What Is Truth? Perspectives on Advice and Reality

“Believe nothing you hear and only half of what you see.”

I always thought the comment my dad made was cynical in the extreme.

Today, I think he was onto something.

The first half of his statement is simple. Everyone has an agenda and if you say it often enough, you make it true. People will ignore facts, make up facts, bend the evidence, ignore the evidence, or just plain lie to support their truth. Frank Perretti had an interesting way of saying it in his book “Prophet.” In it, his central character is sitting a in a mall watching the world go by. The man is a newscaster and knows the power of television. As he’s watching the world go by, a thought goes through his mind. “Give me enough budget and enough exposure, and I could ruin the makers of the color brown.”

It’s true.

Today, we have the internet. You don’t even need a big budget to ruin the people who invented Brown. Worse, the search algorithms we use will present you with whatever you’re looking for. Don’t believe me. start doing searches and then watch the MSN homepage. You’ll get lots of suggestions.

The trouble is, the Internet has become our source for truth and unfortunately, it’s turned into something that’s anything but. It’s a wasteland where if I say something often enough, it becomes true.

End result! We ask Pilates question, “What is truth.”

The last half is interesting considering my father grew up in a world without CGI or special effects images. That didn’t stop images being shown that were doctored, zoomed in on a specific things, or even created by actors and actresses. Today, we get tiny clips that we’re supposed to determine the whole story from. And most of the time, we get commentary on what someone thinks.

So, I’ve altered what my father said. I still don’t believe anything I hear, and don’t believe 99% of what I see.

Truth is up for grabs.