- Brander Matthews
Comment on December 28th, 2007.
For starters, let us not confuse intention with truth. Hitler has truly told us that he wanted to “cleanse” the world of “evil” Jews (to state it very crudely). That was a noble intention for him, but the truth it that the holocaust was one of the most tragic events in human history.
Moving on…
“YOU WANT THE TRUTH?? YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!!”
I don’t know which movie this is from, but it’s true. We can’t handle the truth.
“Do I look fat?” literally means “I know I look fat, but please tell me I don’t, so that I can begin to hope that I don’t look as fat as I fear I do… I mean, as long as you think I don’t look fat, there’s hope that others might think like you too”
Alternately, had we, as a society, been accustomed to the truth since time immemorial, then there is a possibility that we would be able to tolerate the truth. We wouldn’t be shocked and stunned when we found out that our children hate us, and our parents only want us to pay their bills. Or we wouldn’t be shocked if a widow mother wanted to do her son… a lot of perfectly naturally TRUE things are considered socially rejectable, immoral or unnatural. The truth shall set you free, eventually… when it’s time to die, and there’s no longer any reason to hide. Till that day comes, we shall continue to hide in our sugar coated, perfectly simulated happy happy world.
Gurdit’s last blog post..The results are in, the show’s over.
Comment on December 28th, 2007.
“I wonder what society would be like if everyone just told the truth?”
I think the question is wrong. Because it is something like, “What if energy wasn’t conserved?”, “What if mass could be created?”. What I mean to say, truth cannot exist alone. It is a simple law of nature/science or whatever you call it, that for any observer, if any thing is to exist, it’s absence has to exist.
For example, if matter has to exist, it’s absence i.e. vacuum has to exist too. Inversely, if vacuum is to exist, the absence of vacuum i.e. matter has to exist. Just like if light is to exist, dark has to exist too. Because if there is any thing that exists solely without it’s absence existing, it has to be omnipresent and has a uniform distributional density. And for any observer, any omnipresent object cannot be detected because all observations are based on disturbances caused in existence and/or distributional density.
Similarly, truth cannot exist without the existence of it’s absence. Now, the absence of truth may not necessarily mean a lie, but it may mean either a lie or ‘no-statement’. Which means, if a given person chooses to reply, a ‘lie’ will always be an option for him.
If, truth was an omnipresent entity, then, humans couldn’t have ever detected something like the “truth”, because at the lowest level of abstraction, you cannot define or distinguish any characteristic of any object solely by the properties of it’s objects. So, basically, everybody would have spoken the truth from the first day, and your actions would have been modified, because then, there would have been no choice for a person to hide his doings. At any costs, it was sure that whatever he does will come out.
At the same time, we would have realized that our perverted nature, criminal instincts are natural, because everybody would have to disclose it. Ans therefore, knowing our nature from the very beginning, we would never have faced a “shock” or an inability to handle any occuring. But now we do, because we have a concept of “knowing the truth”.
rohan
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