THE TRUE NATURE OF THE TRUTH
What does man think is the truth? Is there really a possibility that there is only one SOURCE of the truth thereby making void of free will? Is the truth actually “true”? These questions which actually cloud the mind of man when he thinks deeply about the truth will be discussed subsequently.
What is the truth? The truth is the conformity to fact or reality; correctness, accuracy. In other words, when someone says something pertaining to facts and realities, he is saying the truth; if says something not pertaining to facts and realities, he is telling a lie. Facts are objective consensus on a fundamental reality that has been agreed upon by a substantial number of people. That is, what makes up facts are: Consensus, reality and a substantial number of people. So, if document, even if it is made in error, enjoys a complete composition of the trio, that document has automatically become a document based on facts. Again, reality is a state of being actual and real. That is to say, those things which can be deduced from the physical environment through our senses are attributes of reality. However, we should be looking at the possible circumstance that reality may enjoy a relative perception. What do I mean? For instance, two individuals may look at an apple, the first says, “it’s a green one”; the other says, ‘it’s a pink one’. Now, the latter suffers colour blindness and thus, gave room for such response. In the mind of any layman, that fact that he has colour blindness already renders his answers invalid, but the big question is what if we were all suffering from colour blindness? And one ‘healthy’ person gives a complete opposite answer on all visual experiments? Of course the same layman will say that the ‘healthy’ person is the unhealthy one. WHY? Because there is ‘lack’ of the basic trio named above: Consensus, reality and substantial number of people. Like the igbos say Nigeria, “crowd is power”, that also relates that when a higher number of persons agree on something, such agreement creates a fact which becomes the truth. With the above analysis, one will not help but wonder, “How true is the truth”?
Furthermore, our next question bothers on the fact that the truth enjoys mostly, a monopolistic source. And with such monopoly, comes the absence of free will. Speaking of monopoly as regards the source of truth, one out of the various examples is the academic/school system. Here, a teacher uses a textbook authored by an individual who learnt either from a teacher or read the works of other authors who were taught by other teachers to teach or confer “knowledge” on students. Now, when an assignment or assessment is given to a student, his expected answers should not be found outside the radius of the works which the teacher taught him with. Some teachers even go to the extreme by ‘compelling’ such students to write the exact words used by the teacher or as found in the work he/she taught them with. Little or no attention is paid to the input of the student or his thoughts on the matter. In fact left for the teachers, such “input” cannot constitute a valid principle so, why give it a shot in the first place?
Finally, how true is the truth? This is a question even the ‘disciples’ of the truth cannot answer. For after going through the above, the indifferences that may arise at the mind of the reader will make him see the truth as something less; something incomplete; he will be looking at the possibility that in all honesty, the truth could actually be a lie.
Author..... Joachim Chinedu
Labels: Let me tell you something
