Socien's Blog

The reason we always run away from the truth is it projects an image we are not willing to take. So, we instead live opposing the reality and its requirements. We run from the truth through, and not sorely:

• Choosing dignity over freedom: Being concerned about outward images we project to the society around us even if achieving so is against what’s required to attain our happiness and progress.
• Choosing to classify former glories and liabilities as assets: Those days we have been on top of the competition, and won a fight against our bullies, and assets that are in essence liabilities. This comes with attachment, “My first salary bought this car”.

I read Plato: The Last Days of Socrates,  a translation by H. Tedennick and H. Tarrant of Plato’s Euthyphro, Apology, Crito and Phaedo. Socrates’ approach to problems in life, in his conversation Euthyphro challenged me to isolate a problem from problems. Up to now the sophist’s approach is what I think to be the best I can do to find what my best version of the truth.

I rewatched an Episode of Young Sheldon in which her mom made references to the possibility of her giving up religion altogether. Sheldon was a genius and the kind of person to attempt a scientific explanation at all things. But this time he cautioned her mom to reconsider the possibility of a Supreme being. Yes, gravity exists that’s a fact that can be scientifically proven. But what makes it to be just right? Not more or less to tip us off balance and render our existence impossible.

Distinct from my failure to set problems in my life, the fear of invalidating what I feel that I represent is a reason I keep running from the truth. I feel that deep down my destiny is to become a secular industrialist. I should be one source of salaries instead of a destination. Thus, in the past, I suffered unnecessarily just because I couldn’t opt for a salary just for a few years as a means to raise capital and earn a living.

The other way to know the bigger truth, is to mute what you think you know so that you can welcome more of what you don’t know better. Of one of his mentors Sextus, Marcus Aurelis comments that he was one who “could express appreciation without noisy display, […] possess[ing] much knowledge without ostentation.”

Possessing knowledge, that is an abstract concept from which the truth can be based, is one thing. What you do with it is another. You can use it to win arguments as if you are in a court, a thing which Platonism dismisses from the evidence that indicates that the truth have been said.

Now thanks to what we know we are already in argument. That argument may not be for our senses to hear of see. But it is there once knowledge exist. This is why we want freedom of speech so badly. We want it not because they feel they must say something but must win an argument. Each one of us wants to have his world view to rank above all.

Winning an argument is having what you believe in taken as the truth. You can win one without taking it to anyone. Here is an example: I came to think that that the education system was failing me. There was none to challenge me as I read books and pondered on it. I then consciously build a knowledge system that was sufficient enough to prove that the education system is broke. I came to believe that the education system is broke. The building of a new belief other than the one that have been planted in you while growing up is winning an argument; one that is a contest between the new and the mindset that was set before.

We are somehow clueless on what to call the truth. What you believe in is the truth.  Definitely! What someone else believes is nothing but lies to you. But somehow you may not find progress until you borrow some lies, and live in them for a short time or entirely. It is may be true to your people and to you that ethnic group B is bad. But what’s true to group B is that they are a good people. So it is still good to borrow their truth which is a lie to you and coexist with group B. Peace is found in dissolving half of the old truth and absorbing half of the new lies and see them at an angle you never thought you should.