That which is true or in accordance with fact or reality.
That’s a simple definition of truth I’ve just copied straight from a web search.
That sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? Or does it?
Perception is reality.
Ever heard that saying?
What that means is that the way that you and I perceive the world is reality. By extension, the way we perceive the world establishes the truth. But what if you and I perceive the world differently or just a specific aspect of the world?
Surely in that case, our reality is different and so is the truth.
I could ask two people the lyrics of Watermelon Man and one might chuckle knowing there are no lyrics, while the other might chuckle because the lyrics are “watermelon man”.1 They’re both correct. The truth depends on which recording they know.
In effect, there are two different truths. And that’s only accounting for two people. How many different realities and truths could there really be in the world?
A few years ago, back when I used to visit Facebook voluntarily rather than to deal with companies who only offer customer service through the platform, I saw a comment in a group. I think it was probably shortly after the murder of George Floyd.2 A black man in this group shared about how he, as a 50-year-old American, felt apprehensive every time he left his house in case he was stopped by the police.
I fear I may have huffed a little as I read it and thought it was all a bit melodramatic. A week or so later I saw a video online of another black American who was sat in his vehicle with his hands out of the window of the driver’s side door. He was a serving member of the US military I believe. Outside the car was at least one police officer pointing a pistol towards the black man. I don’t recall if there was audio, but the description of the event explained that the police officer was shouting at the black man to exit the car. However, the black man refused because it would mean taking his hands out of the view of the officer and he was scared a movement could then be misinterpreted as threatening and he could be shot. This all arose from a routine traffic stop, possibly for a damaged tail light.
Perhaps a year or two earlier in southwest Spain, I was barrelling along a main road at a crazy lick in a desperate effort not to impede my fellow road users and spotted a camera in a parked car too late to brake like a maniac. One K further on I was pulled in by a couple of Guardia Civil officers. Lovely pair of fellas. Their pistols remained holstered throughout as they almost apologetically explained that I’d been going a teensy-weensy bit fast. After politely handing me a ticket, one of the officers took his life in his hands and stepped out into the traffic of the Córdoba-Lisbon main arterial connection and brought the traffic to a stop, before waving me out to go on my merry way as both officers smartly saluted me.
So what’s the truth?
Are police officers a lovely bunch of fellas and fellaettes who treat the public with great respect or a pack of aggressive, shouty people who point guns at random members of the public while demanding they do exactly what they say?
Obviously, it comes down to personal experiences and perceptions. There’s no universal truth in this case.
The problem of perception affecting truth doesn’t just affect different events occurring to different people. Let’s watch a short video together.
It’s not great quality and just black and white, but we can clearly see a woman with a dish towel in one hand and a frying pan in the other. It’s a kitchen isn’t it? Woah…fudge…that man came from nowhere and that punch…I almost felt it…that’s not good…there’s no colour, but that’s obviously blood, a lot of blood from where her head hit the corner of that table. I feel a bit sick, are you okay?
That man’s a monster. We both know it. We both saw him punch, possibly kill, that woman.
Another short video. Not great quality again. Is that the woman from the first video again? Yes, the table’s the same, just a different angle and there’s a boy in a school uniform hugging her from behind…beavers rice, what is it with these people? The woman suddenly turns and smashes the frying pan hard into the boy’s head, sending him flying out of shot. The camera angle cuts to the view we saw before as the man punches her.
The man was protecting the boy. The man isn’t a monster, the woman is.
One more video to watch. It’s the original angle again. The woman is in a kitchen drying the washing up, oblivious to the man in the doorway behind passing what looks like a knife to a boy in school uniform. The boy moves stealthily forward and twice we see sunlight from a window out of sight glint on what surely can only be a blade…hang on, that’s no schoolboy, that’s Jimmy Krankie3…no wonder the man looked familiar. Oh really, Jimmy Krankie doesn’t hug the woman, but reaches around and stabs her stomach. The camera angle switches once and again as the previous two scenes play out one last time.
So the woman isn’t a monster, The Krankies are the monsters. In fairness, if you’d seen their comedy routines on TV in the ’80s you’d have already suspected that.
We tend to think of truth as being something clear and precise, like black and white, but the reality is often very different. Even when facts seem to tell us something concrete, truth may not be quite what we think it is.
The United States of America has a homicide rate of 6.4 for every 100,000 inhabitants.4 For comparison, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland has a homicide rate of just 1. Even Spain, a country filled with people with a fiery Latin temperament (can I stereotype much? well yes, yes I can) has an even lower rate of 0.7. It’s probably just that mañana attitude. Why brutally murder someone today when you can put it off till tomorrow when it might be a bit cooler?
Based on that data, we can clearly see the truth is that Americans are a very violent and dangerous people.
Is that a fair assessment though?
It’s important to note that, unlike the UK and Spain, the USA has very liberal gun laws and is relatively relaxed about people owning guns. As the National Rifle Association are keen on saying, guns don’t kill people, people do, but guns do make it very easy for people to kill people, particularly in a moment of explosive anger.
If we remove all the homicides where the weapon used was some type of firearm, including rifles and shotguns5, we can revise that 6.4 figure down to a much lower homicide rate of 1.6 per 100,000 people. Sure, some of those murders would have still happened, just with a different weapon, but the rate would still be dramatically lower.
