all I'm offering is the truth, nothing more."
- Morpheous
"The Truth, Neutrinos, Taylor Swift,
And Otto Von Bismarck"
by John Wilder
“I know what you're thinking, 'cause right now I'm thinking the same thing. Actually,
I've been thinking it ever since I got here: Why, oh why, didn't I take the blue pill?”
– "The Matrix"
"I write a lot about the Truth, but I think the Friday before Memorial Day is a fine time to talk about the Truth in general. Why? Because I said so.
The first thing I want to point out is that a quest for Truth, does not mean everything is bright and happy and puppy tails. The Truth is, very often a grim thing. I have found things sometimes aren’t the happy web that I imagined. Like the Wedding Guest in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner I ended up being “A sadder and a wiser man” because of The Truth. I guess the Wedding Guest’s bright spot is at least Iron Maiden® wrote a song about him.
That is part of the issue of looking for the Truth – I thought I understood life, and then a curve ball hits. Some people call this sudden exposure to the Truth: The Red Pill, based on the red Reese’s Pieces that E.T.® ate with Indiana Jones™ in the movie Jaws.
Or something like that. Heck, I used to worry about the evidence that the Sun’s neutrino count was half of what would be expected, and that maybe its internal fusion had stopped. But that was just too scary, so now I worry about celebrity gossip.
The Red Pill is choosing to see reality as it is, not as we’d wish it to be. In this quest, I’ve seen things I didn’t want to see, and understood things often people are willfully ignorant of because the consequences of the Truth are...disturbing. That’s difficult, because then I have to go back through what I formerly believed to be True, and reassess – how does this new Truth change what I thought I knew? What else do I think to be True that is similarly wrong? What I trusted as the Truth, after taking the Red Pill, I had to reassess and review my whole worldview through different eyes.
One of my first Red Pills was when I was a sophomore in college. I realized then that most people simply didn’t care about me, didn’t care if I succeeded or failed, and that the majority of my presence in the world was like that of a finger in a cup of water – pull the finger out, and two seconds later you’d never know a finger had ever been in the water. Unless I hadn’t washed my hands after going to the bathroom.
And, it’s True. Most of the journey of most lives is shared with just a few very close people. I remember that one of my friends died not too long after high school – a car crash. I hadn’t seen him for four years afterwards, and was sad, but, you know, I shrugged and moved on.
That’s not the case for everyone – families are much tighter, obviously, but lots of marriages are transactional: it’s based not on a bond, but on a transaction, like nearly every Hollywood marriage. But it comes down to friendships, too. I once had a close friend at work. I left the job, and boom, the friendship status was closed. Our relationship had been a transaction, and it occurred in an artificial setting. Didn’t mean I wasn’t irritated, but, hey, like Mark Twain said, Red Pill is gonna Red Pill.
Searching for the Truth isn’t about avoiding ugliness, searching for the Truth is about being able to make actual choices, using free will free of illusions. It’s about making actual conscious moral decisions without pretending. This is better, even if the Truth is ugly. Why? Decisions made with the Truth in mind work out better. If I tried to use reason and logic with a toddler, we’d both end up frustrated and I’d end up with a black eye and a fractured clavicle. Again.
That’s a key problem with making decisions or basing reality on anything other than the Truth: “solutions” won’t solve any problems if they’re not based on reality except by accident. Those “solutions” may even make things worse. For instance, if the problem is youth crime, and New York City decides that to stop youth crime, for any crime short of murder, they’re going to ignore it and put the criminal back on the streets immediately, what will happen?
For illegal aliens, if the policy to stop those illegals is to fund them to get to the border, bus them from the border to relocation centers, feed, clothe, fund, and then fly for free to yet more free stuff: housing and food. How many illegals will that policy stop?
The True solution to a problem often requires a True understanding of the problem. In the examples above, the True problem isn’t the illegals or the young criminals, the True problem is the GloboLeftElite who want the illegal aliens and the youthful criminals to be doing exactly what they’re doing. Not using the Truth to make decisions when you have it is morally and ethically bankrupt, and the GloboLeftElite and their stooges have a lot to answer for.
The biggest ally I have in my search for the Truth is humility, which is probably one of the best inventions, ever. Although I’ve learned a lot, the best lesson I’ve ever learned is that I can be 100% dead wrong. Because of that history, I always, always try to ask myself, “what if I’m wrong?”
It’s a powerful question. If everybody is doing the same thing, and I do something different, what happens if I’m wrong? What’s the upside if I’m right? We live in a world of uncertainty, and finding Truth is not always clear. It’s True that the dollar will eventually go to zero, but it’s also True that I could go broke waiting for that to happen.
So, I try to seek whatever evidence I can to help me. I also like to use those close friends (and The Mrs.) as people to help point out when I’m delusional. They try, and sometimes they’re right, and sometimes I’m right. By writing these points down in the posts I’ve put out, I’ve also made it so it’s harder to delude myself that I knew better than I really did.
Just kidding.
The reward, though, is to live a life where you’re guided not by delusion, but by Truth. It may not always be the happiest outcome, but it is the real outcome. Or if that’s too scary, I’ll just concentrate on whatever Taylor Swift is doing instead. Stupid neutrinos."
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