On Truth, Lies, and the Culture of Lies

Truth - what is, and saying it like it is. When we speak the truth, we are aligned with reality. When we live in truth, we live in wise accordance with the way things really are. If reality is such that drinking poison causes death, then we speak the truth when we say this... And living in accordance with the truth means not drinking poison, and warning people when they are about to drink poison! "What is Truth?", Pilate said to Jesus. Truth is as simple as that.

Some philosophers have argued that truth is ultimately what coheres with everything else we know. There is an element of truth in this... At least, it tells us something about the intuitions of our hearts. We sense that when all is said and done, the universe is intelligible, everything fits together in a beautiful mosaic.

But, I think it mistaken to reduce truth to coherence. The reason why I say this is that coherence and intelligibility derives from minds capable of grasping it. Such things are not universal. A certain mathematical fact or theorem may seem incoherent and unintelligible to a novice. But that does not make it untrue. The intelligibility of the theorem, and its coherence in the rest of the matrix of theorems can only be seen by someone with more experience - an expert mathematician. In this way, coherence is not the criterion of truth.

I also argue against coherence as being the criterion of truth, given that a fact can be perfectly coherent with other facts taken to be true, but still be mistaken. Geocentricism made perfect sense to people in the middle ages, given what they could see and understand of science at the time. The proposition was coherent. But that does not mean it was therefore true. Hence, coherence is not the criterion of truth. We expect coherence, but we cannot always get it. So, coherence cannot be the ultimate guide to truth. Someone who refuses to accept a claim, well backed up with evidence, because it does not cohere with his or her web of beliefs is either delusional, proud or both.


Truth, as I have pointed out, is correspondence of thought/word with reality.... Saying things as they really are. I observe though, that there is a culture of skepticism about truth.  Especially among junior philosophy students, this whole idea of "true for you, true for me" is very common. This is the dictatorship of relativism that Pope Benedict XVI spoke of. I propose a series of interrelated causes behind this state of affairs.

First, we have the phenomenon of existentialist philosophy. This was started by Friedrich Nietzsche, who in a nutshell, taught that we create reality, morality etc as artists, that life is, in a sense, art, a meaningless blank page to be scribbled on or finely painted, whatever we wish. This was carried forth by such thinkers as Jean-Paul Sartre, who argued that there is no human nature, "existence precedes essence", that there is no meaning in life except the meaning we give it. The theory of this school of thought may not be known explicitly by many people today. However, I see it in how people live their lives, interested in self-fulfillment, making their own lives, their own rules. We have become lost in radical individualism.

The existentialist philosophy, entailing radical individualism and subjectivism I observe is further played out in socio-economic changes of the 20th/21st century. Urban sprawl means we are losing the old sense of community and relationships with other people... Family sizes have dramatically shrunk , especially since the advent of the pill. It has become easier to fall into the delusion that we are islands, that we are radically free, not responsible to anybody... Shielded from the consequences of our actions, with unprecedented capability for comfort and pleasure, we live in grim cocoons. Contemporary society can be very poisonous.

I have highlighted the individualist/loneliness factor in creating the relativist culture I see. But there is another factor that is also important. As WWII drew to a fiery close with the atomic bomb, the whole confidence in human reason to create a better world was also smashed to pieces... So came the development of post modernist philosophy, skeptical of any claims to certainty, to the extent of arguing that truth itself is subjective. Reason turned against us.... So philosophically, in the academy, we have turned our backs on reason to embrace post modernism, where we see reality as only subjective opinions, all socially constructed.

Another factor in the cocoon that traps people in the matrix of relativism is how it has become easier to live in fantasy than ever before. With the advent of the computer, virtual worlds, facebook and the like, we can create our image to our hearts content, quite possibly lying to ourselves and the world until all lines between truth and lies are gone... So we deny truth itself. In a world filled with liars, truth itself becomes questionable.

When we live in a world of comfort, a world of tremendous technological power, it becomes easy to believe that our actions have no consequences, that we are God, able to create reality unconditionally. No consequences means we start to think like the Roman Emperors, or even worse, to think we are Gods. Meanwhile, the consequences of our errors show us clearly that reality does not bend to the human will - the human will must bend to reality to discover peace. A person who feels the pain of getting burnt will avoid putting his hand in a fire. A person who cannot just conveniently avoid the consequences of treating girls like mere objects to be lusted over will, hopefully, learn to have honour... Trouble is, with our increased ability to avoid the consequences of our actions, we have lost both the ability to learn, and the willingness to learn... We have the perfect society to breed unhealthy pride. The cocoon is doing its job, growing a monster. This pride will be our undoing.