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Tag: Truth

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    The Rationality Illusion

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    1–2 minutes

    We often flatter ourselves by believing we are 90% rational and only 10% emotional.

    A hypnotist—or anyone dealing in the psyche—knows the inverse is true. Logic and data are rarely the drivers of change; they are “after-the-fact” justifications for emotional impulses.

    Once you accept that emotions govern 90% of human behavior, leaving logic at a measley 10%, you realize why reason fails to resolve conflict. Because the vast majority of our “problems” are interpersonal frictions and fears rather than objective obstacles, logic is the wrong tool for the job.

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    The Transparency of the Self

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    1–2 minutes

    Kant argued that a good person is simply a clumsy liar, while the wicked excel at deception.

    Nietzsche, however, dug deeper: the "good" often lie to themselves first, making their outward dishonesty a habit of internal delusion.

    True virtue is transparency—being honest with others because you are first honest with yourself. Which invokes the question: can the self-deluded person truly lie?

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    The Great Inversion: Sacred Unreason

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    1–2 minutes

    We’ve entered a mirrored reality where “Truth," once a shared value, is now a partisan slogan to reflexively discard. Enlightenment Reason has been traded for an easier secular theology.

    Deconstructing religion as an unreasonable, modern ideology, has ironically installed a more rigid orthodoxy. "Suicidal empathy" (narcissistic nihilism) supplants objective facts, branding reality as heresy.

    When truth/facts/reason is the enemy of the collective, we haven’t reached the enlightenment utopia where we shape the world with desire; we’ve simply returned to a pre-rational age of unified, unquestionable belief: the medieval dark ages and the Spanish Inquisition.

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    Cause into Conspiracy

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    1–2 minutes

    We cannot grasp the full causal web behind any event—its linkages sprawl into near-infinite detail.

    So we simplify: we model the visible threads, stitch coincidences into a satisfying "cause."

    Expand the model far enough, however, and it becomes a conspiracy. As the network grows, correlations weaken and fray; what remains dominant is not evidence but an emotionally directed story that "feels truer" than a mass of fragmented facts.

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    The True Artist’s Labor

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    1–2 minutes

    Art constructs novel frameworks and languages, unveiling unconsidered modes of existence—existential, contingent, and often initially weak or opaque. Its power emerges slowly through prolonged contemplation.

    True art refines anti-mimetic ideas over time, resisting easy translation or quantification; once embraced, they become intuitive shorthand.

    Pretending to be an artist means clinging to surface image and form without the laborious practice of channeling profound, noncompliant authenticity into a visual language. The lazy artist trades in style alone, parasitically enjoying freedoms earned by diligent predecessors; the dilettante parrots platitudes like a spoiled child.

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    Belief’s Vacuum

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    1–2 minutes

    G.K. Chesterton observed: "when men stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing—they believe in anything."

    Curiously, wielding reason to logically disprove God’s existence elevates reason itself to supreme status. Yet the same tool that dismantles one paradigm can erect equally unmoored ones.

    Without an ultimate anchor, rationalism becomes vulnerable to irrational leaps, enthroning fleeting ideologies or comforting fictions in God’s vacated place.

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    Power/Knowledge

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    1–2 minutes

    Foucault’s core insight: power and knowledge are not separate—each produces the other in a continuous loop.

    “Truths” (often inaccurate, partial, or constructed) become instruments of power by defining what counts as normal, sane, criminal, or desirable. These truths shape subjects, discipline bodies, and regulate behavior.

    Yet power depends on them for legitimacy and effectiveness; without accepted “truths,” coercion alone falters. Lies, myths, or provisional knowledges sustain domination precisely because they are believed—or at least acted upon.

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    Psychological Effectiveness Over Truth

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    1–2 minutes

    What works now trumps what is real.

    A comforting lie or useful delusion can fuel action, sustain motivation, and boost performance far more reliably than a harsh truth ever could. When reality blocks desire or shatters fantasy, people retreat; when a fiction empowers, they advance.

    Usefulness has quietly dethroned truth as the highest value.

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    Beyond Truth: Strategy Over Fact

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    1–2 minutes

    While facts are powerful and can point to the truth, they can mislead. A leader will use facts to categorize people (geography, race, religion). It is true, but it is a tool to limit full agency, turning people into victims of "facts."

    So, to protect ourselves, we learn to be skeptical: to deny accepted truths. While useful, it too is limiting.

    To recapture agency, we can temporarily ignore the framing of "truth/lies" or "good/bad" and focus on what works (utility). As we become strategists, we make changes in the world, turning us into authors who can seemingly write reality without the same limitations of those concerned with truth and facts.

    ~ from Scott Adams

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    Truth: Facts that Lie

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    1–2 minutes

    One problem with factual accuracy is that it is only part of the truth: the totality of reality (absolute context) is too vast, yet it is the only full accounting of the Truth. Thus, any truth claim necessarily relies on reduction, abstraction, and incompleteness.

    (Perhaps there is “the truth of a situation” – the facts- but not “the Truth.”)

    There is a conflation in which facts, such as cherry-picked statistics, are applied with a broader ideological brush as “truth,” leading to a split from the singular Truth to multiple “truths” at odds with each other. In essence, fragmentation of the whole by omission is deceit and manipulation: lies.

    Many sages avoid this factual rigidity through observances, allegory, and parable: metaphorically displaying the complexity of the world and its relations to offer insight without a truth claim.