The truth, my truth and your truth all very different and warped according to fact.

Having gone through the stress of a marital separation, like many others I have been faced with the presentation of falsehoods. Blame and accusation that offer little and no fact despite appearing real to the accuser… but why!

How can another create a truth so believable with detail and yet offer no fact or evidence to suggest it ever existed. Truth is a motivator and has instrumental and intrinsic value. It is a comforter that reduces the pain of mistakes and potentially future suffering; it provides a manifested validation behind historic poor choices and attempts to add reason, even if the manifestation of ideals within is an absolute falsehood.

‘You cannot prove a lie but you can freely talk them’. BB 

In the philosophy of language, Socrates says (Greek, ‘truth’) is a compression of the phrase ‘a wandering that is divine.’ Since Plato, many thinkers have spoken of truth and God in the same breath, and truth has also been linked with concepts such as justice, power, and freedom. According to John the Apostle, Jesus said to the Jews: ‘And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.’

Today, it is slightly less poetic with many of us attempting to weed through the fake news in attempt to find a basic presentation (news) without any additional ‘alternative facts’. ‘Fake news’ is nothing new despite the modern ‘trumpisms’, but in our internet age it has spread like a disease, swinging elections, promoting social unrest, undermining institutions, and diverting political capital away from health, education and good governing.

So, if we are immersed in a society of truths that lack any FACT what do we do? 

One-way to understand truth is simply to look at its opposite, or opposites, namely, lies and bullshit. Lies differ from bullshit in that the liar must track the truth in order to conceal it, whereas the other has no regard or sensitivity for the truth or even for what his or her audience believes.

Truth is a property not so much of thoughts and idea but more properly of beliefs and assertions. But to believe or assert something is not enough to make it true and certainly not fact.

For centuries, philosophers have agreed that thought or language is true if it corresponds to an independent reality one of which is linked to survival.

For some thinkers, something can only be true or false if it is open to verification, at least in theory if not also in practice. The truth of something lies at the end of our inquiry into that thing producing a definitive and undeniable evidence that brings the end to the question of truth. But if an inquiry can have no end, the truth of something can never be more than our best opinion of that thing. If best opinion is all that we can have or hope for, then best opinion is as good as truth, and truth is a redundant concept. Again think about the difference between truth and fact! 

We create truths, not facts, to deceive and remove ourselves from a constant and painful cycle of emotional disarray, so it has a place or does it? Self-deception doesn’t ‘add up’ in the grand scheme of things and can easily be brought down by even superficial questioning especially when fact is the purpose, is there evidence to support the FACT?

Does it matter? Truth or fact?

Are you empowering yourself to fulfil your highest potential, or depriving yourself of opportunities for growth and creating further problems down the line by comforting yourself with a manifested truth?

Is the cycle simply going to repeat, or will the facts, at last, make you free?

This is only something you can decide…but one thing is for sure. Believing you are able to run a marathon and being able to run a marathon offer two very different measurable outcomes.

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