Untruth and Nothing But the Truth

If honesty were such a great policy, I would wonder why we don't see more of it, except for the fact that I understand that most people, and that includes myself, don't know honesty on sight. Instead, what many people, and again, I include myself in this, recognize is what aligns with the world as they understand it to be, as it works for them and how they would like it to be. And to the degree that those things are often considered to be self-evident, things that contradict them are often seen as deliberate falsehoods. Because how could anyone understand things any differently?

In this sense, the problem isn't that people lie. It's the idea of Truth; either as it is, or as it should be.

I don't recall when it was, but some time ago, I let go of the idea that I could actually understand the truth of things. It started when my father, who was wiser than I gave him credit for, told me that the definition of "Obvious" was: "Something so crystal-clear that you're the only person who sees it." And that sparked the realization that part of everything I see is, well, me. I am the filter through which I see the world, and so I am going to see things differently than literally everyone else on the planet. For a long time, I likened this to the difficulty that two people have in seeing the exact same view of the world, because in order to do so, they would each have to inhabit the precise same physical space. Now, while that example still seems apt, it also seems inadequate to the task at hand.

I'm poor at Internet "Authenticity" because I don't naturally seek to reinforce the worldviews of the people around me. I don't know that I'm openly contrarian so much as my outlook on life tends to be just that much out-of-step with the people I normally hang around with; apparently without regard to what their outlooks are.

I've come to lack an idea of Truth, because I lack confidence in the trustworthiness of my own senses. And the universality of my experiences. That leads me to an understanding of why I find things to be true that disconnects them from the way they may actually be. I don't know whether that's a good thing or not.