Our relationship with truth is becoming increasingly problematic. This is because we associate truth closely with facts. We might go to fact checkers to discover if information is true. But if it isn’t, it doesn’t seem to make any difference. Meanwhile events like climate change, which appear to be empirically true, are ignored. Worse, most of our information comes from online sources and is served by algorithms designed to keep us engaged by telling us what we want to hear. This is made even more difficult by the rapidly growing use of AI, which is so easily directed to retain engagement at the expense of all else. Algorithm led information tends to mean that our initial biases are reinforced and strengthened. As a result, we are led to one of two points of view. Either truth is a pragmatic strategy designed to lead to a defined outcome, and is represented by external forces which are easily perceived (or designed) to be for us or against us. Or, in the opposite case, truth is relative and subjective, and is a self generated property defining us as individual. We are led to believe information based on these fallacies by the fundamental misunderstanding that truth is dependent on outcomes. But this is itself quite clearly not true. The truth is an inherent quality, and never an outcome. How can I say this with such confidence? Let’s say that you find an injured bird and try to help it. But it is delicate, and you mishandle it, causing it to die. Or let’s say instead that you are a skilled vet, and you treat it correctly, and save it. These opposite outcomes mask the same truth, which is that you are kind and care about animals. The two outcomes are contingent only on the level of your skill. They are therefore not truths in themselves. While your skill level is critical, of course, both to the survival of others and yourself, it is only an expression of a feeling which lies behind it. It is this that is true. So if we now think about the two roles factual information can play, we can see clearly that these are only secondary to truth, and that the understanding they offer can be illusory. If you use factual information to create identity, that identity will be dangerously subject to manipulation. And equally, if you seek or present factual information in order to achieve a specific goal, it will be dangerously skewed. In each case, the truth is masked. Unfortunately, the truth that is most often masked is the presence or absence of kindness. The misunderstanding of truth as an outcome continually creates suffering and conflict. But human beings do retain some wisdom. Repeatedly, when conflict is healed, we find that only the restoration of kindness lay behind it. This is often not the sound of a lone voice, but the voice of an entire people crying stop, enough. It is the sound of the human voice. It is fragile, and often faint. It is critical to our survival that machine generated information does not succeed in drowning it out.

NOTE: This is an updated version of an earlier article, Truth Facts and an Injured Bird, which you may also be interested in reading.