Why I got started on this path (The Real Truth Project, then Truthology 101)

A "good enough" grasp of reality is necessary to our very survival.  Having an inaccurate view of reality can easily kill you. Winston Churchill was nearly killed in New York city because of a very simple misconception of reality he "knew" cars drive on the left side of the road.


All but the tiniest portion of what we think we know comes packaged and delivered to us from .. other realms that we hardly know even exist. I don't mean some kind of supernatural realms -- I just mean hundreds of thousands (at least) of academics, reporters, teachers, government spokesmen, and sometimes friends, family, and neighbors. Thousands of bits of "information" come pouring into our world at almost any moment. It is more than we can absorb, and much of it is wrong.


Still, I'm sure that most of the people reading this are good enough at choosing what to pay attention to and believe -- good enough, I mean, to avoid dozens of possibilities of disaster every day.


Other people are not so lucky. In North Korea, to take an extreme example, people are kept in a starving, miserable condition primarily through the manipulation of their view of reality. They think most of the rest of the world is worse off, and wants to destroy them, so they cling to their leaders who control them with lies.


If they stumble somehow into the world outside, they are lost and disoriented. One result is a mini-encyclopedia of basic facts about the rest of the world, written just for North Koreans, that is likely to be the first thing they receive if they somehow escape, or are among the lucky ones who get to travel to China. It is called "Welcome to the World", and generally comes on a PC thumb drive or memory card. (SOURCE LINK).


Certain philosophers (called "epistemologists") have long debated what we know and how we know it - but until recently have done so almost as if each person learned everything they know all by themselves.


One of my conclusions is that if each of us individually strove to get better as seeing through appearances and getting at the real picture, it would be far from enough.  If we did the most wonderful job of teaching "critical thinking" or "rationality" from elementary school on, it would not suffice without some radical changes in our information environment.  Instead of just getting better or smarter, we must ask "How can we adjust the world so we might tell at least the most important truths from falsehoods? As an ultra-simple metaphor, think of adjusting a telescope to bring something into focus. It sounds presumptuous, but otherwise, I fear, we are headed toward a brave new world of perfect counterfeiting of reality which will keep the truth inaccessible, and make it far more difficult to maintain our freedom.


I named my original blog The Real Truth Project because "The Truth Project" was already appropriated -- by TWO entities. One, a "Focus on the Family" project to promote a "biblical world view"; the other advocating a sort of leftest paranoia -- that the 9/11 attacks were faked by the U.S. government. They call themselves "truthers". It is strange how the phrase the truth is made to serve one or another particular (often obsessive) idea, rather than suggesting the whole staggering business of making words reflect what is going on around us.


I have very little justification, to date, for calling my effort a "project".  Rather, it has been a learning experience.  For a while, I got quite caught up in refuting deceptive anonymous political emails, even though I doubted the effectiveness of this sort of debunking.  At least I was getting one person, my 80-ish year old mother, to recognize some messages she was inclined to trust for the sort of deliberate distortion that it was.


Other blogs and projects I am working on:

* What Was the Cold War?

* Jacksonian Miscellanies

* Owning Our Democracy