I want the truth

"Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?" Anyone with a passing familiarity with the legal system as seen in the world of film and TV will recognise those words as one of the cornerstones of a trial (when I first head them spoken in a real trial I had to stifle a giggle; I was half expecting the defendant to bark "You can't handle the truth" at the court clerk...). It's a ritual formula that assumes there is a definitive story behind whatever chain of events led to some poor b*stard standing in the dock. I've always assumed the same; that most events in life have a clear beginning, middle, and an end. And there is always one version of the story that is the pure, unvarnished truth. But now I'm not so sure. I've just finished a relationship that, although it was unquestionably the right thing to do, I didn't hugely want to end. I did so because of my obsession with knowing 'the truth'. So this seems as good a time as any to ask if there really is any such thing as a universal truth.

For example, think of any event witnessed by yourself and some of your friends. If I were to ask each and every one of you what happened at that event, would your stories be exactly the same? Of course they wouldn't; unless you'd had time to get your stories straight then everyone would give a slightly different version (I once sat in on police interviews with 3 clients accused of burglary. Their stories matched identically. Right down to the exact words used in answer to the questions. Astoundingly, the police didn't believe them. Mind you, I was their solicitor, and neither did I). Does that mean that one of you is telling the truth and the others are all lying? Well, perhaps it does (I'm sure we've all been guilty of embellishing a story), but I think it more likely that all of you will promise faithfully that you are giving me the truth.

So what does that mean? That we're a race of chronic liars (or, to use the correct name for a group of liars, lawyers)? Well, I like to display a little more faith in my fellow man, so I'm going to say that it does not (though if we really are all predisposed towards lying, that's probably another fib). What I think it does demonstrate is that the truth, far from always being something immutable and fixed in stone, is a little more flexible than we may have thought. The truth varies according to who it was that witnessed the event, and what their perception of it was.

Okay; that sounds like abstract bumslop of the worst kind so I'll explain myself a little more. The best place to see that the truth varies depending on your own perceptions is, perversely, politics. Usually, the wide and varied political spectrum is split into two for ease of identifying where one's basic sympathies are; left wing and right wing (or Liberal and Conservative). It is rare indeed that you'll find any sort of agreement between these two sides (mainly because the Conservatives want to preserve all the existing evils and injustices of the world. Liberals want to replace them with an entirely new set of evils and injustices), and you will see this being reflected in the media. There are left wing papers (The Guardian, The Mirror) and right wing (The Times, The Mail). Generally speaking they report on much the same stories. But the reports are rather different to one another.

Take the recent and continuing war in Iraq. Should you read the Mail (assuming you can find news about the war in between the pages and pages of jingoistic, anti-immigrant bile) , then the invasion wasn't just necessary, it was an imperative. It was about freeing a nation from a tyrant. The subsequent steady stream of dead soldiers and civilians is regrettable but shouldn't affect our resolve to bring freedom to the Iraqi people. If however you read the Guardian, then the war is nothing more than a grab for resources by the Americans. The soldiers dying every day are evidence that the Iraqi people don't want the kind of freedom offered to them by an invading army. The indisputable fact is that Iraq was invaded. Yet here are two wildly different versions of just why it happened, and what the result is.

I have my own bias; I'm more inclined to find the left wing version of events more to my liking. And I can produce all manner of reasons and justifications as to why I believe it that are, in my mind, unassailable. Yet I've spoken to people who are equally as adamant that the political right is, well, right. And they (well...some of them) can produce completely valid facts and figures that would seem to prove that they are correct and I am mistaken (and what with my temper, mistaken at the top of my voice). How can this be? Well, mainly because we look for the facts that back up our beliefs and then do our best to either ignore those tricky points that debunk our opinions, or we look for more facts to make those troublesome opposing ideas seem like naively held beliefs at best, lies at worst.

Of course, I'm just talking about people who are able to articulate just why they hold the beliefs they do, and why they believe in one version of events rather than another. I'm excluding entirely another category of people; those screeching idiots who are only able to shout down an opposing view. I'm inclined to believe that these people are not remotely interested in the truth, be it universal or not. Being too stupid to have any actual beliefs of their own, they are interested only in one thing; being seen to be right. Happily, these people are incredibly easy to humiliate into silence; try pressing them on specific facts and watch them dissolve into a red-faced, teary-eyed mess reduced to ranting "You're wrong!" ad infinitum. Unfortunately, an awful lot of these type of people seem to hold fairly important positions in society, and so it means we actually give credence to the menstrual waste that they laughably refer to as their version of the truth.

As a side note, if I had to pick one of the many insultingly idiotic arguments used by this group of people to justify why their blinkered Me-Muppetry cannot be disproved by any available facts as the worst, it would have to be "The media is biased towards the Liberals/Conservatives (delete according to political affiliation), so they will never report facts that prove what I say is right. Not that they have to, because I'm right and I know I am. And if you disagree, you're an idiot". These are always the same people who will cheerfully refer to newspaper articles that support whatever they're braying out as proof of how clever they are. Funnily, they only accuse the media of bias when they produce something that disagrees with them, but I digress.

What I'm driving at in this little rant is that we cannot expect to get a nice, neat version of events that is the undisputed truth. Usually, an event happens. Then different people give their different perceptions of what happened. We then have to look at those different perceptions and make up our own minds as to where the truth lies. As a race, we seem inclined to look for something that fits the 'story' structure; we look for explanations that have a clearly defined beginning, middle, and end. The fact that our lives rarely fit the storybook mould doesn't seem to bother us; we expect the rest of the world to do so. So it's not really the truth we look for, but the story that we're most inclined to hear.

But of course, that's just my perception of the truth. Yours could be completely different.