The ugly truth – It’s actually a dare!

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken” ― Carl Sagan

 

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” ― Carl Sagan

 

“That which can be destroyed by the truth, should be.” ― P.C. Hodgell

When playing truth or dare, have you ever thought…

• If I choose “dare”, they can still dare me to tell the truth about anything.
• If I choose “truth”, they cannot really turn this into any kind of non truth-telling dare.

It seems like action is somehow more valuable in life than truth. Because you can always take the action to search for the truth. But you knowing the truth doesn’t have any benefits by itself. If you do nothing related to the truth, you can still fuck up, no matter the knowledge you have. Does this mean that dare (actions) are more valuable than truth (knowing)?

I can tell you who thinks like this. Nature! Because passing your genes does not require knowing it, but it surely requires… doing it.

Truth however feels important. We never want to be wrong, do we?

Then why the sad reality is that most people are wrong about most things? Is it evil manipulation, propaganda and bad actors? They play their role but it’s not the main part. Life is long and if we really had the tools to find the truth, we would get there despite all evils. The core reason is actually within us and it’s biological and easy to explain.

The main problem with objectivity is that believing the actual truth was not a significant evolutionary advantage when we evolved. You know what was somewhat of an advantage though? Believing any potential truth. Not being totally confused and acting with a plan, even a bad one, resulted in gathering experience and improving over a lifetime.

Then again, you would never want to live with a different truth from your tribe. The plan needs unity and cooperation and passing your genes requires not having the status of on outcast idiot who believes in a different reality from the rest. This was such a strong factor that conformism is built into our biology.

The strongest evolutionary advantage was not to know the actual truth. It was to have one perceived truth with those around you. Then you could make coordinative dares as a group and be competitive against other groups of humans and the elements of nature in a very harsh world. Coordination was how humans conquered the earth.

Let’s recap the world then and the world now. We’ll examine three qualities of our beliefs in each case:

• Usefulness
• Beauty
• Truth

The value of usefulness, beauty and truth in tribal times

The actual objective truth was hard to come by in the Stone Age. Unless you ate the wrong mushroom and died, few interactions with the world would be definitive enough to come close to modern science. Wise old men and women had remarkable intuition from observation and the stories of the ancestors but it was more of a how-to-survive feel than a structure of precise knowledge. We had no idea how the world works and attributed scary unexplainable events like lightnings to gods and spirits, because the actual explanation was way out of reach.

In such a world everything was based on usefulness. If a belief helped the survival quest of the tribe, it was valued and survived in time. Otherwise, not really.

Believing lightning came from the gods was less scary than not knowing what the fuck is going on at all. A potential truth always won the evolutionary battle against no truth at all.

Beauty was secondary but still present. It was nicer to believe in the beautiful than the mundane. People could have believed the gods threw down lightning when they are bored, which is a perfectly rational thought – but where’s the fun in that!? It was because of anger! There had to be drama, there had to be stories, there had to be beauty, because it sticks and makes the story survive in competition with others. Beauty and the love for it is also biologically built into us.

Objective truth was almost nowhere to be found in the Stone Age. Even in the much more advanced time of Aristotle, who had a lot of other Greek thinkers to learn from, people were wrong about almost everything. Evolution did not prepare us for the concept of scientific truth at all. People were happy with the gods and spirits and made up myths, society worked and all of the improvements that could happen with science (eg. reduce child mortality) were unthinkable because people had never seen any better and could not imagine it differently. This is why human scientific progress was so incredibly slow at first but after The Enlightenment sped up dramatically. We needed to believe that progress was possible in order to make it happen.

The value of usefulness, beauty and truth today

In the modern world we have a mess of beliefs that are all possible combinations of useful, beautiful and true, right? No wait, that’s wrong! Because almost every existing (and non-self-destroying, eg. psychiatric condition) belief is useful on a biological level for whoever expresses it. Even the belief that the Earth is flat!

Wait, what?

I’ll repeat.

Believing the Earth is flat is biologically useful and fine for the people who believe this.

But why?

Because you evolved to believe in any potential useful truth and if you believe in one, well you’re… using it to solve your problems! It may not be objectively true but who cares? Biology certainly doesn’t.

Evolution wired you to 1) survive and 2) pass you genes. For this you need 1) a tribe! and 2) a tribe!

In a messy atomized world where people no longer form tribes the way they used to, desperate times require desperate measures. As you know biology is all about desperate measures (link crazy stuff in nature on each word). We make new tribes based on whatever fiction we stumble upon first. The fiction itself doesn’t matter that much – only that we find a tribe where we are valued and special enough for survival and finding a mate. A tribe where we find status.

People in many conspiracy theory movements derive their status mostly because of the onslaught against them. The lowest level of emotion in any relationship is contempt – even worse than aggression from an emotional standpoint. The contempt we may carelessly give Flat Earthers only makes them see themselves as rebels of the truth. The gap we need to bridge can only be bridged with love and understanding, not ridicule. It’s not Flat Earthers’ fault that they obey their biology – we all do! While it’s our social responsibility to help more people get closer to the objective truth, this will not happen with arguments. Biology is prepared for arguments and has defensive mechanisms. It’s love, compassion and understanding that melts the ice. Because the Flat Earther just desperately wanted to be special and find some real human connection. Since when is this a bad thing? Their method is not the best but who are we to judge? This is only a sad sign how much society is lacking better ways to find true human connections and flows in general.

