You Can’t Handle the Truth!

Whilst Jack Nicholson’s classic line from ‘A Few Good Men’ remains a persistent echo in my mind, Winston Churchill’s lessor known comment is perhaps more insightful.

“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.” Winston S. Churchill

I typically face my first predicament over truth as I stagger into the day over my first dose of caffeine. Opening my inbox, I discover the great news. Overnight, it seems I won a car, two holidays and some cash! All I need to do is ‘Click Here’ to claim my prize. Even though I know that these are scams, a little part of me says ‘well somebody has to win that Range Rover’.

After a fruitless ten minutes processing my daily batch of ‘Unsubscribe’ transactions, it is then time to read the online news. Lamentably, this turns out to be a swirling mess of sensationalised ‘fakeness’ designed to hook me in and sell me more stuff. I admit it is pretty clever that news.com knows that I am thinking of remodelling my bathroom. Of course, I know that news has always been fake to some degree, as news reporting is just somebody’s interpretation of events, but what the heck is ‘Post Truth’ anyway?

Oh well, at least I can trust Google, Facebook and Twitter to give me the good oil. Now I find my OCEAN score and my choice of friends are skewing my FaceBook feed AND trying to sell me even more stuff that I don’t need. Actually, that nifty pressure cleaner and putty knife combo could come in handy. And now I find that Donald used fake news and ‘dark posts’ to sway voters in that epitome of fair play, the US elections. Shame on you Don, but I am staying online until I know what ‘covfefe’ stands for.

Well, that leaves academic research as the last stronghold of truth. However, according to Brian Nosek and the Reproducibility Project, 50% of psychology experiments cannot be reproduced and that this is a problem in many areas of medical and scientific research. I read this in Nature, but weren’t some of those papers published in Nature in the first place? Now I am really confused. Should I stop eating eggs, eat more eggs, cook them on my aluminium frypan, or age them for throwing at badly behaved politicians and sports stars?

After all, what is truth anyway? If everyone believes something to be true then isn’t that a form of truth? Consider Copernicus, whose theory that the planets travelled round the sun was contrary to popular theory and prevailing religious doctrine. Fearing persecution for heresy, he waited until his deathbed before publishing his revolutionary work ‘On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres’.  It caused quite a stir among the information overlords of the time. Imagine carrying around that secret for 30 years pondering the realities of truth, knowing that everyone around you had a distorted view of their world. The mind boggles about what Copernicus’s deathbed tweets may have looked like:-

The reality was true then and it remains so today. Politics and social momentum trump the facts in most areas of truth, and having a robust ‘truth filter’ that isn’t easily hacked is pretty tough. I reckon ‘I can handle the truth’, it’s just that I’m finding it hard work in the new world of ‘augmented truth reality’.

Mark Twain was one of the most respected authors of the late 1800’s and one who regularly contemplated truth. His writings on the subject are surprisingly enduring: -

"Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please." 

“A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” 

“Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing the matter with this, except that it ain't so”