And We Will Probably Still Believe Them

>>> I still maintain a belief that there are systems, such as science and journalism, that are still effective to determine truth

I’ve been mulling over this quite a bit recently, and I’m not sure if it’s that simple. For example, America and Australia have similar founding stories – people left England and bravely travelled great distances to discover a new land, and forge a new life there. Fair enough, but others would say that the whitefellas came here, killed off as many of the locals as they could, then stole their land. Which is “truth”, which “fake news”? It’s not that clear-cut, it’s just one messy spectrum of grey :-/

You’d think that history (i.e. what happened in the past) would be clear-cut and unambiguous, but it’s actually very much subject to interpretation, and it’s the victors who get to write it. In the same way, truth is what you make it to be, and with respect, I suspect you’re doing a bit of that e.g. “nobody doubts”, “was proven to be”, “has been thoroughly disproven”. We point a finger at others and say “How can you not see the truth? I do. You must be stupid!”, but they do exactly the same thing to us :shrug: Who’s right? Well, me, obviously 🙂 And so “the truth” becomes “whatever I think.”

Similarly for science, once upon a time, everyone *knew* that the sun revolved around the earth, *knew* that leeches were an effective medical treatment, *knew* that the way to the way to prevent earthquakes was to sacrifice 4 goats and a virgin 🙂 But what was known to be true actually wasn’t.

I suspect that a big part of the problem today is ubiquitous access to things like the internet and Google, and everyone is now an instant expert on everything. There’s no consideration that you might be wrong, even in the slightest, no ability to analyze things, or handle any sort of nuance. We have this massive firehose of information coming in (often conflicting), and in the face of such complexity, the natural reaction is to simplify, to the point where the analysis becomes “you’re either with us or you’re against us.” I don’t have much hope for us being able to handle any kind of situation in the future. As you’ve pointed out elsewhere, the clusterfuck that was the response to COVID is a good indicator how things will play out 🙁

No worries. Writing that comment was quite a useful exercise, since it forced me to tighten up a bunch of ideas that have been sloshing around inside my head for a long time 🙂

I think we have “facts”, which are generally unassailably binary, they’re true or they’re not e.g. on 6th January 2021, a group of people entered the Capitol building. Although it’s not always even that simple e.g. flat earthers, or the moon landing 🙂

Then we have how those facts are reported. I used the word “entered” since it’s fairly neutral, but others might say “invaded” or “stormed”, which are stronger, more emotive words. Some might even insist. So, unless you were there, how the event is reported is coloring your view of what happened.

And then we have how those facts are interpreted. Were these people patriots trying to preserve democracy? Trump-loving morons trying to steal an election? A bunch of thugs who just wanted to smash up the place? It’s completely subjective, but because we conflate truth with facts, people think that there is a such a thing as The Truth, and it’s black and white, and of course, they know it, and anyone who thinks differently is Wrong.

The world is getting too complicated, there’s too much information (of very questionable quality), and people are just getting overloaded and have to simplify things down to Right or Wrong. And that’s how we end up with the situation we have now, where people are screaming and flinging shit at each other from opposite sides of the aisle 🙁