Ok, so biology made usefulness always dominate objectivity and some people fall into the traps of tribalism which separates them from the actual truth. Is this the whole story? Sadly no. Because the worst danger to the world’s collective sanity is not Flat Earthers. It’s the untruths that most of us believe in. And here beauty plays a big part.

Beauty and its main channel of spreading, storytelling, is a part of many conspiracy theories, but never the central part. A Flat Earth and A Spherical Earth are both beautiful. Yes, if aliens ever visited Earth, it’s kind of beautiful and interesting. And if they didn’t it’s just boring. So we kind of… want to think they did. But they most probably didn’t, due to the vast distances in space and the fact that faster-than-light travel is almost certainly impossible.

This is a great example how arguments don’t help. Tell this to an aliens conspiracy theorist and they will say “but what if a super advanced civilization built a spaceship that can travel faster than light!”. Good luck explaining that the speed of light is the speed of causality in The Universe and not just some arbitrary limit like the speed of sound and that it’s built into the fabric of reality itself. You just made the alien-supporting belief stronger, not weaker! Because in order to counter your truth that endangers their core value (beauty), they generated more beauty in order to shore up (super advanced, beautiful spaceship). And just like that they are more convinced than before in the aliens story. This is not the way.

Still beauty plays a role but is not central to most conspiracy theories (same with religions). Finding human connection, feeling loved in a community rather than suffering alone is the main drive.

Unfortunately the central danger to truth is not from the Flat Earth model we explored:

Non-truth = Clearly untrue + Useful to the self + May or may not be beautiful. 

It’s from this model:

Mystery danger = Partially true + Often useful to a group/tribe + Usually beautiful

This Mystery danger has a great name. It’s called Bullshit.

Let’s break this down.

At least partially true – Flat Earth and similar movement can never get big as there are strong headwinds – too many people outright reject the concept and by extension, the people in the group. The environment is hostile, even if there is some beauty involved.

If there is partial truth, we can convince people in our cause with arguments that are actually true and of course from those we’ll choose the most easily verifiable. When we mix them with playing to people’s emotions and sprinkle in some beauty (usually in the form of stories) we have a very persuasive mix.

Often useful to a group/tribe – People are social beings that biologically want to fit in a group (their tribe). The tribe has an energy and behavior of its own and the simple goals to survive against threats and be competitive. Therefore it needs, as Tim Urban says, a “glue” – a strong identity-building story that unites the people in the tribe. United tribes are powerful and competitive, which makes them grow in size over time, as they recruit people from less competitive tribes using brute force, coercion or incentives.

The uniting story of the tribe has to be emotional and beautiful in order to be sticky enough to work. There is no incentive for truth in it. In theory it can be true but as the world is chaotic and has a ton of potential emotional and beautiful stories of which very few are actually true, in practice the “glue” story is almost never true. It usually has grains of truth though as this gives it extra strength. Bullshit is very rarely a complete lie.

Let’s take an example of Bullshit and analyze it. The Communism ideology in its historically most prevalent Marxism–Leninism variation.

Communism has grains of truth in critiquing capitalism for it’s exploitative nature and frequent free-market failures, such as the very expensive healthcare in the US. But it completely ignores what human nature is all about. It ignores what motivates people and their appetite for corruption when they end up in a position of power in an otherwise scarce environment. It provides fuel for one of the most destructive human emotions – envy. On a more structural level, centrally planned economies turn out to be a disaster in the long term. So Communism as a theory is at best partially true.

Marxism–Leninism generates a huge tribe of people and attempts at brainwashing them into worshiping it like a religion. Its Bullshit serves the interest of the tribe, not the individual communists.

And finally Marxism–Leninism has a very strong reliance on beauty. Imagine the utopia where everyone has everything, not even needing money any more! Brotherhood, freedom from exploitation and ultimate equality for all. Alas, after countless tries and 100+ millions dead and repressed, no one has come even close to the utopia. It’s all a lie. But a beautiful one!

If you think about it, Communism, Fascism, Populism and all other major hurdles for a well-governed democratic society are all variants of Bullshit.

So are all the companies that harm the world with their shitty products. Tobacco and gambling companies, Coca-Cola and McDonalds are all about Bullshit – they don’t outright lie that they are healthy – they just turn your attention away from the fact of how unhealthy they are by endless advertising playing on your emotional strings.

In a world with amazing access to information and still some authority carried by experts and scientists, outright lies are no longer a huge danger. Bullshit however, easier to create than debunk in the shallow, fast-paced digital world, thrives like there is no tomorrow. It’s an even more dangerous and insidious enemy of the truth because it survives much longer and is more resilient in the public discourse.

Bullshit is everywhere on every level. The bigger a system is (eg. the government or a big corporation), the more Bullshit it produces – unless the leadership is truly exceptional and highly dynamic (all bullshit actors are fired on the spot while honesty is rewarded) we eventually get into the following death spiral:

1. Bad incentives bring out the worst in people
2. The worst in people creates bad structure and rules
3. Bad structure and rules brings more bad incentives

Have you ever asked yourself how the fuck most small companies are very effective while most big companies, governments and institutions are not, despite huge and obvious advantages like economies of scale, easy access to partners, vendors and capital, government support, trust and stability, brand recognition and more collective industry experience?

We believe the number one reason is because:

• People working in big companies are separated into departments competing for spotlight and funding.
• People working in a government are separated into departments competing for spotlight and funding.
• People working in an institution are separated into departments competing for spotlight and funding.

