The strongest evolutionary advantage was not to know the actual truth. It was to have one perceived truth with your tribe. Everything was based on usefulness. If a belief helped the tribe, it was valued and survived in time.
Beauty was secondary but still present. It was nice to believe in the beautiful. Beauty and the Love for it in biology is also evolutionary built into us.
The truth was almost nowhere to be found in the Stone Age. Biology makes usefulness always dominate objectivity.
Beauty, and its main channel of spreading, storytelling, is a part of conspiracy theories and religions.
The biggest danger for truth comes from this model: Bullshit is a partial truth combined with usefulness and packed in a beautiful story.
In a world with amazing access to information, outright lies are no longer a huge danger. Bullshit is easier to create and thrives everywhere.
Bullshit is not built to fight Truth. The nemesis of any Bullshit group is another group with even stronger Bullshit! For the people trapped in a Bullshit story, objective truth is out of reach.
The Truth team is smaller and has one goal: to fight the Bullshit. Team Truth cannot monitor it all. There is no prevention, only partial damage control. In modern times, there is hope that both crowdsourced projects and the AI revolution can scale the efforts of team Truth so they can engage in earlier mitigation or prevention.
Why fight biology for the truth in ourselves?
You either love the ideal of truth and fight for it or you leave yourself to the evolutionary forces, which will lead you into one of the many Bullshit camps. If this happens, we partly lose touch with reality, which severely hinders our potential in The Game of Life, where objectivity and understanding are the keys to success.
The thing about false beliefs is that they generate a ton of secondary false beliefs. Useful beliefs do not generate secondary useful beliefs. The usefulness does not translate to anything meaningful and will be lost if you experience even a minor case of harm. The falseness does lead to more falseness, by detaching us from reality in the long term.
In the modern complicated world secondary beliefs have a huge influence. Once there is a direction, a story, once emotions win, secondary beliefs take over.
You already had a useful, true, and beautiful story: “I can do anything and survive against all odds story. The story that is built into all of us because being a fighter for survival is built into our biology. Even the option of being a hero is built into us due to evolution selecting for cooperation and risking it all for the tribe.
The worse the intentions around you, the more Truth you need
Most governments, political actors and corporations are typical Bullshit actors and have the main intention to build and keep control over you. The systems that govern their evolution, the driving forces themselves, forge them in such a way. It’s not the fault of single people. Bullshit is the main tool of control over the masses because of our biological susceptibility to it. We have to constantly resist. Truth is your shield against Bullshit:
- In order to be successful in The Game of Life, you have to understand it.
- To understand the world you need the shield of Truth, otherwise everything is distorted due to the Bullshit everywhere.
Your true allies are flows and the intelligence-defining power of prediction. Biology is in the enemy camp; it is very powerful but also very predictable.
How to fight biology and Bullshit with Truth
Humans are born as little, clueless copy-pasting machines. They have such empty brains and so much to learn!
In the first years of their life, they copy just about everything they can from everyone around. Not a lot of conscious reasoning happens, though information processing leads to intuitive patterns forming. Any data points are welcome.
Slowly, kids start to reason. And with reasoning comes filtering. This is when young humans encounter the all-important concept of trust. There are two different types of trust, making it a weird trap word.
Emotional trust is about people’s intentions and is carried by love.
Intellectual trust is about people’s competence and is carried by structure.
Babies have a sense of love from day one. They feel emotional trust before they can walk or talk. Emotional trust is built into us at a very deep subconscious level.
Intellectual trust is a very adult feeling that requires a fully developed brain and is boosted by education and diverse experience.
We’re always talking about one type of trust, with a word representing both, which creates a mess of epic proportions.
Trust is at the crossroads of all human experience. The Love-Fear spectrum is the central Human one, and the Chaos-Structure one is the central Universal one. The two types of trust are fundamental human expressions of life’s core forces.
When we evolved, emotional trust (connection) was everything. It was the bonding force that made humans the masters of cooperation and eventually the hegemon force of the planet.
Intellectual trust was nowhere. People were not “intellectual” in the modern sense. Everyone in the tribe had access to roughly the same information. There were situations where everyone knew the objective answer of a question and situations where no one knew the objective answer.
