Truth Is Vitally Important ~ But How Do We Discern What Is True?

This is probably the biggest question of the era we are living in. We see so many news articles accusing people of spreading misinformation, yet what we are hearing is like shifting sand. It is constantly changing.

Science evolves – so we are told. Isn’t it ironic then – to be telling others they are spreading misinformation and unfounded conspiracy theories? Who is to say those news articles are truthful? The media is not the least bit reliable for delivering truth, so who are they to be brow beating others?

No matter what anyone says – truth does not evolve. It is the one thing in life that is constant. Truth will eventually rise to the surface on all controversial topics.

If you ever watch true crime documentaries, one of the key things police look for is inconsistencies and lies. For the guilty who refuse to confess, the story constantly changes. The story evolves based on the evidence presented. For instance, a person may claim they were not at a certain place at a certain time. Then when they get presented with evidence to the contrary, suddenly they change, or add to the story.

How do the police identify or get confirmation when a person is lying? The police like to get the original story from the person they are interviewing as soon as possible, and get it documented. That way, they have something to compare it to when they do the next interview. It also gives them something to use as a baseline when they are collecting other evidence, to see if the actual evidence contradicts what the person told them. That evidence based documentation, is what is used by the prosecutors in court.

So our first clue in discerning truth, would be that the story changes, and it changes often. Lies are built upon other lies, sometimes with a bit of truth thrown in, just to add a convincing component.

The first step is to evaluate the consistency of what we are being told, and how much the story changes or gets added to. To hear bureaucrats say, “Oh but we are learning as we go” is no different than saying “I have no clue, or am lying, and don’t want to be held accountable for it”.

Nowadays many people are accused of spreading misinformation, when they are simply giving a testimony of their own experiences and observations. Testimonies are part of the judicial proceedings, when truth is being sought after. We are allowed to give truthful testimony, based on our own experiences, and first hand observations. I really don’t think anyone should be able to take that away from us.

Deception is tricky business. To avoid deception, we have to actively seek the truth, respect the truth, and actually love the truth. Truth is not the author of confusion. Lies create confusion. If there is confusion in truth, people should be able to ask questions, until they are satisfied.

Lies in one way or another, get forced on people. Even those who are doing the deceiving, are deceived and building a worldview based on lies. Truth is revealed to people who sincerely seek it. That is the key and fundamental difference between the two. No amount of arguing in the world will change the mind of someone who is truly deluded with lies. Lies, once accepted or believed, can create deeply rooted strong delusions, even among very intelligent people.

But what if we are deceived about things we simply do not understand? Things like climate change, viruses, and vaccines – are topics too vast and controversial for most people to understand. And even for those who do have advanced education in these fields, there are massive and often polarized differences of opinions.

Now there are lies embodied and homogenized from the political, into the personal health choices for all individuals in the world. Should a person be called a conspiracy theorist for wondering if some of the vaccine marketing campaign is driven by profit motive? Or would we be stupid not to consider that as a possibility at least? After all, money is one of the most powerful motivators known to humankind. People will sell their souls for money, and they will take yours too. So how dare we ask? How dare we use our own judgment?

We have gone from the respect for personal autonomy, consent and privacy in health care – to somehow making choice a collective experience or societal need. All of a sudden, personal choices, discernment, and doubt are bad things – something to be chastised and ridiculed over. Yet, when you think of the millions of drugs, treatments, invasive procedures, etc. the concept of removing consent in health care is where true anarchy would come from.

Health care cannot be collective anyway. Not everyone has cancer. People need different things on an individual basis. No one does triage in ER, and collectively puts everyone at the same level. Some people are injured in car accidents. Others are sick from a chronic disease. How can health care possibly view an individual’s care as being part of a collective society?

You cannot rob the individual of choice, and then claim it is for the collective good. If so – it is a very slippery slope. Health care has the ability to take things from dystopian political levels – to the depths of the pit. That pit – will be our fate, if they abandon the central component of the Hippocratic Oath and concept of “first do no harm” in health care.

After all, health care has the drugs that can kill people quickly and efficiently. Once a person is stripped down, and on a stretcher with nothing but a gown and a wrist band on, that person is totally vulnerable, especially if they are medicated or sick. I am not saying the system is untrustworthy or that intentional harm is happening. I am simply saying that people are vulnerable when they end up in hospital. The system has a responsibility to maintain ethics and trust.