When those departments go many levels deep, we have passive sabotage (doing nothing rather than proactively helping) of every person, team and department that is not strictly on our side in the fight for budget and recognition. Sooner or later the death spiral makes the environment so toxic in some departments that active sabotage also takes place.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it.

– Upton Sinclair (American novelist and social reformer)

People in large organizations get into a comfort zone, resist changes and improvements and equate their salary with survival. So they will get out of their way to sabotage anyone who jeopardizes their comfort and funding.

But wait, there is an example even worse. It’s when one huge rich organization offers a bunch of overpriced shitty services (typically IT or consulting) to another huge rich organization. Both organizations are just exploding with Bullshit and totally detached from reality.

Organization One has a shitty product but the best salespeople, high brand trust and budget for kickbacks and “corporate gifts” if needed.

Organization Two has day job bureaucrats, supported by clueless managers, making together a decision for millions of dollars without understanding how Bullshit sales works.

The result:

In September 2023 the city of Birmingham declared bankruptcy after 131 million GBP (!) were spent on Oracle accounting and HR software (!) that never properly worked (!), resulting in 70,000+ transaction errors. The city council could not monitor its own balance sheet. They ran out of money, announced it publicly and after a 5-month audit it’s still unclear how much they are in the red. Because Oracle.

This is where our world is going when we don’t fight for the truth!

There is one more huge generator of Bullshit – public perception of success.

We live in a chaotic world where adaptive people succeed by constantly adapting, which often includes ugly or unethical behavior. But once they are in the spotlight and are asked about their roots of success, they cannot afford to or simply don’t want to tell the full ugly story. So they tell a Bullshit story instead. Since those successful people are role models for millions, this Bullshit story causes a lot of actual harm by distorting people’s actions and expectations.

The picture became pretty bleak, biology is not on our side, social evolution creates mostly Bullshit, is there hope at all? Yes.

The hope is in you.

You have the potential to rise above the Bullshit and dare to fight for the truth. It’s not an easy fight. But it’s very fulfilling once you get going.

In order to make a difference, you have to understand the nature of the struggle between Truth and Bullshit.

Truth and Bullshit are not two sides of the same coin

Bullshit has a self-serving agenda for its group and is thus a directed force of influence. In this context what is Truth? Certainly not a force. Instead, it’s an ideal. An ideal does not directly engage in the evolutionary game – Truth will be there even if no one believes in it, so it’s not in the fight for survival like other ideas. Then in what fight is it? In none. It just is.

The Truth cannot fight for itself. We have to fight for it.

So the fight is actually between a very loose coalition of Bullshit-promoting groups (who also compete with each other directly) and Truth-promoting groups and individuals.

Since all of the participants in the fight are humans who have the strong biological attraction to any emotionally-serving fraction of the truth, the Bullshit coalition has been, is and (unless we totally reform our education system) will always be bigger. Big do not confuse bigger with stronger! Here is why we have a chance.

Remember Bullshit is not built to fight Truth which is a minority threat. The nemesis of any Bullshit group is another group with even stronger Bullshit! This does not mean closer or further from the truth but rather more uniting, more sticky and more beautiful. For the people trapped in a strong Bullshit story, objective truth on the matter is out of reach, making it irrelevant.

This is why in all countries with Marxism–Leninism the party immediately bans and represses organized religion. Why? Dangerous Bullshit utopia story competition!

The Truth team is much smaller but it has and has always had one main goal – fight the Bullshit. There are no multiple versions of the Truth so there is less infighting within the team. It’s much better prepared for the battle.

When the Truth team clashes hard with a member of the Bullshit coalition, it’s usually a contested win for the Truth team – some members of the Bullshit side start seeing through the fog and ditch the half-truths they were taught to believe. People leave questionable religions and extreme ideologies if they get disappointed enough. The problem is that new people join all the time.

A main problem with this dynamic is that team Truth is small and cannot monitor all the Bullshit that is forming everywhere in accordance with evolutionary forces. There is no prevention, only late partial damage control when a Bullshit story gets way out of hand. And if it’s very sticky and fills a psychological hole in the lives of people, like religion, it may stay with all the good and bad consequences.

In this model the big loose Bullshit coalition and the smaller group of elite fighters from team Truth reach a dynamic equilibrium. In modern times there is hope that both crowdsourced projects with no agenda like Wikipedia and the approaching AI revolution can scale the efforts of team Truth so they can engage in earlier mitigation or even prevention. There are some hopeful signs. The rise of populist politicians however is a huge warning for the existential danger that the spread of a single Bullshit story can have on society.

We’ll separate the rest into four parts:

1. Why fight for the truth in ourselves
2. How to fight for truth in ourselves
3. Why fight for the truth in others
4. How to fight for truth in others

Why we should dare fight biology for the truth in ourselves

It’s not that you win that much be being in team Truth. It’s more about how much we can lose ending up somewhere in the Bullshit coalition. There is no middle path. 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 lose touch with reality in some parts of our life which severely hinders our potential in The Game of Life where objectivity and understanding are the key to success.

But wait, if our beliefs are useful, is it important if they are true?

The thing about false beliefs is that they generate a ton of secondary false beliefs. Information is a network structure.

Useful beliefs do not generate secondary useful beliefs though. Why? Because most secondary beliefs are not nearly as useful anyway – this is built in the nature of belief usefulness itself which comes from flows.

