The Truth About Truth

The truth is slippery. Everyone sees the truth differently. There can be a million different twists on the same story, each told by a different person, and each one entirely true. Truth, in it’s purest form, does not exist. Every story, event, article, and video contains an infinite number of truths meaning none of them are false, yet none are intrinsically true. The only “real” truth in life is that every person has their own truth.

Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth. -Marcus Aurelius

A recent Storycorps interview details the account of a man who checked two hijackers onto a plane involved in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He recounts how many people, including himself, viewed the 9/11 attacks as (at least partially) his fault; that “knowledge” plagued his psyche for years afterward. However, is that really the truth? Sure, he blamed himself for it, and others did as well, but very few people place responsibility on him for the tragedy. His truth is not the truth.

Sure there are facts. Facts are, by definition incontrovertible. Facts are always true, because facts don’t have opinions. The second a hint of an opinion enters into a fact, it no longer becomes true.

When one person claims that another person lies, it may be because the other person made a statement that doesn’t coincide with the first person’s truth. People seem to forget that they see things differently from everyone else. Either that, or they don’t care. Wars are almost always started because two nations or powers see things differently. Neither power is wrong, but neither is right. This means almost every trivial disagreement, and almost every devastating war, was a pointless fight between opposing truths.

However, there is a manifest issue with this philosophy. If America had followed this philosophy, slavery would still exist, European Jews (possibly all Jews) would have been eliminated and Middle Eastern nations would be able to blatantly ignore human rights. The solution is that truths accepted by a majority of people, are accepted to be true. Were they not, the human race, and most likely the planet, would fall to ruins incredibly quickly.