An Imprisoned Mind is its Own Jailer

When someone proclaims their "own truth", they often mean they're lying.

There’s been an increasing trend towards tribalism in society. There are many reasons for this, and I primarily blame social media for it, but that’s really beside the point. Fact is, people are becoming more rigid in their mindsets as a result of placing more and more value in being part of the “team”, in whatever manner that expresses itself.

I question whether or not these worldviews are innate, or constantly curated in order to appeal to the crowd.

I suspect that curation is far more likely. The intricacies of the Israel/Palestine conflict, for example, are incredibly complicated, and the idea that everyone that holds a stance on the issue is able to articulate the history is highly unlikely. Some may be able to, but they’d be in the minority. The majority have simply heard someone ape the opinion of someone that knows better, and have decided to parrot the view because it’s in vogue.

And you know what? That’s not a bad starting point for any point of view. Listening to people that know more than you is a wise course of action in any situation. It is, however, a starting point. Someone that knows a lot may not be immune to making false attributions along the way. The scientific method is built around this. Someone makes an educated guess, then goes about attempting to prove that the guess was incorrect. If the guess stands up to enough testing it eventually evolves into a theory. It’s never truth, just the closest we have to truth for the moment.

But a lot of people claim truth all the same. People state that they’re speaking their, “Own truth”, which by linguistic necessity identifies it as something other than truth. To speak truth is simple enough, but to speak your own truth implies something else. It’s also rarely their own. They often picked up the ideas from somewhere else, then shoe-horned them into their own perspectives. Speaking their “own truth” rarely has anything to do with anything internal, and is instead virtue signalling to the tribe that someone belongs to, or wants to belong to.

There’s nothing clever about that, no matter how counter cultural or edgy it appears to be at the time. There’s also very little in it that identifies someone as an individual, and instead displays someone that will sacrifice all personal identity to appease one’s peers.

And there’s nothing new about any of that, it’s just that we can constantly monitor one another’s thoughts due to social media. That makes the problem appear to be far worse than it was before, as we’re regularly privy to the private thoughts of our neighbours, when in the past we just wouldn’t give a shit what they thought as long as they agreed to take the rubbish out when we went on holiday. Now we think that if we let them do that, the rubbish bin will be a Nazi/Communist/Islamist by the time we get back.

It seems a little beside the point, though, doesn’t it? If my neighbours are good people in every respect other than how they view certain political issues that don’t affect me directly, why should I judge them for that, and why should I give a shit? If my rubbish bin agrees with them, why do I care as long as it continues to get wheeled out once a week? If someone’s own truth is truly their own, then why do they find it so triggering when people don’t agree with it?

These extreme reactions to questioning what someone claims to be truth is based around one thing above all, and that’s that some have the audacity to question what others believe in. This is a particularly vicious reaction when what they’re believing in to begin with is, often, a house of cards. Sometimes it’s not even that, as a house of cards is at least built with something real. The cards exit. Some of the concepts people are trumpetting as truth can’t even claim that much.

When something that is clearly absolute rubbish is questioned, there’s only one way to defend the concept, and that’s to yell as loudly as possible until people are too scared to bring up the subject. From there you can incrementally push the idea further and further, using the same technique. If someone doesn’t actively address and affirm your ideas, you yell as loudly as possible until they do. Keep moving that bar along far enough and eventually everyone’s paying lip service to bullshit because they can’t be bothered dealing with the yelling.

The irony of this situation is that the exact same thing occurred in relation to religion. There were many religions around the world that built their entire social power around concepts that just couldn’t be proven, and they yelled, and killed, until everyone accepted those concepts as their “own truth”. Once the killing ended and religion was baked into society, the new atheist movements began and people questioned the fundamentals of the narratives that they’d been fed about reality. Science had proved to be more than capable of explaining many of the mysteries of existence (except magnets), people started questioning the religious narratives, and the religions started yelling.

This didn’t work. Many of the bedrock religions around the world are significantly diminished in their power today than they were in the past, particularly in the West, because once they started yelling it became clear that they’d also been molesting, raping, embezzleing, and killing in the name of their “own truth” the whole time. Part of that is because of many of the organisations that rose up in order to confront the fact that religions were preaching a lot of shit that just wasn’t true. Those organisations largely won the war, and when they were standing on the body of the dragon they conquered, they had the option of laying down their arms and living the peaceful and enlightened lives they’d preached in opposition to religion. Some did. Others drank the blood of the dragon and decided to become it.

Now they preach their “own truth”, and are heading for the same obscure destination that religion now finds itself in. I guess when you were once weak and then momentarily felt strong, you believe yourself to be strong.

But people aren’t strong, truth is. People break very easily and sway in one direction or another according to social winds. I do it myself, but always attempt to anchor myself to truth when I see an opportunity to do so. To descend into lies when truth is what made you strong is an odd choice, and I see no reason to respect it.

The problem with all of this is that many of the organisations and people that now proclaim the lies of their “own truth” achieved great things, in the name of greater truths. It’s a problem, as many of their achievements are tarnished by their current behaviour. Once someone starts proclaiming tangible and obvious lies everything they did in the past is also tarred with the same brush. Many of those achievements were created before the brush was tarred, but the cynicism towards them is not unwarranted. It’s entirely logical, and there are old dragons that were defeated by logic that know the power of it now.

We can do something about it. Just say, “That’s not true, and here’s evidence as to why,” whenever you see the opportunity to do so. They’ll yell, but words aren’t violence despite the many protestations that they are. They’re just words. Sure, you’ll lose some associates, but if your associates are the sort that will abandon you for lies to flee from the truth, you’re probably better off without them. You may be wrong about many of the things you believed to be true, so be open to that, also. You may be the enemy that I’m writing about. I could be, too. But we’ll never work out who’s who without actually talking about what people mean when they proclaim their “own truth”.

Your “own truth”, over time, when challenged will become the truth. It may hurt, but growth requires pain. There’s rarely as much harm in it as we feel at the time of its onset.