If the system robs trust, or gears up to do whatever they want to do to a person without informed consent, that would be medical anarchy, or lead to a true medical mafia. One would think and hope that democratic countries can maintain reliable and stable health care systems, and would never do that. Let’s hope ethics and informed consent do not get turfed over covid, along with a very aggressive marketing/ad campaign for a myriad of different vaccines.

The issues over vaccine safety and dosing intervals, has created a great deal of confusion. Is it any wonder there is an erosion of trust? But rather than see there are valid reasons for the mistrust, they denigrate and label people for having the mistrust. That is no different than ganging up on people, and is a bullying tactic, not a fair political tactic. It is certainly not the basis for any scientific arguments either.

In many of the US states, they are offering lottery tickets, cash prizes, vouchers, and various other incentives to get people to take the vaccines. Although I see that as being quite tacky – at least it maintains choice, which is crucial.

Any level of intuitive discernment, or doubt, or truth seeking, is seen as selfish. It is framed into a shaming, peer pressure onslaught involving a wide range accusations, labelling and name calling. It is viewed by some, as being some kind of a renegade individualist, with no concern for the collective good and survival of all people. Whoa – wait a minute.

First of all – all people are going to die eventually. So using the survival of all, and the threat of death – is a very questionable approach to begin with. From Wikipedia ” An estimate on the “total number of people who have ever lived” as of 1995 was calculated by Haub (1995) at “about 105 billion births since the dawn of the human race” with a cut-off date at 50,000 BC (beginning of the Upper Paleolithic), and inclusion of a high infant mortality rate throughout pre-modern history.

You do not have to be a mathematician or genius to figure out how many people have died so far. The big difference is that death was never used to stop people from living their lives before. Life stopped for the dead, not for the living. Nor was life ever structured around death, but rather survival. We have never before been brainwashed with daily doom and gloom on the number of deaths. The history of humanity has never sank so low, at least not while people are still alive.

One of the best stories and illustrations about this and well worth watching, is the story about the Donner-Reed party in 1846. It is about a group of pioneers who set out on a journey by wagon train, from the midwest to California. They were talked into taking the uncharted route, by a fast talking, lying young lawyer, who was just twenty-seven years old, and had never taken the route himself.

The journey was basically a disaster for them. They got bogged down in salt mines, and gradually had to abandon a significant amount of supplies. They also lost livestock, and quickly ran out of water. After the salt mines, they got trapped and snowbound in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Many of them starved to death. Although it has been quite a few years since I watched that documentary, I found it to be profound on numerous levels.

One aspect of the story is that the families who chose to take the alternative route laid out by the dodgy lawyer, had a fairly distinct gap in personal wealth. The wealthier family had way more supplies, and brought quite a bit of frivolous stuff. So this family had to build a double decker wagon train to hold it all. That wagon train was the first thing to be lost, since the weight of it made it very difficult to traverse narrow mountain trails, and when they reached the salt mines, it sank and they could not get it out.

In the end, only a handful of them survived the journey. Interesting to note is that all of the survivors were women, as well as one twelve year old boy. After seeing the story, I do not view the fact that only women survived, as being due to women having more mind over matter strength. I think it was simply because women have less muscle mass, and did not starve as fast. If they had not managed to walk out – not one of them would have survived. Stories with survivors are the best, because those who survive can explain what happened. They can give their testimony, making it an achievement – as opposed to a catastrophic loss, without knowledge of how it all came about.

One thing the Donner-Reed documentary does demonstrate, is that people cannot stop living because others have died. Otherwise, no one would survive. For sure, these were extreme conditions, and they did need to stay together and help each other for as long as possible – but the living had to go on in spite of the deaths. This is something we see in all survival stories. It is the reason survivor’s have so much guilt until they come to terms with the trauma they had to go through. We really don’t know why some survive and others do not. Not one of us even knows the number of our own days.

Fate is death and death is fate. It is only a matter of timing.

Another thing that muddies the waters of truth, is that there has been a widespread problem with ghost writing, and plagiarizing in medical journals. We have learned about the powerful lobbying associated with the pharmaceutical companies when it comes to many of the articles in those medical journals.

Surely some of them are truthful, but sifting enormous amounts of information is tough to do, especially when it is dry as a bone medical terminology. Most of that terminology is foreign to the layperson, or to those who have worked in entirely different fields.

Since I worked as an RN for many years, I can pick out inconsistencies in what many media journalists write. It is because they are not familiar with what goes on in hospitals, and they often describe very mundane and common things in hyperbolic terms – especially when it comes to covid. Also, when they show pictures of people claiming they are deathly ill just because they have some nasal cannulas delivering oxygen, does not mean much. It especially does not mean much if the person’s colour is good, and they are talking away like normal.

