Nothing But the Truth

The impressionability of the human mind fascinates me above all else: the idea that we can believe anything we choose, and it will become true to us.  It need not have a foundation in reality for it to become the truth: we do not have to see it or touch it to think it is there; thinking leads to believing, and believing naturally to knowing.  

When I say one of my favorite books is 1984 by George Orwell, people look at me funny, but it is for the above reason (and not the miserable, mind-controlling future Orwell imagined for us) that I love it: his grasp of humanity's capabilities as they could be.  He exaggerates what we know as possible just so far as it is still plausible and then elaborates until it becomes probable.  For those who have not read it, or do not know the premise, what I am referring to is this: the people in the world of 1984 self-police themselves.  There is no real Big Brother, or at least his existence is not proven, and yet because he is real in the minds of the citizens, he exists.  There is no system: each man is the government in and of himself, and if any chose to stop believing what he or she was told, no one could technically stop them.  But the population is trained to shut down their brains like computers if they begin to broach topics specified as off-limits (the whens, wheres, and whys).  As relationships between the three major nations [vacillate] between alliance and war, so do the textbooks so that the new alliances always existed, and the new wars have forever been waged: one day each man, woman, and child is convinced that they are at war with one nation, the next they are told it is the other, was always the other of the two, and as soon as they are told this they know it to be true--know it because they have taught themselves that it is so.  

My favorite principle by far in the novel is that of doublethink, which outlines the entire purpose of the novel, and of this blog post: that one person may believe two things, each of which disproves the other, to be true at the same time; they can know that an apple is red, can see that it is, and yet can tell themselves so many times that it is purple, teach themselves to know that it is purple, that the latter becomes just as true as the former, and they can push the true color of the fruit to the back of their mind until it is obscured by the knowledge that the apple is really and truly purple.

We teach ourselves to believe things every day: to believe in a God, or gods; to believe in science, in the definition of what we are and why; to believe our eyes and ears and mouths.  And yet, we each have a different take: every religion knows their god or gods are the only true ones; every scientist knows what he has discovered is correct until it is proven false, and then that which has proven it false becomes accepted.  Ask one man to name the color of an object and he will say it is blue, ask another and he will say it is red, and one will say the other is color blind, but how do you decide which?  Every individual's "truth" is based on their perception of the world around them, so what is true to one is not necessarily so to the next, and truth becomes an abstract concept, subjective to the person possessing it.