The core useful beliefs are an extension of the core flows, statements like:

• Self-love is essential for good mental health
• Unconditional love is always good
• Long-term freedom is always beneficial

Now try to make a secondary belief out of those? Is it helpful to believe anything else about Self-love, Higher love or Long-term freedom? Not really. We already know everything we need to know about them. Flows go everywhere they need to by nature. Unlike logical structures they don’t need to be developed. They just are and it’s enough.

A belief may be false, yet marginally useful eg. “Carrying this charm will protect me from harm” may help with your peace of mind without influencing the chances of harm. However, 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 though by detaching us from reality in the long term, by creating non-truthful structures in our brain. The fact that it was useful will make other false and questionably useful beliefs more attractive in the future. This one is a slippery slope.

All of this explains why we never evolved to care about the effects of secondary beliefs. In the Stone Age life was simple, short and violent. There was no space and time for secondary beliefs and they did not affect us nearly as much as they do today. In the modern age, in a complicated world where we live long lives and compete in more abstract fields for success and happiness rather than survival, secondary beliefs have a huge influence.

Imagine you’re a US factory worker who loses their middle class job in Pennsylvania due to outsourcing and globalization. The useful thing to believe is that you can always reinvent yourself, you can learn new skills, you can succeed against the odds. The useful thing to believe is that fighting for the wellbeing of your family and community in times of crisis makes you a hero, giving you every reason to live your live with fulfillment and pride.

However, a populist politician from the Bullshit coalition throws a special Pennsylvania rally to specifically send you the clear message that the politicians from the other party are to blame. Those greedy globalist neoliberal sociopath MFs outsourced everything to China and Mexico and left you in the dust.

On the surface, this is close to the truth. However, there are pieces of truth intentionally left out (this is simply how capitalism works!) and the main problem is there is an agenda, a direction of emotional manipulation. Remember, Truth does not have an agenda. It just is. Once there is a direction, an agenda, a story, once emotions take over, it doesn’t matter what the initial percentage of truth was because secondary beliefs take over. The fact that our jobs got outsourced to Mexico distorts our beliefs about Mexico, including about emigrants coming from there, even though evidently they are not the ones who “stole” our outsourced jobs. Same with China. Same with Globalization. When you get cheap imported goods, globalization is great. But when we lose our job, fuck globalization! When huge corporations like Amazon exploit hundreds of thousands of expendable workers to support same day deliveries, it’s great! Where are all the people boycotting Amazon? When we are the expendable ones – not so great anymore. Everything is now distorted due to one interaction with the Bullshit coalition where we gave them more trust than deserved. Because they didn’t give you a story useful to you! They only pretended to. In reality they gave you a story, politically useful to them so they can get your vote and increase the power of their group. And make no mistake, they did this in full cold-blodded conscience.

The saddest part is you already had a useful and true and beautiful story about it. The “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. Yet the populist politician dared to come with their Bullshit and replaced this story with the one in which you are the victim. They made you weak, gave you something/someone to love and to hate and moved to the next city and next state in order to do the same again. And they made sure to run TV and web ads in order to reinforce everything.

Do you see how not respecting the Truth highly enough backfires? How not daring to fight may send your life in a whole other direction?

The worse the intentions around you, the more Truth you need inside to survive and thrive.

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. As long as we’re coping using Bullshit, they will provide it in unlimited quantities. So we have to constantly resist.

Truth is your shield against Bullshit. In this fakery-dominated world, you cannot survive unscathed without one. This is why it’s worth investing time, energy and focus to forge this shield.

At first sight this doesn’t look like a very productive investment of your limited resources. To forge a big-ass expensive shield just for this? But as usual in a vibe system, everything truly great creates endless positive ripples. Think about it this way:

• In order to be successful in The Game of Life you have to understand it, to know how it all clicks.
• In order the understand the world you need the shield of Truth, otherwise everything is distorted due to the Bullshit everywhere.
• If no one else has this shield, yet you do, this gives you a huge competitive advantage!

The fact that forging this shield is not biologically programmed into us and takes resisting our natural instincts holds everyone back. But it doesn’t have to hold you back.

In fact once you know your biology is the problem, it becomes easier. Most people somehow assume they are attracted biologically to the Truth while in fact they are not, leading to wrong “brute force” approaches. Once you know your true allies (flows and the intelligence-defining power of prediction), you can turn the tables around. Biology is in the enemy camp, very powerful but also very predictable. You can trick it using the power of flows and even its own desires. Don’t feel like learning science? How about the pretty girl in science class you want to hang out with? Ok, now you do. It took three seconds and one strategic thought to commit yourself to a good direction. It’s tricky but don’t lie to yourself about it being hard. It’s not.

Ok, we’ve answered the Why. Time for practice! How can we resist the strong manipulation of the Bullshit coalition?

How to fight biology and Bullshit with Truth on the line

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 on a low level leads to intuitive patterns forming. We’re mostly filling blank spaces with structure for now. Any data points are welcome.

Slowly kids start to reason. And with reasoning comes filtering. Maybe they shouldn’t copy everything? Maybe some beliefs are actually useless or even harmful? Maybe some data is biased or wrong? How do we intellectually differentiate? This is when young humans encounter the all-important concept of trust.

