In the fantasy world, when we concern ourselves with truth, we do not involve our personal feelings. We understand that personal sentimentality doesn’t help. Rather, it serves as an obstacle to truth.
Of course, that’s the fantasy world. Instead, personal sentimentality goes a long way in making decisions, even the most deadly ones.
“What I accepted as true 30 years ago is the basis of the bonehead decision I made today,” says no one.
Then why does someone make a bonehead decision based on what they accepted as true 30 years ago?
“If my decision today was a boneheaded one, then the fundamental principle underlying it — a principle I accepted as true 30 years ago and have defended ever since — is here proven false.
“Sorry, I can’t admit that. I’m going to have to double down.”
In the fantasy world, that wouldn’t happen where truth is the goal rather than saving face.
Why we double down
We all catch ourselves failing to concern ourselves with truth. Instead, we occupy ourselves defending the veracity of what we had already accepted as true. In essence, when we do that, we’re not defending truth. Rather, we’re defending our past decision to accept something as true.
In other words, our primary objective is not seeking truth. Rather, it’s defending what we accepted as true long ago to avoid admitting a mistake or to appear inconsistent.
This doesn’t merely apply to apologists of a particular religion. It could apply to anyone. It’s not out of the question for a Christian apologist or a secular historian to fail to admit any false claims made in the past. After writing so many bestsellers, making good money, and establishing a respectable reputation, it would be extremely difficult to backtrack.
Our observable desire to know truth
What do we make of our postmodern society? Think about it. We have a seemingly infinite number of perspectives from every direction. That makes life interesting, but confusing still. I enjoy all the different conversations. I’m happy that I can listen to a plethora of formal debates on YouTube.
It’s not difficult in the midst of this confusion to declare that truth is relative. But then again, if we were to assert that, then we would have to admit that particular assertion was another attempt at objective truth.
If we were to swim our way out of this sea of rhetoric and safely reach the shore by observing behavior alone, we’ll likely discover that humans labor intensively sifting truth from falsehood. If that were not so, then there would have never been this paradigm in human history we call the Information Age.
It’s our desire to know truth that made this Information Age a reality.