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Do we really care what the truth is?
What is the truth of any situation? To consider what is ‘truth’ or ‘true’ one has to consider what is the opposite of it – a lie. Classrooms of 6 year olds were asked – “What was telling a lie?” There was silence until one child stood up and boldly declared that “It was getting found out!” A telling answer in our times when there are so many systems in place attempting to protect us from lies – and sadly failing to do so. It would be interesting to ask the same question to a politician, a banker or a media reporter – what would be their answer? Would there be a similarity to their answer even though it would be coached within the technical language of their trade. Truth has become a matter of convenience or inconvenience dependent upon motives, objectives and the context. In middle-eastern cultures, lying is acceptable, especially to the infidel. The sin is to be found out that you lied.
Is ‘truth’ a matter of opinion determined by the relativism of situational ethics that give licence to ‘change the rules’ at your convenience? Is ‘truth’ defined and substantiated by the currently accepted collection of ‘facts’ on any subject? Or is ‘truth’ something far more profound and substantial than we could imagine. Whichever it is, it still seems to come down to the same answer that the 6 year old gave. Everything is OK until your definition of ‘truth’ is found out to be wrong.
To be in possession of the ‘truth’ does not make one truthful or always 'right', a realisation that many would struggle with especially those that invest energy in the accumulation of ‘facts’ so that they can always be right.
Is Truth tangible and definable? We would like it to be, but would there be much left after it had been hung drawn and quartered by empirical analysis? If information cannot be sensed, measured and categorised, it is frequently discarded as improvable and irrelevant. It is relegated to the realms of myths, superstitions and those aspects of man's ignorance that modern man boasts of having grown beyond. Or have we?
The emphasis and insistence of western meritocracy to logically constructed truth built from our own experience and accumulated facts, could be alienating us from the very truth that we seek.
If Truth is an eternal reality, then the reality of it is constantly with us and influencing life as we know it. The consequences of that influence are dependent upon our relationship with ‘truth’ – friend or foe. The temptation is to try to define, categorise, to put limits around it, to neuter it; but if we were to succeed in doing that then the essence of what ‘truth’ is would be lost. It would no longer be able to serve and enrich us as it is. It would be reduced to trinkets of information that we can be entertained by or used to control situations with. Although we would like to own it, and master it by definition, it would be like capturing and confining a bird of prey, expecting it to live as it would in the wild.
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