Or do they? Yes and no. The above is both very true and totally wrong. Because there are two different types of trust, making it a weird type of 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. This is why babies feel emotional trust in their very first year, before they can walk or talk. This shows that emotional trust is built into us at a very deep subconscious level.

Babies are very far away from being able to interpret complex knowledge networks. Toddlers mostly copy and don’t filter. And even if older kids wanted to filter, they would not have the intuition and experience to do it for complex fields such as politics or economics. So intellectual trust is a very adult feeling that requires a fully developed brain and is boosted by education and diverse experience, if the latter is not distorted by emotions.

Now you see why the way we talk about trust is always wrong. We never differentiate. Those two types have literally nothing in common! So we’re always talking about one of them, with a word representing both, which creates a mess of epic proportions.

Emotional trust you can feel for your grandma and hug her.

Intellectual trust you can feel for your sysadmin to fix you operating system.

Now imaging letting your grandma fix your OS and hugging your sysadmin!

WTF are we doing here!?

Trust in its two varieties is literally 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 (totally different) types of trust are fundamental human expressions of life’s core forces and we thought it’s a great idea to merge them in the same word to create what… an explosion of confusion!?!?

Of all the fuck-ups of modern language, I feel this one is having the worst consequences. But why did this happen this way?

When we evolved while living in tribes, emotional trust was everything. It was the bonding force that made humans the masters of cooperation and eventually the hegemon force of the planet.

But where was intellectual trust? Well, nowhere. People were not really “intellectual” in the modern sense. Everyone in the tribe had access to roughly the same information so there were no true “erudite” folks. There were little-to-no situations where you would trust someone else for information you could not later verify yourself. There were situations where everyone knew the objective answer of a question after some time (does bison meat spoil in the heat? – we’ll know tomorrow!) and situations where no one knew the objective answer (what’s the deal with lightnings? – we’ll never know for sure! Let’s make a God story about it).

There was no “I read on Social media that Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s friend’s balls got swollen after a Covid vaccine shot and totally believe her since she’s hot and famous“ shit going on. And I wish I was making this one up. I don’t know who the lead expert on Covid vaccines is. But I’m pretty sure the friend’s cousin does not deserve my intellectual trust and the data point of his supposedly swollen balls can be safely ignored. This is a key skill – to reduce the noise by ignoring everything that can be safely ignored. Ignoring it also helps with another huge problem with the surrounding noise – how to stay focused.

(If you haven’t guessed by now, social media is a big part of the problem. Here are some great ideas for improvement but we will not dive in as reforming social media is not your direct responsibility. You are responsible only for reforming yourself. Social media makes this harder but you can still succeed).

Let’s recap. Emotional and intellectual trust are both very important in the modern world.

• Emotional trust as a skill will always be critical for our survival and wellbeing as it keeps us out of malicious people’s way.
• Intellectual trust as a skill is essential to fight your way as close to the objective truth as possible. It is the only tool to find your way in an ocean of information with varying quality.

Many people have imbalances in their levels of emotional trust, mostly due to past trauma and genes. This is a subject for professional psychologists and therapists and out of the scope of this article.

Let’s focus on intellectual trust as:

The main skill you need to access only the best, least biased information about anything, is which source(s) to intellectually trust.

First let’s see what happens if like most people you don’t differentiate intellectual from emotional trust. This means that you simply apply only the emotional trust skill. As both biology and evolution developed it, it’s your 100% default option. Not a great start.

An even worse addition is the very powerful Confirmation bias. This means that once you believe in something, you are subconsciously attracted to sources that confirm it and subconsciously avoid ones that reject 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 and they can pour Bullshit into your brain with the big funnel. You will not only not resist but you’ll love it and Confirmation bias will make sure you will not change your mind easily. Populists (both wings have them) know this so they brazenly don’t care about the truth anymore at all. Politics is now about emotions more than ever in recent memory. Here is an example of the shift – after Trump admitted of the “Grab ’em by the pussy” talk in late 2016 everyone presumed him finished. In every previous US election cycle this would have been game and match. But they were all wrong – the game itself had changed. (Most politicians on the US left are also full of Bullshit, not picking sides here. The system itself is broken).

Bullshit plays a central role in sales and advertising, especially of addictive and harmful products. Every Coca-Cola ad is essentially Bullshit, meant to trigger your emotional trust and draw your attention away from the health effects of drinking anything with such an amount of sugar in it.

We will never be able to stop political and corporate manipulation from existing. It’s what they do due to evolutionary forces. Our job is to see right through it and not be influenced one bit. How do we train this skill, ideally in a way that would make the training beneficial in itself? There is a perfect playground – the conversations with people we care about.

The communication between politicians/advertisers and us is via one-to-many broadcast channels such as TV, media and online ads. We cannot easily respond to them or challenge them. This makes us feel a bit powerless and thus demotivated. But we are very motivated when we talk with our loved ones in symmetric conversations where we exchange not just information but also emotions.

If you think about it, another less visible but highly consequential arena where Truth clashes with Bullshit, are private and small group conversations where stories are the most powerful tool of influence. Stories, told in private by people, whom we emotionally trust, are the ultimate influence. This is where you can make a difference in building your shield of Truth. Because this influence from well-meaning people may involuntary be… Bullshit. Still, the fact that they are well-meaning allows safe space for vulnerability in these conversations. And if you’re new to this, only in such a space can you overcome your instincts for the first time and differentiate between emotional and intellectual trust so you can also focus on the latter.

