A stream of truthlessness

I gave myself an hour (hence the straggling Unintegrated points section) to try and articulate my feelings about truth, its fragility, and our collective relationship with it. I found I was able to write more than I expected – though the scope of the stream outgrew my intent – and I feel like preserving the resulting artefact. As always, I am fallible, inconsistent, I am human. My beliefs are duly fallible, inconsistent, and human.

We know little. What we do know can never be certain, it all rests on the strength of our belief in things that have yet to be proven untrue to our satisfaction, but which may already be untrue. Some truths have proven resilient through time, others have yet to do so, many more have been discredited along the way. Still, a truths age has little bearing on it’s veracity, only on the attention we afford it. We all have different thresholds for truth, untruth, certainty, and doubt. These thresholds are almost impossible to communicate, they stem from our beliefs, which we arrive at through a motley sequence of influences, experiences, and environmental factors which cannot be substantially traced nor weighed. Also we lie about them. Our beliefs, taken as a whole, will never be consistent, rational, honest, nor true.

As humans, our strength lies in our ability to think in non-converging parallels and to believe things that contradict one another without being discomfited by these contradictions. We grow when we manage, usually through external influence, to see as true something that formerly we disbelieved. But not all growth is healthy, nor does it necessarily arise from truth, though it always creates ‘truth’.

Exploring unproven truths and untruths is the foundation of human knowledge and progress but building an identity atop unproven truths carries a high risk1 of destabilising the mind should these truths later prove doubtful. In such cases the mind must either exorcise that part of its identity or shear away from prior truths, either one of which is liable to be painful, volatile, and often humiliating.

Societies are collectivised minds, they can and do support contradictory truths. Societies2, where societies are taken to be engines for testing truths, attempt to prevent this destabilisation by cultivating a level of cultural inertia, inculcating its members with a foundation of common truths. These truths, like all truths, need not be true so long as they are believed. Societies however, being mere minds, can only support so much of their identity being drawn into doubt by irreconcilably contradictory truths before society itself must undertake the painful reckoning outlined above, exorcise or shear.

Societal inertia – which scales at least linearly and possibly exponentially with population3 – tends to make the former almost intractable: consensus takes time while new truths don’t like to wait, ideas fight and mutate in order to survive, censorship rarely works and is almost certainly immoral… So we’re left with societal shearing. A population must stratify in order for all groups to maintain their truth.

Truth is the beginning, the middle, and the end of all things. Belief in the possibility of discovering truth is the thickest, most enduring thread in human mythology. Without truth we can only despair. As a consequence truth, and control of it, is a uniquely intoxicating idol.

Possible examples of cultural truths that have grown doubtful in a significant mass of people:

Unintegrated points:

  1. Relevant to Paul Graham’s essay Keep your identity small.↩︎

  2. The inertia I refer to here is taken from physics, notably Newton’s first law of motion:
    LAW I. Every body perseveres in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed thereon.↩︎

  3. Smaller societies may therefore be less generative of new truths but, conversely, better equipped to assimilate them.↩︎