Ah, the truth. Much like many other topics we’ve romanticised ‘til death, the idea of “the truth” is something we constantly aspire to. It’s a moral high ground. An ivory tower underneath which all else is not worthy of our time. To be truthful is to do it the right way. Anything else falls short of true human potential.
We’ve seen it in the media discourse for the last few years. Truth is dead. Fake news are in. Post-truth is in. Narratives are in (or, according to HyperNormalisation, have been for 30 years). No one knows anything anymore, so we’re left with news snippets and quotable tweets to make sense of what the hell is “really going on”.
Except the truth is a slippery subject. A moving target with an expiry date. Scientists know this well. Every discovery they make is not labelled as “the truth”, but rather something that was proven to not be absolutely and flagrantly wrong. And yet, when we move to the social sciences, and especially about how we cover things in media and how we talk to one another, we never see it that way. We crave certainty. The scientist says they’re not wrong right now; we obsess about their findings being the absolute truth on a matter.
Our needs for individualism and definitive truth fail to recognise that the truth is neither definitive, nor an individual affair. If we go back 50 years, Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin put it as such:
“Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction.”
At our best, we know this to be true in advertising. The reason many ad agencies preach the merits of fame over the technicalities of personalisation is they know people are social creatures. And as social creatures, they construct meaning together. “I know that you know that I know” kind of stuff. If we all saw a different version of a movie, there’s nothing to talk about. The same principle applies to products and services. Sometimes even brands and campaigns.
On the other hand, the entertainment industries love the idea that people change. They can stop being selfish career-driven pricks. They can move on from toxic relationship habits. Angry people can prove to be quite affable fellas. Bad guys are no longer purely bad, they’re someone who deep down is good and can be good again. We hate having to change, but we love the idea that people can change.
One of my favourite aphorisms is that “science progresses one funeral at a time”. Which means that sometimes the old guard must be replaced by the new guard for what we call the “truth” to change (often for the better). But the reality is we don’t need to wait for everyone to die for truth to change. We see truth changing every time people bother to challenge and prove the status quo wrong.
And here lies the crux of the argument, and the main flaw with the idea of “one truth”. There isn’t one truth, there are multiple ones. And only time tells how long something is “true” for. We love the idea that people can change, yet we reject that when it comes to the truth about the world. But if truth is born between people and people change, then the truth can change with them. [tweet this]
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