How to turn the tables on how Truth forms in us using intellectual trust

First we have to get this out of the way. Emotional trust is biological and will always be way more powerful than your intellectual one. So, before the differentiation becomes an instinct built into you, you may have to consciously remind yourself that Truth and emotions belong to different categories, require different approaches and mixing them up is usually very counterproductive, both internally and in relationships. Fighting couples know this well. If during an argument one person talks facts like “You did this!” and the other emotions like “You made me feel like this!”, they are talking different languages, just unconstructively hurting each other and should pause until someone switches the language and then continue talking in the same one (either facts or emotions only).

So the master truth-searcher tunes down their emotions. Except one. It’s hard to express in words but we may simply call it “Love for Truth itself”. It’s a flow.

The Love for Truth has no representation in nature or the animal kingdom – everything is about usefulness there. It’s a distinctly human feature. In people who have 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, technology and simply reducing the harm from the Bullshit. They feel the value of Truth for everyone and thus fighting for the Truth becomes their form of love to the world.

Think of the journalists in war zones and authoritarian countries, who risk their lives just to tell the truth to the world. They have this kind of love and are to be admired for it.

Since Truth is an ideal and intellectual trust is more of a method than a driving force, we need an actual force to motivate and push us in order to pursue objectivity (nothing ever happens unless a force is involved).

The Love for Truth is this force. But beware, it’s not a given that it will combine with intellectual trust! Some people have crazy Love for Truth but only work with emotional trust. Which means they will likely end up in random places of the Bullshit coalition despite their noble intentions.

Both Love for Truth and intellectual trust require that you have more flows and less boxes in your life. Love is a flow in itself so that’s obvious but why would a structure-based intellectual method require flows? The reason is a very common coping mechanism practiced by people who people lack flows.

The thing is, people cope with all of their problems using various boxes. People are the most rewarding “boxes” so latching onto specific people is the most typical coping mechanism – is this case one person (typically parent, partner or kid but I suspect Parasocial relationships will play a bigger and bigger role in this) becomes our “savior box”, our master in life. In this common situation we explode with emotional trust since we basically surrender our freedom to this person. Whatever intellectual trust we have to spread around is sadly gone.

If we have strong flows we feel no need to overattach ourselves to a single person. This reduces emotional trust to normal levels and leaves space for intellectual one.

I bet by now you are no longer surprised how team Truth is such a small force. Damn, it’s so hard to circumvent biology, its traps are everywhere!

The fight for Truth may feel like a lost battle, so many pre-requirements to even be able to start! We need flows, Love for Truth, intellectual trust skills, good education, diverse experience, not to be heavily indoctrinated in a Bullshit group already… Is it even possible?

However, it’s not a lost battle. In fact it’s the end of a battle already almost won.

You don’t have many battles in life. You have one. Everything is connected to everything.

• You want to avoid cultish Bullshit groups anyway.
• You want to have good education and diverse experience anyway.
• You need flows anyway since otherwise you will not be happy, creative or successful.
• You want to have meaning anyway and if you do, Love for Truth comes next.
• You want to have intellectual trust skills anyway – not just for you but in order to help others with their quest for the Truth.

Everything you need to forge the Truth shield, you need anyway. It’s a cherry on top of the cake of your self-improvement. And like all cherries, it comes last but is sweetest.

If I have all of those, how do I find the Truth?

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 approach in messy situations with a lot of Bullshit floating around.

The direct approach is great for simpler questions with a definitive true answer. For example “has mankind really been to the moon or was it faked?” or “is climate change real and caused by human activity”.

Even with the direct approach you can never be 100% sure about most things. Can the moon landing be faked? Surely. Was it though? I’m pretty sure it wasn’t. Why? Incentives and probabilities.

With the direct approach you:

1. See the likely truth;
2. See if it matches the incentives of the players involved;
3. See if any alternative is probable in comparison;

Let’s see this for the moon landing:

1. Everyone says we went to the Moon and there is no major reason to believe everyone lies in our faces;
2. Going to the Moon for real was obviously very hard, yet possible. Spending tons of money and not actually doing it was not playing in anyone’s hand. Leave the Soviets to be the first and potentially expose our fraud so we become the world’s laughing stock? Not smart.
3. Imagine what would it take to fake this. The Apollo program had 400,000 people working on it in some form at its peak. Imagine the insane planning and execution you needed to lie to, coerce or hide the truth from every single one of them. A single person spilling the beans to the media and it’s game over. And people would have emotional (I worked so hard on this!) and material (every newspaper would pay for such a story!) incentive to do exactly that. Folks talk to each other too. Who in their right mind would even try to pull this off and why? Impossible – no. Extremely improbable? Definitely.

Climate change is a similar case. Could all the scientists that agree that it’s real and human-caused be wrong or coerced? All thousands of them? Yes, but the chances are so slim that for all practical reasons it’s a not. Climate change is real.

The direct approach requires clear data that cannot be easily manipulated. So it works best in exact science.

Sometimes the direct approach is possible but impractical, as it would take you years of digging for grains of verified truth in an unfavorable environment where the actors are biased while you’re not exactly an expert. Let’s take everyone’s favorite rabbit hole – Covid vaccines.

I did not prepare in any special way to present this topic to you right now. I have pieces of unverified information like most of you. A good thing is that a few years passed and we can now look at this less tribally and with some intuition about what the fuck actually happened. So I will just write what I think based on my limited information and if our fact checker finds any major errors, I’ll just delete all of this and choose an easier example.

