Do We Still Care About the Truth?

As a journalist, and maybe because of my psychological makeup, I care a lot about the truth. It irks me when people repeat false information, or they declare something as fact without citing any evidence. I also notice when an issue stirs passion in people, or presses their buttons, they’re more apt to gloss over the truth because it doesn’t fit with what they want to be true.

I’m not saying I’m immune to this, because I’m not. I repeatedly have to check myself, dig deeper, and try to find the original source. What troubles me is that, especially with the rise of AI and social media, we don’t know what’s true anymore. But more importantly, do we even care?

When people disagree with us, they are “sheeple” and “idiots” and “people who haven’t done their own research.” There are people who’ve been “red pilled” and are “still living in the matrix.” How did we get here?

The truth is boring and doesn’t encourage engagement, whether that’s clicks or likes or comments or reshares. Back when Twitter was still Twitter, a study from MIT found misinformation spreads about six times faster than the truth. TikTok is renowned for this. People post random things as “truth” all the time when they aren’t backed up. Like that rubbing cheap beer all over your skin before lying out in the sun acts as a natural tanning accelerator. It does not.

Big Tech has zero incentive to shut this down – although it half-heartedly tries – because misinformation and disinformation translate into eyeballs and engagement, which spells more money for them. Big Tech, and I’m including AI in this, directly affects our lives: how we think, how we vote, and also how we behave. That’s a lot of power in the hands of companies that are mostly unregulated, although becoming more so.

I also think something needs to be said about the mind itself. There’s a psychological concept called “the third-person effect,” and it’s the tendency for individuals to estimate stronger effects of mass communication messages on others as compared with themselves. In other words, it’s thinking other people fall for dupes and misinformation but not me!

No one is immune to the third-person effect. Many spiritual people think they know “the truth” because they meditate; they’re tapping into their intuition; they’re aligned with the source of all knowledge. According to my spiritual philosophy, there is such a thing as immutable truth, as absolute truth. That “thing,” or entity, really is Brahma, which is a combination of the consciousness that pervades the universe as well as the creative force undergirding it. Everything else is a relative truth.

What is often missing among spiritual people is the understanding that the mind has layers, or filters. I won’t go into it today, but even without launching into an in-depth explanation, this makes sense. We filter everything we hear, everything we learn through the lens of our perception. We compare it with what we’ve heard before, what we’ve been exposed to, what we’ve experienced in the past. All of which is to say we’re not imbibing a perfect, unadulterated truth. Nor is “intuition” the same as “omniscience,” despite the seductive belief that it can be.

The best I think any of us can do right now is practice some humility and recognize we may not actually know everything, that our sources are flawed, and we don’t know the absolute truth. The best any of us can do right now is cultivate healthy doubt and skepticism. I don’t know if everyone still cares about the truth, but I sure do, and that’s all I’m in control of anyway.

I dream of a world where we realize lies spread faster than the truth. A world where we recognize the truth is relative and can change depending on time and space. A world where we leave room for being wrong while also recognizing there is such a thing as consensus reality. A world where we still seek to know the truth.

Another world is not only possible, it’s probable.