What’s it called when a person knows the truth but refuses to acknowledge it? Well, denialism fits, as does cognitive dissonance. Something I find more disconcerting every year is the number of people afflicted with this disease. I know it’s not an actual disease, the kind tracked by the Centers for Disease Control, but it is an epidemic that has exploded among the population as a whole.
What I’m referring to is the lack of acceptance for truth. Not my truth or your truth: the truth, because there is truth and falsehood, and it has nothing to do with how anyone feels about it. It doesn’t matter whether anyone likes it or not, because it is what it is — and denying that it’s true (or false!) is exactly where I started.
That’s the real damage. Most of the battles people fight — online, in person, it doesn’t matter where — happen because somebody won’t admit a basic fact. Everybody carries around their own set of facts, and of course they disagree with one another. But the whole point of a discussion about anything that matters is to determine what the truth actually is. When people refuse to do that, that’s what leads to the strife and the division. Evidence is primary. If I can say, this is true, and here is my evidence — and you can look at it and say, yeah, that is evidence — then we already agree on something. We have a starting point for the disagreement, whether it’s politics, religion, science, or whatever it is.
And there’s a difference people slide right past: a thing can be truthful and still not be a fact. You can pull a sentence out of a book — any book — strip away everything around it, and the words are real words, truly there on the page. But what the author meant by them lives in the context, and without the context you haven’t got a fact anymore. You’ve got your opinion wearing a fact’s clothes. People build whole arguments that way — a piece from here, a piece from there, assembled into something the pieces never said — and then they call it truth.
We know what’s true or not based on evidence. No evidence, not true. Some evidence, worth pondering. Real evidence, conclusive.