The Truth

The average man is stupid, mean or both, and democracy has crowned him sovereign. And as king, his first act was to abolish all information that didn't relate to his well-being and comfort. If it couldn't be boiled down into a ten-second sound-byte or a single photo or a catchy jingle, it was contraband. So for the average man, the world is black and white - truth is cheap, abundant and simple. Pre-loaded with an opinion (in the delicious flavours of Lemony Left, Chocolate Centre or Raspberry Right), he proceeds to buy his truths from the rack as he would a shirt. When he grows too fat or too lean and the truth no longer fits, he simply buys a different one, each with its own simple, pre-digested worldview, its simple causes and associated products.

So much for the man of the Mean. For the wretched outlaws who cringe at unsourced statements and leap aside from the Prevailing Wisdom like they would an approaching freight train, things are not so simple. The universe is a hugely complicated mess of cause and effect - enormously unpredictable but yet if gazed upon closely seemingly following a certain logic. We seek this logic and call it Truth.

But gaze closely upon any part of the Universe, and see that just beneath the surface of cause and effect there is another layer, and beneath that another. Layered like the skin of an onion - the logic, increasingly minute, complex and unending, and the layer beneath always promises the Truth, the end of the search. Meanwhile it calls into question assumptions made earlier on in the investigation and makes mockery of the crudities employed to dig even this deep.

We run here into the brute walls of time and human understanding. We will all die in less time than it would take to follow any investigation to its proper conclusion. At some point our animal brains will be buggered by the immense complexity of the questions surrounding our search. Bleary-eyed we can peer no deeper into the Truth, and it inevitably escapes into the murky unknown. We dig as deep as we can, and label what we have seen.

The Catch 22 for us reasonable but not overly-intelligent types is this: if we dig deeper, we find that at considerable cost we are less certain about the universe than when we began. If we cease digging and stake our claims on the truth, we understand that we have let the Truth go and therefore cannot believe that our knowledge is true. While easy answers abound (and can be bought off the shelf) for the intellectually dishonest who deny rationality and Truth in the hopes of sounding smart at keggers, to follow this path for the likes of us would be utter suicide. Our worlds would fall down and we would join the Mean.

Logic shakes the rational man far more than the beast. The Truth makes the honest despair. The dishonest man simply Knows.