Let’s start with the basics. Covid is a weird virus. Some people have a very mild illness or none at all. Others are way more vulnerable. There is a sizable death toll – much less than the 1918 Spanish flu but much more than the usual flu. There was a definite incentive to create a working vaccine.

I’m generally pro-vaccines. They have helped eradicate or nearly eradicate many terrible diseases like Smallpox, Measles and Polio.

Of course like many things in medicine, vaccines are made largely by trial and error. This means that they may end up ineffective or with dangerous side effects during trials. And this is where the first red flag appears. It has happened on multiple occasions that pharmaceutical companies, driven by greed, release on the market vaccines with known problems, who end up being administered on millions of people before being withdrawn.

Still, if you draw the bottom line, vaccines have saved much more lives and wellbeing than they have taken away. It’s not even comparable.

But Covid was a different beast. There were factors not present (at the same time) for previous vaccines:

• Urgency for everyone involved
• Lack of enough scientific data about the virus and its effects
• Lack of data to predict how the virus will evolve and mutate
• Huge opportunity for profit by pharma companies
• In times of crises governments have to make compromises. The problem is they don’t know which ones.
• Governments had to save face for a botched first response and were ready to spend a lot on vaccines
• Since Covid became very political even for things such as masks, scientists and experts lost their freedom to pursue and share their findings when they were not in line with the government.
• There was social media censorship for discerning views on vaccines and other Covid topics.
• Data was in the hands of governments and pharma companies and what/how was shared could be biased.
• Governments definitely used the lockdown situation to increase control over citizens and reduce their freedoms.
• Many people’s economic futures were on the line because of lockdowns.
• Supply chains were under huge pressure, further creating shortages, inflation and anxiety.
• Populist opposition politicians were ruthlessly attacking the government over the unpopular lockdowns.
• Every crackpot with a social media following used the situation to spread random, (dis)information and make their voice heard.
• Russian propaganda used their existing propaganda online assets (accounts, bots and processes), created mostly for Ukraine-themed disinformation, to score some cheap points by spreading Covid confusion too.

In this free-for-all muddy fight for influence the stakes were high and everyone was all in. And who defended the interest of ordinary people to know the truth? In most countries, no one. Some scientists had things to say but the political influence on everything Covid was so heavy that you couldn’t know how many others wanted to say something but couldn’t.

All in all, a very low quality, distorted chaos of conflicting data for the ordinary person

What can we be sure of?

1. Pharma companies made a ton of money by overpricing vaccines. So much that in fact huge lobbying has surely taken place and potential corruption is very much possible. When tens of billions are on the line and an urgent decision is needed, conversations move behind closed doors.
2. The vaccines did not have common and severe short-term side effects. They were basically safer than Covid for most people. Long-term side-effects are harder to estimate as the psychological shock of the lockdowns and the stress of economic insecurity also contribute to long-term health issues and they happened at the same time as vaccines. Various studies suggest everything is fine but again, given the huge politization of these decisions, no government study can allow itself to be completely impartial, so we unfortunately cannot be 100% sure.
3. The vaccines were not super effective either. Vaccinated people still spread the virus and the “herd immunity” take turned out to be a complete fabrication. Still vaccinated people seemed to have a less severe illness when contracting Covid which is a significant benefit.

To recap – in most cases we got an overpriced vaccine that was produced fast, kind of worked, made pharma companies rich, was used by the governments to increase control over the population (by rules and certificates, etc.) and bitterly divided society because of the many flaws of the implementation of the whole thing.

Was it all worth it? Frankly, I don’t know. Short term, lives were saved. But the trust, unity and freedom we lost long-term may hurt society more than we imagine. The process could have been more transparent and just better.

As you can see, the direct approach failed and turned into an indirect approach mid-process.

We didn’t get to know the exact truth. We lack good data and everything leads to grey areas. Does this make the whole process useless? Certainly no.

We train our intellectual trust in such complex cases. Whoever bails out and calls the grey black or white is not to be intellectually trusted much anymore. We need people who appreciate the nuances of this mess.

We learn more about complex systems. Governments like Australia, which were all about freedom and human rights, suddenly showed their true colors with their harsh lockdowns. Many facades fall in high-stake times of crises so along the biased data you get unique and fresh perspectives, although often not pretty.

We train ourselves to be patient, not arrive at premature conclusions and not fall into the trap of tribal emotions. I dislike the greedy pharma companies as much as anyone. Were they greedy in this situation? Undoubtedly. Were they evil like Purdue Pharma were when they were knowingly creating the US opioid crisis? It’s unclear but more likely the answer is no.

And if you believe the vaccines contain microchips, think about it – this requires a stupendous level of secret cooperation, much more than for faking the Moon landing. Is it possible for someone even as rich and powerful as Bill Gates to pull this off and keep it a secret? Simply no. The government may want to microchip us – I suppose they do as every system strives for more control. They just don’t have the resources (trust, money, organization) to pull it off, actually they are very far away from having them. And to pull it off in secret is hundreds of time harder.

The Covid pandemic was a very human experience that showed the best and the worst of what we’re capable of. Even if we don’t know what happened exactly, having some intuition, some feel of the truth may help us in future similar situations. And it’s worth the dare to get closer. Of course devoting months of your life to go down a single rabbit hole is not productive for most people. But taking the data points that you already have and arranging them in an intuitive framework that resembles the truth as much as possible, is always worth it.

