In his NPR article ThereIs Such a Thing as Truth, Errol Morris asks what truth is. There are some things that are facts. One of them, from Morris’ article is that
Reno, Nevada is further west than Los Angeles, California. He continues explaining how truth is not
relative of subjective. He says, “There
is such a thing as truth, but we often have a vested interest in ignoring or
outright denying it.”
I’ve often felt that while there is absolute truth, often the details and nuance get lost or skewed and truth becomes confused. This became a topic I started following a long time ago, but
during an environmental biology class I took last year, I learned that the real
truth is much more difficult to reach.
There are many documentaries made about the environment, and it seemed
that arguments on both sides benefitted greatly by not looking at the whole
picture when it comes to climate change and global warming. I came to the
conclusion that climate change is a real problem enhanced, if not created by
man, but the very best way to save the environment is to go back to the stone
age and live in caves while the majority of society dies off. So what did it take for me to reach that
conclusion? Spending a semester studying
it under the guidance of a professor.
But then over this past election cycle, I began seeing how some
of my friends on facebook and social media became absolute experts on the candidates
and all of the hot-button topics from the environment to terrorism to
immigration and beyond. They would cite
sources that to me didn’t seemed frankly shady.
So I began a quest to try to find truth in that mad house, and came to
another conclusion – to get to the actual bottom of the story, I would have to
dig, dig, dig, and dig. I would perhaps have to fly to D.C. and interview the
candidates themselves along with family and friends. I would have to become the expert, and it
would be my full time job from here on out.
I don’t have that kind of time or those resources.
When it came time to share what I believe in for our
fireside chat, I immediately gravitated to this subject. I started out by combing through facebook
looking for posts that seemed off to me, and trying to dig deeper, not to find
an answer, but to see both sides of the argument. What surprised me the most was that by taking
this approach, I actually found that both sides had interesting arguments, some
that seemed valid, and some that seemed not quite so valid. I then tried digging deeper finding facts
supporting what those arguments were based on.
Again, I found other posts. As it
turned out, we have arguments built on what some call “facts” which are built
on posts about facts which lead straight down the rabbit hole. Interestingly enough, I even found people
trying to make legitimate arguments based on memes, as though someone thought, “it’s
legitimate because I see a picture next to words in quotes”. My head was spinning.
I found a couple of examples where fact and fiction crossed
lines – one from a current event, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and one from the
past about Khrushchev and Kennedy, and a mysterious picture of the two and what
it means. But to make a point about the absurdity
of where some people turn for information, I made a meme of myself, and closed
the presentation by saying that my meme proved everything that I said in my presentation
was fact. Basically my point was that
truth does exist, but it’s not always in our face. We have to work for it and earn it. And that I feel as creators of art, media,
and stories that we have an obligation that when we are dealing with things of
a factual nature, to work a little harder for the truth. I just hope that with all the false
information, real truth doesn’t become some mythological creature.
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