"What is 'Truth?'"

"What is truth?" retorted Pilate. With this he went out again to the Jews gathered there and said, "I find no basis for a charge against him."
John 18:38 (NIV)

With all the people shouting 'I've got the truth! I've got the truth', I thought I would do a post about the bullshit people often accept as 'truth' simply because it is convenient to do so, and the harm that usually results. When Pontius Pilate faced that bloodthirsty crowd, Pilate, a notorious bastard who would become an even worse notorious bastard in the years following this incident, tried to get at the truth of the charges against Jesus of Nazareth. The crowd worked against him. Like so many people these days, it had already decided that it knew the truth, and refused to entertain the notion that it might not have all the facts. It wanted blood. It wanted someone to be crucified. It didn't seem to really care if the person being crucified was the real culprit, as long as someone got hung up on that cross.

It is a bizarre mentality that is all too often found in people screaming for supposed justice, and frankly, one that I can't understand. Isn't it preferable to get the right person strung up, than whatever convenient bastard happens to be available and railroad-able at the moment? I mean, what is the point of just stringing up anybody, when your child, spouse, or parent has been murdered? Wouldn't you want to get the son-of-a-bitch who really did it? Likewise, wouldn't a responsible parent, spouse, or other concerned individual want to find the real cause of diseases such as autism, instead of wasting time and resources spreading propaganda based on proven-to-be-flawed studies and surveys? Wouldn't your first concern be getting the truth, no matter what strange avenues and unpleasant realities it leads you to?

Indeed, sometimes the truth isn't obvious. It may appear to be obvious to the untrained observer (or to the willfully gullible individual), but to someone with a critical eye there are a hell of a lot of little tells that indicate the truth may lie somewhere else completely. It is what lies beneath, the thread that solidly links all the inconsistencies in a logical manner, that needs to be dug out, tested, and proven. In scientific testing, this means that the same test, performed under the same conditions, must provide the same result each and every time. If the result varies, then there is a flaw somewhere in the theory. In matters of logic and criminality it is a bit harder to get at the root of what happened. What separates the men from the boys, however, is a person's willingness to search for the real truth instead of accepting a convenient scapegoat.

I like a mystery, and so I tend to watch a lot of true-crime videos. This has led me to a lot of real-life cases where guilty verdicts have been overturned based on solid DNA evidence, or other incontrovertible evidence. What boggled my mind was just how many of the assorted victims' surviving relatives refused to accept the fact that the wrong person had been convicted. It is as if they wanted someone, anyone, to hang for the crime, and they don't give half a shit if it is the right person on the business end of the noose.

Well, that isn't right. What I would have expected would be anger all right, but anger directed at the police who fucked up the investigation, and the legal system that buried the real truth of what happened by convicting an innocent person. It is so rare to find such an attitude, in fact, that my jaw dropped when I came across a 60 Minutes Australia report about a mother who is launching her own crusade to get her son's accused murder out of jail because she is convinced he didn't do it (click here for the video). It is probably the first time I have ever come across a story about a victim's relative who wanted the right person in the prisoner's dock, and not just someone to take the blame, and bear the brunt of their desire for vengeance!

How rare to find someone who isn't interested in finding a convenient scapegoat! Yes, the case is an almost grotesque example of a learning disabled Aboriginal man being beaten into a confession that is full of holes, but the sad fact is that people have been convicted on even less reliable evidence than this, and that evidence has been embraced by both the public and the survivors/relatives of the victims.

What a fucking disgrace!

Shortly after coming across that story, I came across another 'real life' series about British policing. In a nutshell, the cops suspect a man of murdering his girlfriend based on the usual reasons: he was the last person to have seen her, her relatives said he was 'controlling' her, etc... . They get a nice camera shot of the man's house, where his shoes are lined up in extreme order all the way up the stairs, and I immediately thought, 'he suffers from OCD, and nothing else'. By the end of the episode it is determined that he was not controlling his girlfriend. She had a severe alcohol problem, and had to take meds for mental issues, and he was delivering her meds according to their prescriptions, as well as rationing whatever alcohol she was allowed. Her bizarre method of death was determined to be a suicide, based on the forensic evidence, and the fact that she had attempted suicide in exactly the same manner while under psychiatric hospitalization. At the end of the episode, her sister accepted the results of the investigation, and also changed her opinion about the boyfriend's 'controlling' behavior. It seems that here was another remarkable person who, when the real facts became known, accepted the truth instead of demanding that a scapegoat, any scapegoat, be sacrificed in order to fulfill her need for vengeance.

Hats off to that lady, too.

Those are just two examples drawn from the world of real-life murder mysteries. The problem, unfortunately, is found in every aspect of daily life. Only a very small minority of people actually want to have the truth. The rest of the populace is more interested in having someone else tell them what they should believe the truth to be. Sadly, they are more interested in being acknowledged as having the truth, than of they are in actually discovering it. If they were, they would not be so virulent and violent towards people who disagree with them.

The only way to discover the truth is to look at all the evidence, all of the arguments against it, and being willing to shift your idea of what the truth is when new info comes in.

You also need to know when you're stretching coincidence into 'fact'.

One day in the distant future, I believe that we will laugh at how stupid and primitive people of the 21st century really were. 'Man descended from apes? Hahaha! How could they have not known how ridiculous that theory was?'

They'll laugh their asses off at some of the things we believe in - that is, if we don't end up plunging ourselves into another dark age by losing our alphabet! It happened before.

Pontius Pilate obviously knew the headache facing people bent on not discovering truth could induce in a person whose interest was in putting facts before emotion.

No wonder he washed his hands of them.

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
-Aristotle

Image: Pixabay