We have heard many claims that people are infected but asymptomatic. I have also read that some otherwise young and healthy people have gone to a clinic or hospital and were told their O2 sats were dangerously low, and they did not even know it. Although I only read about those strange claims in the news, I find it hard to believe based on my experiences as an RN. To be brutally honest, it seems more like fear-provoking nonsense directed at people who do not understand anything about medicine.

Speaking of the new medical trend of being so cat-ostrophic – the only time I had pet cats, was as a kid on the farm. So that could be why I have often wondered about the idiom “curiosity killed the cat”. Maybe it is because I am quite curious myself. I distinctly remember the first time I heard the expression when I was in grade school, because at the tender age of six or seven, I thought, “Oh No! I may not live long!”.

But in actual fact, this idiom was first penned in the late 1500’s and at that time, it was not curiosity that killed the cat – but care that killed it. Now that does make much more sense, albeit in a warped sort of way.

Shakespeare used a similar quote in his circa 1599 play, Much Ado About Nothing: “What, courage man! what though care killed a cat, thou hast mettle enough in thee to kill care. “

The proverb remained the same until at least 1898. Ebenezer Cobham Brewer included this definition in his Dictionary of Phrase and Fable: Care killed the Cat. It is said that “a cat has nine lives,” yet care would wear them all out.”

Now, I am beginning to think the original meaning of this idiom is the truth, not the adapted version we are all so familiar with. When we look at the situation in long term care facilities, we can see that care not only kills the cats!

Is truth prevalent among the masses? Or is truth based on the individual’s choices and perceptions? We can accept there is truth in what we can all observe such as the seasons, and the fact the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. But when it comes to what we cannot see, we have to believe the basics of what we are taught, at least to a certain extent.

For example, we know there is an electromagnetic spectrum, even though our eyes only detect visible light, because there are ways in which we can observe the infrared, such as in satellite imagery or night vision goggles. We know that radio, microwave and x-rays are part of the electromagnetic spectrum, since they enable these things to function.

But there are many things that we cannot prove. In fact, there are many things no one can prove. So many theories have been pitched as fact, when they are not factual at all. There is probably no greater deception than a theory based upon a false foundation, then layered with more and more convoluted fallacies. These are the deceptions that are the most difficult to unravel.

How does white collar crime get away with so much? They fudge the numbers. They make a knotty (naughty) labyrinth, so things are so twisted and confusing, it is very difficult to decipher, or trace the pathways back to the original deception. Some of the fraudulent practices have taken years to untangle.

Just look what happened to Bernie Madoff. He had years of living the high life, then got sentenced to 150 years in prison, and died in prison. In addition, his son committed suicide, and his wife, who married him at the age of eighteen, had no love for him either. Ruth Madoff said she didn’t miss her husband. She said: “The villain of all this is behind bars.” Was all that money worth it?

Truth is very important. We are all fallible. We all make many mistakes throughout the course of our lives. I have come to the conclusion that more than anything else, we are best to not only seek the truth, but to love truth – and pray for the ability to discern the truth.

I know not everyone believes in the Biblical proverbs and warnings about deception. But the Bible does repeatedly advise us not to be deceived. There are also over four hundred verses that specifically tell us not to have fear. Why? Because the pursuit of truth requires courage.

And finally – it is a relief to know, it was really not curiosity that killed the cat.

So go ahead, jump right in – be curious, and fear not. If we seek the truth, we will find it. The truth will always surface. Lies are the weeds in the fields, soon to be chaff in the wind. Our intuition and minds, are the best, and only defence against lies.

Lies don’t hold water, or any nutrients for the soul – so for those who lie for gain, greed and exploitation, they are doomed in one way or another. Like the example of Bernie Madoff’s life and family life – we see the barren outcomes of that kind of greed. We are only beginning to see the philandering and deception that has been part of the Bill Gates empire.

The ultra rich can make a convoluted mess of billions of dollars. Yet they cannot put two and two together, to save their souls from the consequences of their own greed. Go figure…

Essentially all battles begin with words – and will end with words. We would be wise to choose our words with care. Because unlike the proverbial cat – humans don’t have nine lives.

Copyright Valerie J. Hayes and Quiet West (2021). Unauthorised use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author/owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Valerie J. Hayes and Quiet West with appropriate and specific direction to the original content