The Importance of Seeking Truth — The Lessons I Learned from Socrates
In today’s society, we seem less inclined to seek truth than ever before. We are less open to different opinions and we are wired on the stimulation of being right.
With always having our phones in our pockets and information at our fingertips, we are in a data overload. With the correlation between information and truth getting lost in the wind.
Trying to find why we are in this mess, I looked back at some smart people in history. Here is what I found…..
“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”
This quote is by Socrates, and it is more important to think about than ever before in history.
What Socrates was saying in this quote is that by accepting that you know nothing, you open yourself up to the potential about learning about yourself and seeking truth rather than fitting in to your current way of thinking.
Let me show you how Socrates arrived at this quote and my thoughts on how it has grown so important in our current lives…
Socrates lived during the golden age for Greece
New thought leaders were coming up, advancing every field from art, philosophy, architecture, and laying the foundations of how societies are to function.
But Socrates was an independent thinker, a contrarian, and a realist. He definitely approached his life a bit differently than everyone else.
They said Socrates was messy, wore a dirty robe, never bathed, and walked around barefoot.
Not exactly the description that comes to mind when you think of one of the greatest philosophers of all time. But what Socrates did best hink.
He thought about how society should function, how to best live his life, what are good things to do, and much more. To say the least, Socrates fully devoted his life to spirituality and getting to know himself and the world around him.
Socrates laid the groundwork for western philosophy. He taught Aristotle and Plato who also helped in pioneering western philosophy.
So with me thinking about the best way to find truth, I chased down everything Socrates had to think about it.
Socrates believed that knowledge is necessary for virtue and virtue is necessary for happiness:
- Virtue is about knowing that humans have a fixed nature and how we achieve happiness is operating as close as we can to that nature. Aristotle (one of the students of Aristotle), called this ‘proper functioning’.
- If virtue comes from operating in ways that are good, the knowledge of knowing what is good will lead everyone to act in a way which is good.
- All evil comes from ignorance of thinking you know what is good.
I know what everyone might be thinking, how could the knowledge of good always cause good when people knowingly are doing something terrible for themselves?
This is because most of these acts comes from rationalizing evil acts.
I believe that the answer to this to be because virtue has multiple levels. If all virtues were equally weighed and we could all understand and agree on them, our world would operate almost perfectly on virtue. But it doesn’t.
Virtues intersect with people’s values. A robber places a higher value on supplying money to family and friends than maintaining society. There is still a lack of knowledge, but it is not just knowledge that will prevent this wrong-doing.
I believe that in today’s society, it is vital to seek the knowledge of what is good and to also understand yourself and how your actions affect the world around you.
I think that therefore, proper functioning of a human is to be insightful. I define insightful as having a small delta between your perceived and actual reality. Reality involves both yourself and the world around you.
If I were to restate Socrates ‘virtue is knowledge’ statements, I would say that knowledge and experience can lead to being insightful and being insightful can lead to virtue which can lead to happiness.
Now that we know that the foundation of happiness eventually boils down to knowledge of the truth, we then have to find out the best way of acquiring that truth!
Socrates views seeking wisdom and truth as a vital part of human happiness
Socrates thought that the formula for a happy life was to have the shortest distance between your expected reality and the actual reality and knowing where you truly stand.
A story that really illustrates this point is one mentioned in Plato’s book Apology. It talks about how Chaerephon (one of Plato’s friends), went to the shrine of Apollo at Delphi and asked the priestess their whether the wisest person was Socrates.
To none of our surprises, she said yes. But one person who was baffled by the statement, was Socrates himself!
So Socrates determined to prove that he is not the wisest, went around Greece asking all the self-acclaimed wise-guys questions and finding out if they thought they were the wisest.
To Socrates surprise, he noticed that all of the wise-guys didn’t know anything more that we did, they just thought that they were wise. He had this to say about it:
“I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, so I do not fancy I do.”
Socrates’ life-hack for being wise was knowing that he wasn’t wise, and that none of us are!
So if we accept that none of us are wiser than the person beside us, what can we do? For Socrates, it was about seeking out what is true. The only thing that can add to the ignorance of thinking you are smart is the ignorance of thinking with the objective of being right rather than being truthful.
I believe that as humans, we are over-optimized for the present. Our brains haven’t changed a whole deal throughout history, and we are still optimized for survival out in the wild. But it is so much different now. If you are reading this article, it is most likely that you will never have to worry about your survival.
But now, when acquiring new knowledge about the world, our brain takes in that information and filter it according to see what fits with our current perception of the world.
What this causes us to have, is a sense of the world based on our past experiences.
I believe that this point is so important to determine how we should live our lives. We have to realize that our personal experiences take up such a small percentage of what is happening in the world, but we manage to use them to make up what we think the world is.
Everyone is so different. Growing up with different experiences with money, family, friends, learning, reading, playing, working, etc. we all have different ways of looking at the world.
How to be a truth seeker in a world that wants to be right
I think that the main way of seeking truth, is by surrounding yourself with truth seekers. We have a problem in our current society where we mistake popularity with truth. As I said before, we are over-optimized for the present and therefore can use 1 person saying something as truth, without actually having any facts.
All of us often mistake truth with popularity. Chamath Palihapitiya (Founder of Social Capital) talked about this on several podcasts and on the news episode below.
Creating an environment with a main goal of truth is necessary. Always being the third eye for each other, playing devil’s advocate, and testing thoughts out with actions in the real world.
Socrates was very famous for developing a mental model for seeking truth. He called it elenchos, but the common term for it is the Socratic method.
It is about constantly asking questions to others and digging deeper into problems and thought experiments. A popular way this method is applied is through a Socratic circle, which uses a dialog -like approach to understand the info being conveyed.
The thing I like and is different about these circles is that it is not a debate. It is a discussion, seeking truth. And that is what we need right now.
All of our goals should be to look for what is true in the world so we can be more insightful and act only in good. We are all just humans.
Key Takeaways:
- Socrates thought being good and virtuous was directly linked with knowledge
- It is vital to seek the knowledge of what is good and to also understand yourself and how your actions affect the world around you
- Being wise involves knowing that you aren’t wise, and that none of us are
- We learn about the world through a filter determined by our past experiences
- Humans are naturally over-optimized for the present
- The Socratic method is about having a cooperative conversation between people seeking a truth