessing truth. Do we trust the source? Then we believe the message. Does it have a picture? Then we are more likely to believe it. Have we heard this before? Then it starts to feel truer. Does it fit with our pre-existing beliefs? That is the lie we want to believe. We accept?what we believe to be true instead of requiring truth.

There are many reasons why people no longer care about the truth besides the apparent difficulty of discerning the truth. Perhaps briefly exploring some of them will help to clarify why people do not care.

First, the truth may be so disturbing that we simply do not want to face it. We tell ourselves certain “truths” to avoid the ugly truth of things such as human massacres. We do not want to face the inhumanity of man. This reasoning can be found in different fields such as politics, religion, and medicine. There is a general belief that we are not strong enough, wise enough, or even forgiving enough to face the truth. It is true, as stated in the movie, “you can’t handle the truth.”

Another reason might be that we are so committed to the falsehood we cannot accept the truth. History is full of examples where people have become committed to a cause or belief that they will believe in the face of tremendous evidence to the contrary. Many wars have been fought as a result. Hitler and many other dictators rose to their positions of power and influence simply by telling people what they wanted to believe, taking advantage of this human weakness. Politics are becoming much more about falsehoods and mistruths then about the realty of past accomplishments and abilities.

The truth is also often very embarrassing, or worse.?We do not want to believe that people have cheated or lied to get where the have. We want to believe in hard work and honesty.?It use to be that lying was so much more complicated because it was difficult to remember all the lies.?People have become so good at lying today that it becomes natural, and even expected. Evil exists in the world and all of us have sinned; we do not want to admit our sin.

There is often much to be gained by that which is not true. Again, I hate to do it, I return to politics. How many elected officials, on almost any level, leave their offices with less than when they were elected. My favorite, however, is who believes that they are not paying considerably more for windows installed in their houses with no money down and two years before the pay anything? Sometimes it just doesn't add up.

I worry that the truth is being buried in a landslide of misrepresentations and lies. Sometimes people make honest mistakes. Other times, we argue about how to interpret something. In these cases, we’ll eventually understand the real state of the world. But there is a substantially more dangerous situation. People sometimes deliberately mislead and lie. People present information they know to be false with some goal in mind. Many people come to believe various lies. And these lies seem to be impossible to correct.

Truth and lies are a matter of?ethics but they have many consequences throughout. In science, there are consequences for misrepresentations and lies. Eventually, science gets to the truth. In our political debates, I worry that the internet has made it substantially more difficult for people to find the truth. Too many people may have too many rewards for the lies they are telling. The rest of us are left accepting things that feel true. Making rational choices becomes impossible in such a climate.

This is what it means to live in a post-truth world with fake news. Even if we try to be rational and thoughtful, we may base our judgments on lies. We may make decisions based on things we want to be true rather than the real state of the world. When the truth is buried under a mountain of misrepresentations, we cannot make?wise?decisions.

What do you think? Do you care about the TRUTH? Share this article to continue asking the question and add your comments to the mix.