- Emotional trust will always be critical for our survival and wellbeing as it keeps us out of malicious people’s way.
- Intellectual trust is essential to find the objective truth. It is the only tool to find your way in an ocean of information with varying quality.
So, one key skill in the modern world is to know when to use each of them and to reduce the surrounding noise by ignoring everything that can be safely ignored.
Let’s see what happens if you don’t differentiate intellectual from emotional trust. This means that you simply apply only the emotional trust skill.
An even worse addition is the very powerful Confirmation bias – once you believe in something, you are subconsciously attracted to sources that confirm it.
As you can see the Bullshit coalition is dominant for a reason. It’s enough for a confident, charismatic politician to win your emotional trust. Bullshit plays also a central role in sales and advertising, especially of addictive and harmful products.
Our job is to see right through political and corporate manipulation and not be influenced . You need your intellectual trust to access only the best, least biased information. There is a perfect playground – the conversations in private small groups with people we care about. This is where you can make a difference in building your shield of Truth. Still, the fact that these people are well-meaning allows a safe space for vulnerability. Only in such a space can you overcome your instincts and differentiate between emotional and intellectual trust.
How to turn the tables on how Truth forms in us using intellectual trust
Emotional trust is biological and will always be more powerful than intellectual. The truth-searcher tunes down their emotions. Except one – “Love for Truth itself”. It’s a flow.
The Love for Truth is distinctly human. In people with a high level of meaning (who see the world as whole and no barriers between themselves, their potential futures, and the world’s future), Truth connects to usefulness and prosperity for everyone via science and technology. Such people feel the value of Truth for everyone, and thus, fighting for the Truth becomes their form of love to the world.
The Love for Truth is a force. But it’s not a given that it will combine with intellectual trust!
Both Love for Truth and intellectual trust require that you have more flows and less boxes in your life. If we have strong flows, we feel no need to over-attach ourselves to a single person. This reduces emotional trust to normal levels and leaves space for intellectual ones.
The fight for Truth needs so many pre-requirements to even be able to start – flows, Love for Truth, intellectual trust skills, good education, diverse experience, not to be heavily indoctrinated in a Bullshit group already.
You don’t have many battles in life. You have one. Everything is connected to everything. Everything you need to forge the Truth shield, you need anyway.
Finding the Truth has two approaches – direct (logical) and indirect (intuitive). The second one brings you closer to the truth rather than exactly at it, but is the only available in messy situations with a lot of Bullshit floating around. The direct approach is great for simpler questions with a definitive true answer. Even with the direct approach, you can never be 100% sure about most things.
It is important to learn to differentiate between fake and proven experts.
Proven experts’ approach
- Present all the evidence
- Use exact terms
- Normal confidence
- Respectful and polite
- Don’t always have an answer
- Are not afraid to be wrong
- Seek verification from peer experts
- Cooperate with each other
- Don’t overuse storytelling
- Never overuse humor and sarcasm
- Keep facts and emotions separate
- Evaluate ideas impartially
- Are aware of their own biases and adhere to strict standards such as double-blind trials.
- Hold their ground in a hostile environment: debates, interviews, and written discussions where everyone has a chance to search deeply for an error.
Why to fight for the truth in others?
If you bring one person closer to the truth, you change a life. Not only that, but this person will share the truth with others, vote, spend, and invest money more consciously.
How to fight for the truth in others?
The answer to any hard problem in life always comes from flow. Unconditional love, understanding, and compassion are essential to building emotional trust.
Letting go of any structure is psychologically hard.
Stronger flows will help reduce the influence of these box structures and open space for new intuition. Never apply any pressure. Your goal is to open space for consideration and to melt the ice. Then the process of intellectual change is started and will complete over time.
Whatever happens, never do anything that might instill guilt or shame. This is unethical and unhelpful as it just paralyzes the person, makes them defensive, and prevents them from taking any meaningful action.
The only way to really help someone get closer to the truth takes unconditional love. Be prepared to be factually correct, yet emotionally vulnerable. Give the person a safe space.
Always remember – People started believing in Bullshit due to emotional reasons. Only via emotional power will you be able to change their mind. Facts won’t help without you showing love, acceptance, vulnetability and care.
