The Truth Is a Niche Interest for Human Beings

By the time you’re three or four years old, you’ve already learned the tremendous value of dishonesty.

Even if you were the one who unrolled all the toilet paper onto the floor, you know it’s possible for your parents to believe it was someone else, and that’s a better outcome for you. So you say you didn’t do it, hoping they adopt this false version of reality and never know the difference.

The truth is a useful and beautiful thing, but it easily comes in conflict with other interests, namely feeling safe from unwanted forms of attention, or getting others to do things for you.

Deception – or at least, putting truth second to other interests — is instinctive. I have a clear memory of being six years old, playing in the town pool with one of my friends. We were talking about how deep the water was, and he said that his dad could touch the bottom because he was seven feet tall. I said my dad could too, because he was eight feet tall.

Now, I didn’t actually know how tall my dad was, but I knew he probably wasn’t a whole foot taller than Wilt Chamberlain. Why did I say that? I guess felt I was being challenged in some way, and that it was important to counter my friend’s aggressive claim of father-height superiority. I didn’t feel like I was lying exactly. The accuracy of what I was saying just didn’t seem particularly important.

Human beings like the idea of the truth, but you might notice how quickly facts go out the window when there’s something to gain or lose. There’s an instinctive drive to protect one’s position, real or hypothetical, by saying whatever keeps you feeling safest. This drive doesn’t have much to do with what’s true, and often there’s no truth to be found at the bottom of the question anyway – kids will argue over whether Freddy Krueger is better than Jason Voorhees.

One day at recess, a different friend and I went around the playground asking people whether Coke or Pepsi was better. For some reason, I was an unwavering Coca-Cola partisan at the time. Probably it was just the one my family bought.

The survey result was something like 30 to 5 in favor of Coke, which felt extremely vindicating. Every time a kid said Coke, something inside me went “YESSS!”

I was thrilled about that final result, and my joy had nothing to do with learning anything about reality. If I had believed, for example, that older kids liked Pepsi and younger kids liked Coke, I would have been sure to ask mostly younger kids. Clearly I wanted to be right more than I wanted to know what was true. And I was right!

We don’t grow out of this condition. There’s no point at which the human being matures past its partisan interests and switches to a sober and disinterested affinity for truth-seeking. Knowing what’s true remains secondary at best to feeling safe, improving your tribe’s position, and the other lower layers of Maslow’s pyramid.  

Activists and pundits choose slogans and reductive talking points over careful, good faith arguments, because they can convince more people that way. Academics want their own theories to be borne out by the evidence, not the other guy’s – or even favored despite the evidence. Scientific findings are selectively discussed, regularly hacked, and exaggerated with clickable headlines and puff pieces. Red wine is good for you! Flossing is a waste of time! Hooray!

Whenever status, money, or some other form of personal gain is at stake – which it almost always is when someone is making a truth claim — the truth is likely a second priority, at best. Of course, this alone doesn’t mean they’re incorrect. Demonstrating that something is true can be a means to get status, money, or advantage. Having a product that actually works makes selling it a lot easier.

It makes sense that we developed this truth-second instinct. Being seen as right has more survival value than actually being right, most of the time. You’re far better off being wrong with a tribe backing you than being correct but unpopular. This is why the emotional reward of feeling validated, even if you’re wrong, is extremely appealing and satisfying. We crave it like we crave honey and fat and shelter from the rain.

Human beings do value the truth, just not as much as other things.

Notice what you crave over knowing the truth

You can notice the power of the desire for validation in your own behavior.

After having an argument with somebody, when you look up the claim in question, notice whether your heart is hunting for vindication, or education. It probably isn’t craving a deepening of your understanding on the topic. It wants knockout-punch talking points for the position you took. It wants a sexy graph that stuns the other guy.

You might also notice that we tend to give a bit of spin, in our favor, to most of the things we say. We play up the importance and certainty of our claims. The book you liked wasn’t just enjoyable, it was amazing. A thing that might be true becomes “probably” true, while the thing that’s probably true becomes “definitely” true. People naturally want their stories to have an effect on others, so it’s hard not to give it a bit more glitter, or at least a bit less ambiguity, than the truth really had.

Now think of the effects of everyone on earth doing this all the time, especially when there’s money to be made and political power to be generated. Humans produce delusion like cows produce methane.

To make it worse, we’re just too credulous for our own good. Humans want to believe things are just as impressive, horrible, simple, or significant as they first appear. Look at the comments under any A.I. slop video, fake news article, or staged prank. Endless commenters are dazzled, amazed, appalled, vindicated. Anyone expressing skepticism gets scolded as a killjoy — “Jeez, you must be fun at parties!”

For the record, I completely believed the other kid when he said his dad was seven feet tall. He was a good kid. So was I. I thought he was just sharing an interesting fact. For all of the spin and bullshit out there, most assertions are simply believed.

The Marathon vs the Donut

All of this is why I say human beings are really bad at figuring out what’s true outside of their immediate presence. We talk a big talk, but we’re not great stewards of the truth at all.

It takes a lot of work to form a responsible opinion on a single issue. You have to do some reading to gather some initial truth claims, then find counter-claims and counter-counter-claims, then clarify the muddy parts until you feel pretty confident. In the end you can only go with what seems right, because your evidence is fallible human claims all the way down. We don’t have great instincts for doing this kind of work, or a culture that encourages it, so it remains a fairly unpopular activity.

The work of trying to get to the bottom of something is slow and emotionally unpleasant. You have to keep trying to falsify your current position, which means always moving into unpleasant feelings – confusion, self-doubt, and the shame and fear of questioning the tenets of your tribe. Entertaining conflicting moral positions in your mind feels similar to nausea – the mind desperately wants a place to stand.

And you have to volunteer for these bad feelings while also passing up the sweet fruit of validation — which is available everywhere you look, in the form of confident headlines and partisan reporting, all designed to reward you for your existing worldview. Genuine truth-seeking is about as appealing as choosing to run a marathon when the other option is a free Krispy Kreme donut.

The marathons are never going to sell as well as the donuts. The creature we are much prefers easily grabbable treats to nausea-inducing exercises with obscure rewards.

Since my no-politics-for-a-month experiment ended, I’ve been at a loss as to how to go forward. I don’t want to disengage from the issues of the day forever, but I don’t want to go back to grazing on a hundred issues at once, inevitably absorbing strong opinions sold to me by donut peddlers.

If it takes a ton of work to form a responsible opinion on one single issue, how do people “stay on top” of “what’s happening in the world?” How do you keep up a hundred marathons at once?

You don’t. In the information age, where worldviews span hundreds of topics and events, they can only be made overwhelmingly of gathered donuts – just-so stories and partisan talking points, never subjected to real counterargument. People do sometimes have an area or two of specialized, first-hand knowledge, but that’s not where most of our discourse is coming from.

You can run one marathon at a time though. You can invest in one issue or question and ignore everything else for weeks or months, going deeper rather than wider in your inquiries.

This is what I plan to do for now, instead of returning to the mass media donut trough. I’ll delve into one issue per month, trying to get my questions answered, hunting for the best counterarguments, attempting to build a 3D picture of the main angles at least, ignoring everything else.

Now that sounds unappealing! Maybe it will be so tedious and unpleasant that I’ll run right back to the donut vendors. That would be perfectly natural; dispassionate truth-seeking is a niche interest for human beings, at least in my culture. It’s not a core human value, but a nerdy, elective hobby like distance running. That might sound flippant, but I think that’s where we’re at.

***

Further reading: Nobody Knows What’s Going On