Lisa, a Facebook friend of mine, recently posted a cartoon that said: “There are two sides to every story. Mine, and the one I’m not going to tell you about.”
My response was: “I always say, there are three sides to every story. Yours, mine, and the truth.”
Estelle, a Facebook friend of Lisa’s, countered with, “The question is who provides the truth?”
I had no response for Estelle because her question made me realize that there are innumerable sides to every story. And my “Yours, mine, and the truth” theory was hackneyed, naïve, and untrue, which is why I’ll most likely never use it again.
Instead of responding to Estelle, I took the easy way out and replied with a “Thumbs Up” emoji.
Thumbs Up? That’s all I had?
I couldn’t get Estelle’s question out of my mind, and she had me thinking about truth for a hot minute, but then, as usual, life took over.
That was until this afternoon, when I started streaming His & Hers on Netflix. Literally minutes into the psychological thriller, the narrator reflected on the many sides of a story by stating, “There are at least two sides to every story: Yours and mine. Ours and theirs. His and hers. Which means someone is always lying.”
And there it was: Truth can’t be trusted.
Truth can be uncovered, discovered, or often invented.
How many times have we confused truth with belief?
And how many times are those beliefs false?
And how many of us hold onto beliefs that we know aren’t true?
What is it about truth that makes it so elusive and untrustworthy?
When I went back on Facebook to respond to Estelle with more than a perfunctory “Thumbs Up,” about who provides the truth, I saw that Lisa had already done so with: “That’s what we are all trying to figure out!”
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
To follow up on my comment about truth, research is the only answer to truth. With research we get closer and closer to the truth, but truth is not static. As research increases our knowledge of life as we know it, truth changes with more knowledge. No one individual/community/country/organization has a monopoly on the truth. To put it in perspective, one famous philosopher and scientist, Descartes offered another celebrated dictum: “Truth is not to be found in the crowd of opinions, but in the evidence.”
Thank you for your comment, Estelle. Ever since you asked, “Who provides the truth?” I’ve been thinking about truth and the current U.S. political environment. And now every time I watch a show or read something that attempts to define truth, it becomes ever more elusive. If truth is not static, then is it fluid? The definition of fluid is something that has no fixed shape and yields easily to external pressure.