So yes the homicide rate would still be relatively high compared to Spain, but it would only be a little higher than Luxembourg and no-one considers them a nation of crazed vicious mentalists. Just for the record, I’m not suggesting Americans are a bunch of crazed vicious mentalists, but that homicide rate is nine times higher than Spain’s.
So Americans look a lot less violent when one of the easiest weapons for killing people is removed from their toolbox and they’re assessed on a more level playing field with other democratic Western nations. By looking at the same facts in different ways, we can say the truth is that Americans are a nation of brutal killers or the truth is that Americans are just about averagely violent in comparison to a European nation like Luxembourg.
Truth tends to be a very complex thing, yet most of us put minimal effort into thinking about it.
The American writer Carl Clinton Van Doren said “The race of man, while sheep in credulity, are wolves for conformity”, which neatly sums up both our weakness and the problem it creates.
We will readily accept something as truth if we want it to be true and then aggressively act against others as necessary if they don’t accept our truth.
That’s fine if you’re happy being a plaything for others, happy to be manipulated and tricked into believing other people’s lies and, worse yet, fight and argue with others to spread those lies even further.
Is that you though? Don’t you want to think for yourself and do what’s best for you and your peers? Not what’s best for others.
Time To Think
I was born gullible and I stayed gullible for many years.
Like all of us, I like to imagine that I’m smarter than average, but truth be told when I was younger I did very little thinking for myself. That changed as I grew older.
I can trace the turning point very precisely. At sixth-form college, an hour a week was set aside for classes completely unrelated to the subjects the students were there to study. I forgot what this hour was called in the schedules, but every term or semester, the teaching staff had to pick a subject they would like to teach for an hour each week and all the students had to pick one of those subjects for that term.
I learned to play Bridge one term and spent another term learning some basic cooking skills. The subject that I want to share now completely escapes me. I have no idea what it was about, I just recall this one incident from one 60-minute session. Maybe it was analytical thinking for dummies, though I’ve got a vague feeling it was all somehow related to advertising.
This one particular lesson was anyway. Our teacher described an advert and then summarised the main proposition, before asking a question.
“Our new improved formula is 50% better. Does that sound reasonable? Are you happy with that statement?”
Now, I’m never one to play a big part in lessons, preferring to sit back and let others take the credit, but still, I want those around me to understand that deep within me sits a sharp and profound intellect.
So I silently and earnestly start nodding. Across the room, the red-headed Carol raises a hand. There’s no need to protect the innocent here, so I’m using her real name.
The teacher turns to her.
What is his name? No, no idea. Think there was a beard, unkempt hair. And balding?
I’m more than 96% certain his name wasn’t Mr Tobias Tubthumper-Whumper, but we can’t waste all day dilly-dallying in the minor details like this.
So, Mr Tobias Tubthumper-Whumper turns to her and says, “yes Alice?”
Alice?
Who the duck is Alice?6
No, no, no, no, yes, Tubthumper-Whumper’s right. Alice, yes, fudge it, Carol’s sat next to her. And it’s Karol with K isn’t it, he’s Polish remember?
“50% better than what?” says Alice.
I stop nodding my head.
Could the ginger, swotty harlot smart, confident and analytically minded Alice be onto something?
Everyone around me has started nodding their head and I start nodding mine again. Maybe no-one noticed before.
“Exactly Alice,” says Tubthumper-Whumper.
Well yes, there you have it, evidently she is onto something.
And quite the eye-opener that proved to be for me.
That brief and simple experience could have easily passed through my memory without ever settling, like a single snowflake on a sunny day, but its effect on me was utterly profound. Someone turned a light on.7
That was the moment I realised I don’t think. I don’t use my mind to consider and analyse. I just take information given to me and accept it.
I could argue that clearly the makers of the clothes detergent meant that their new formula was 50% better than their old formula, but they never said that.
They could have meant that it was 50% better than washing your clothes in a urine and poo blend. Yes, we’d hope for more than 50% better in that case, but maybe making a clothes detergent is really difficult. Have you ever tried? No, me neither.
Regardless, arguing about what was and wasn’t meant is just an excuse to try and ignore my naivety.
What I realised in that moment is that I’m a natural-born sucker. A plaything for others to manipulate. To mould and have fun with like Play-Doh. To laugh at like Play-Doh.
I didn’t like that realisation.
Would you?
It changed the way I viewed the world. How I accepted the things I saw and heard. Not instantly. It’s hard, perhaps impossible, to be truly objective and unbiased. Almost four decades on I still struggle with it, but I prefer struggling to being someone else’s plaything.
- I’ve only just realised that I’ve always had a bit of a thing for cardigans, but even in my teens, they always made me look like I was heading to a fancy dress party as an old man, unlike Herbie Hancock who seems to have been born to rock a cardie – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP-vD4ScAGA – the model on Mongo Santamaria’s Greatest Hits looks like she could use a cardigan too – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiSXGNJA-XY ↩︎
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd ↩︎
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYYRHkYrNAk ↩︎
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate ↩︎
- https://www.statista.com/statistics/195325/murder-victims-in-the-us-by-weapon-used/ ↩︎
- [Jethro Advisory – Explicit Content] – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saoH-4SvzXE ↩︎
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGSHIidlesQ ↩︎