How do we establish Truth?

(Part 3)

Trust is at the core of the discussion about truth because sooner or later you run into this problem of who or what to trust.

Because you have to trust. There is no way around it.

You trust that the sun will rise in the morning. That gravity will still work. Water will still be drinkable and air will be breathable.

This might seem like a trivial thing to add but it’s very powerful. A breakdown of trust can result in a breakdown of the mind.

People in mental hospitals go on about conspiracies that the nurses want to hurt them. That their food is poisoned. That they are being watched and the government wants to assassinate them. And against all evidence to the contrary, they seem set on their paranoid beliefs.

Luckily, sometimes there are ways to chemically bring the brain back into balance, but paranoia is a serious mental illness. And the saddest part is that they think that by being fearful of all these imagined dangers they are protecting themselves, when in reality it’s those beliefs that are putting them in the greatest amount of danger. It’s paradoxical.

And it’s why I consider things like creationism or global warming denial a form of insanity. They represent are a complete breakdown of trust in science and a rejection of any kind of evidence to the contrary.

Trust is at the core of healthy relationships and it is the solution to the Prisoner’s Dilemma. There is so much to be said about trust that I want to dedicate entire future articles to talking about it. But if I had one takeaway about it for today it’s this: trust is literally necessary to survive and stay sane.

So the next question might be ‘how do I know what to trust?’

And I think the answer to that is by asking questions.

Not asking questions is one of my pet peeves. On average I don’t think people do enough of it. Everyone seems more concerned with telling others how things are rather than trying to see things from another perspective. So many arguments happen because one person starts arguing against something that they THOUGHT the other person meant. And rather than clarifying what the other person means, they begin trying to dismantle their argument. The irony then, is that asking the right questions would actually accomplish that goal far more quickly than any counter-argument.

Asking questions is natural, but we seem to lose it as we age for some reason. One study found that four year old girls ask around 390 questions a day. And then we wonder why children learn so quickly. They are so open and trusting of others with their questioning that it literally shapes their reality and the kind of person they end up becoming.

That’s why damage done at a young age is so difficult to heal: they absorb everything. Children are such amazing little open creatures and they have this incredibly powerful, but simple tool for creating their truth. And it’s humbling to think that 4 year olds, not some algorithm or new app, might hold the answer to the problem of fake news.

Because the benefit of asking questions is you can see what people’s assumptions are. Their core programming. You can see where they are coming from, what their biases are, what they are afraid of or mad about. And by asking enough questions you can see where the faults in their logic might lie. What doesn’t seem to add up. Where the inconsistencies are. Because those will show up pretty quickly if they exist.

There is even a chance that you might have some inconsistencies in your own reasoning. The problem is that too often we become attached to our beliefs. We forget that we are not our beliefs. We can swap them out when we get new information, and update our models of the world as needed.

We’re not omniscient after all and there is a certain amount of humility in being able to honestly ask questions. I think asking good questions makes people look smarter. It shows curiosity and self-awareness. And questions with no agenda are the cornerstone for having honest and constructive discussion.

I don’t think there is no answer on how to establish truth for EVERY situation. There isn’t some recipe or algorithm to follow to figure out whether to trust any given news story or not. But what I can offer is a mindset. One that I try to live by.

And that mindset is to be see the value of trust.

To be open to different kinds of thinking and new ideas.

To try to understand others first, before trying to make myself understood.

To trust others, and try to see their perspective as their TRUTH.

And to do this by asking a lot of questions and then making a conscious choice:

Either accept the answers or reject them based on the best of my ability.

Because the danger of consuming too much bad information is that we could literally could go insane.