The trouble with truth

Is we don't like it very much. These days we prefer lies, half truths, opinions and crackpot ideas. Trump won in America because people didn't want to hear truths, they wanted to buy into his very well crafted distortions of reality that suited their own prejudices. I think you'll find that a very good way of winning elections or referenda. Like when they said if we left the EU there'd be 350 million quid a week left over to re-boot an ailing NHS. Sounded great, problem was it wasn't true. Who cares? The public bought it and look what happened.

Last weekend I spent a very pleasant weekend at an old country house in north Wales which is said to be haunted. At breakfast one of my fellow students announced she was witness to a haunting event: at 3 AM she watched while her door handle was turned. I was probably a bit rude. An American, I first pointed out to her that her country folk have not been the most rigid adherents of truth lately. Then I followed that up with reminding her that deploying Occam's razor, a principle which states that the simplest explanation for any given phenomenon is probably the correct one, it was rather more likely that a drunk student tried her door handle, mistaking it for his or her own. Did she like that? No she did not.

The haunting idea is much more romantic, more interesting and better material for a short story (we were creative writing students after all).

Poor old Boris Johnson. He tried a little truth, and he got slapped down by TM for his trouble. How dare he upset a corrupt bunch of cowards who live in fear of the Wahabi Imans who really hold the power in KSA and enact laws that make women second class citizens and fight proxy wars because that's what the Imans want? Next reshuffle and he's out of here, I promise you. In a post Brexit world we can't afford to upset one of our best weapons customers, now can we?

The truth is, we don't like truth. We'd rather believe in ET (though we're probably alone in the Universe), ghosts (they don't exist, or at least there is no real evidence for their existence), believe in God (see ghosts), that the world is going to be a better place once we get all these ultra right wingers in power and get rid of those soppy liberals and global warming due to human activity is a cruel hoax disseminated by the loonie left (look out, Armageddon is just around the corner).
Truth. That's so last year, man.