Why does the truth even matter?
Did we go to the moon? Do flu shots give you the flu? Was 9/11 an inside job? Are chemtrails poisoning us?
I thought about these and questions like these as I reread and reshared a 2016 article titled, “Students Have ‘Dismaying’ Inability To Tell Fake News From Real, Study Finds.”
I shook my head as I hit the high points of the article. It was well-cited and well-written, and I believed it.
So, why does the truth even matter? Well, if it’s just you and the clock on the wall, not much. Truth becomes important when we look at bigger pictures: how we as a people treat each other, how we spend our money, how we build and/or destroy the world around us. The truth matters when humanity is at stake.
How did we get here? Too many people cite social media as the problem, but if you listened to the streets in 1994, you heard the same kinds of lies and abuse of the truth.
Here’s a fun fact: Typing in all capital letters DOESN’T make your point any truer.
Here’s another fun fact: Your belief in something doesn’t make it true.
Here’s an even more fun fact: When you find out something’s true that you don’t want to be true, that doesn’t make it untrue.
For me, the penetrating question about supporting things that are not true is: Why would you want to? Is this whole dance around the truth just a way to manipulate the world to make it how you want it or how you expect it? Is it that those who eschew critical thinking are actually intellectually or emotionally unable to understand the truth or why it matters?
A disciple of Pythagoreanism, Hippasus, proved that the square root of 2 was not a rational number, and despite this being demonstrably true and provable, the Pythagoreans were so unhappy with this idea that Hippasus was left to die at sea. Imagine.
The time for critical thinking isn’t at its most important when someone disagrees with you. It’s when someone agrees with exactly what you believe. “Whoo-hoo! My guy was right! The hoax is real!” That’s the moment when you’ve got to step back and ask yourself why it was so easy to agree with this.
We all need to do this.
In the middle of writing this, I got an email from a photo-sharing service saying that my photos were doing well and very popular. “That’s brilliant,” I thought. “There are photographers who will enjoy hearing this.” But as you might have guessed, I didn’t have any photos with that sharing service. They outright lied to me.
With all that said, my point comes down to this: most people in my profession, most journalists, want to find out the truth and want to tell you the truth. Sure, you might disagree with a policy or a ruling or a finding, but we as journalists are doing our best to give you the truth.
So, did we go to the moon? Do flu shots give you the flu? Was 9/11 an inside job? Are chemtrails poisoning us? You can find a source to back up any conclusion you want. The question is: Are you willing to find a reliable source that is likely to tell you the truth?