After these examples, here are the main principles to guide your intellectual trust. Everyone may try to pass as an expert so we need some principles to differentiate fake experts from proven ones. And remember, always combine trusting others with doing your own research if practical! Here are a bonus 11 ways to fuck up related to objectivity in business/investment and managing FOMO.

Also a word of caution about podcasts and influencers, especially regarding picking guests, controversies, paid sponsorships and affiliate deals.

The rest is pattern recognition.

If hundreds of proven experts say the opposite of one supposedly proven one on a given issue, the latter one should no longer be considered proven. For example the inventor of the PCR test (which hugely advanced medicine) won a Nobel prize. He then turned out to be a HIV-denier and spread dangerous propaganda about the virus. Nothing is a given with intellectual trust, even Nobel prizes are not a guarantee.

Moreover, scientists:

• Can be biased and “sell a story” in order to receive funding.
• Can work on useless projects in order to publish papers and receive funding.
• Can turn out to be potential frauds altogether (more + in general) (although rare).
• Can do great work only for journalists to mess up representing it in the media.

I want to stress that science is our best attempt at objective truth despite the above shortcomings. In general, science is to be trusted, just no system and no group of humans is perfect.

Fake experts also don’t lie all the time. They advance their agenda which, like most Bullshit, will usually contain lies and truth. So they may try to blend in, keep this in mind.

Finally, ordinary deluded people and professional propagandists intermix so much much in the Bullshit coalition that it’s hard to tell which is which. This should not be of major concern to you – while knowing people’s actual intentions is good for your intuition, once someone does not deserve your intellectual trust, whether they are deluded or malicious is of secondary importance for truth-finding as their actions will be similar in either case.

Now that we’re all sorted out, let’s see how others are doing in their struggle against the Bullshit coalition.

Why fight for the truth in others?

If fighting for the truth in us is so hard it’s actually a dare, a leap over biological hurdles most people won’t even attempt, is it even possible to help others in this regard?

Yes and it’s worth it. 

Imagine someone lost in the Bullshit coalition. They are blissfully unaware how far from objectivity they actually are. They feel no discomfort. There is no biological force that can bring them closer to the truth unless their Bullshit tribe disintegrates and they have to search for another. Even then the odds they will get closer to the truth are slim. They only pretend to care about the truth. What they really crave is human connection and acceptance of who they are.

In a world where we never intervene to help such people, most of them will remain in the deluded state for the rest of their lives. Intervening is very inefficient but it’s better than doing nothing. Because if you bring one person closer to the truth, you changed a life. Not only that but this person will share the truth with others, vote, spend and invest money more consciously. The chances are slim but the stakes are high.

We want to live in a world with more Truth and less Bullshit.

How to fight for the truth in others?

The answer to any hard problem in life always comes from flows. Unconditional love, understanding and compassion are essential to building emotional trust. Without emotional trust no one will give a flying fuck about your arguments – on the contrary, you might just make their beliefs more extreme. Even with emotional trust you’re in for a long uphill battle.

Letting go of any structure is psychologically hard. Nothing can really come in its place – you may have the complete objective truth but for the one you’re helping this is a foreign structure they instinctively reject.

Stronger flows will help reduce the influence of these box structures and open space for new intuition about the topic. Never apply any pressure even if you’re 100% sure you’re correct about where the truth lies. Your goal is to open space for consideration, 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 safe space. They need it for any kind of change to happen.

If you feel pushback, the act of pushback means you are actively making the problem worse. When people get defensive, they harden their beliefs. Don’t dwell on it (we all fuck up), pause or change the approach to a more gentle one. Most people expect you to push back on their pushback but you won’t – surprise them and show your unconditional live instead. These asymmetrical actions are what melts the ice.

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 and care, no matter how convincing the facts are.

Good luck. You’ll need it!

A personal note from the author

This has been an emotional one to write. Although I have been raised by my engineer parents to respect truth and science above all, I have been in my own deep rabbit holes of conspiracy theories and complete ignorance. I even watched two Alex Jones documentaries a long time ago! At age 21 I had zero idea of how the world works due to lack of proper education (a better alternative) or mentors and having the focus on becoming a professional chess player. I was often humbled by people who understood the world much better than me without this helping me at all. Somehow my emotions and feelings of inadequacy stood in the way of improvement…

When I found flows in nature and higher love things improved a lot. I became a better listener and learner. I had to start from scratch but I started loving the process of searching for the truth and then sharing it with people. Truth was no longer the destination. It was the journey! Now I only needed time. 17 years later, I have a decent understanding of science and how the world works. And the journey continues!

I could never explain to myself why did I watch conspiracy documentaries though. This did not bring me the much needed human connection – I was watching them alone at home. I was never in any such community. What was the mechanism? I was no longer in the rabbit hole but I had no idea what made it so attractive to me. That is until I found this beyond brilliant quote:

“The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is actually chaotic. The truth is that it is not The Iluminati, or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or the Gray Alien Theory.

The truth is far more frightening – Nobody is in control.

The world is rudderless.”

Alan Moore

Conspiracies are simply a coping mechanism. If you overcome the fear, you won’t need to cope. This is where you should start your search for the truth. Dare to face your fears. Dare to be vulnerable. Dare to love. I did.

In loving memory of George Carlin, our best exposer of Bullshit.

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