Why It is Not Your Responsibility to Convince Anyone
Society provides us with the basic necessities of life, like our clothes and our food. Most of us no longer need to go out of our way to create these products, which would be time-consuming. This is one of the many important tasks that society does for mankind because the less time you have, the less you can actually do anything else with your life.
This is made possible with the invention of money. In many ways, money represents time. It becomes a representation of the value one creates through products and services. The more value one generates, the more their time and labor are esteemed, thereby earning more money.
The crux of society’s role lies in granting individuals the freedom to venture beyond mere survival and explore the creation of new value. As truth-seekers, it is essential to leverage this freedom to carve out individual value, capitalizing on the resources offered by society. This journey involves gaining knowledge from various sources, learning from the experiences and wisdom of others, and constantly engaging in the educational process, often through interactions, discussions, and cooperation.
However, there comes a point where personal exploration must transcend the limits set by society and collective knowledge. Seeking to grasp what lies beyond requires moving beyond reliance on group knowledge.
Why can’t we just continue working within a group to understand what is unknown?
The issue here lies in the fact that what the group collectively comprehends will consistently be less than what an individual can understand. This discrepancy arises because the group invariably sifts and simplifies the truth to a level that suits their understanding. In a large group, what is acknowledged and deemed true is inevitably distilled, altered, and may diverge from the actual truth. The size of the crowd directly impacts the quality of their beliefs, as the truth is molded into a shape agreeable to all its members.
Why is that the truth gets reduced in a group?
Fundamentally we are biased because we are pulled into different directions based on our values, our beliefs, and our experiences which are going to make us go in a different direction than towards the truth. This is directly related to the strength of one’s will, specifically our ability to endure the discomfort of questioning and deconstructing our own sense of self. In a group with more individuals, there are more available directions for deviation from the truth, and there is also a greater pull towards what is already known — towards that which is comfortable. Additionally, as the size of the crowd increases, its ability to reason becomes more primitive because more animalistic, herd-like instincts come to the surface and take control.
‘In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.’ — Friedrich Nietzsche
The house of mirrors
“Faith in the fact creates the fact.”
— William James
The above quote suggests that individuals interpret the world according to the truths they desire to believe. For most people, truth is a delicate equilibrium between observed phenomena and their desired reality. The more resistant they are to embracing new beliefs, the tighter their grip on a world shaped according to their desires. Our inclination toward comfort often steers us away from the truth.
For example, when a man falls in love with a woman at first sight, he is in fact infatuated with the person, because he doesn’t know the woman at all. He perceives the woman to be exactly what he wants her to be i.e. what he has idealized in his mind to be. In his perception, she fulfills the criteria he has established in his mind. However, when he gets to know her, his perception of her collides with what she is like in reality. This forces the man to throw away the made-up mental version of herself, and replace it with what she is like in actuality.
Similarly, when seeking the truth, we must discard preconceived notions about reality and adopt a version that incorporates new information. The less experienced and less educated the person, the more likely they are to misunderstand the truth. Moreover, if they happen to be older, it implies that they have spent many years solidifying and building upon those foundational beliefs. This longevity often makes them resistant to change, as altering these beliefs would threaten their entire sense of identity. This is also why the older we get, the less open we are to new experiences because it scares us to face something that is outside our mental and physical comfort zone. It becomes far more overwhelming to throw aside the cemented beliefs because it would be the equivalent of throwing away parts of themselves (and sometimes the entirety of themselves). This is why people get upset and aggressive against others who question their beliefs because they feel the need to protect their own sense of self.
So how can one understand the truth?
To know something in the purest form, what is required is to be able to recognize and minimize all your biases. Remove your feelings about it. And let yourself look at it for what it is rather than what it needs to be or what you would wish it to be. The path to the truth has many forks that lead us to several relative truths, i.e., truths that we can bear to live with. To get closer to the world as it is, we must remain open-minded, yet skeptical, and persistently committed.
Any path diverging from the journey toward truth leads us to a different kind of comfortable truth. To reach ultimate truths, one must be willing to forgo comfort and venture endlessly toward them. We are inherently biased, which means that this cycle of falling for a comfortable truth, breaking out of it, and seeking for a better and more objective truth — is inevitable and unavoidable for truth seekers.
A higher number of people means more corrupted and tainted paths to the truth, as we get pulled in various directions by people’s desire for it to be something different than what it is.
“The strength of a person’s spirit would then be measured by how much ‘truth’ he could tolerate, or more precisely, to what extent he needs to have it diluted, disguised, sweetened, muted, falsified.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
The difficulty of accepting a truth for what it is
It is easy to dismiss those who hold on to seemingly irrational beliefs, but this is because their sense of self and worldview was built and intertwined with these ideas. It is a seriously unsettling and daunting task to dismantle one’s own ideas, all the while being content without having a concrete ground to stand on. Many people like to believe they don’t hold irrational beliefs, but in reality, most of us do, as it is not easy to think otherwise.
So let’s say that a person is religious and comes to understand through scientific reasoning that there is no God and that there is no religion. Now, let’s suppose that the person’s mother passed away a week ago. How does that impact the person’s ability to rationalize the absence of God and an afterlife? They might be more inclined to believe there might be someone because they wish their loved one has gone to a better place and want to believe they are still alive and around. Many people deal with their grief in this manner.
They might be unwilling to let go of those beliefs, because letting go of those beliefs means also letting go of their loved ones permanently. Now let’s say that their mother passed away 10 years ago. The longer they have held this idea, the longer they have believed that the mother has been with them, and more strongly they will believe in the idea of an afterlife. They made the decision to believe 10 years ago and they have lived 10 years with that thought as a foundational stone.
We build on our present experiences and interpretations of the world on top of the foundation of experiences and beliefs of our past. This is why our early memories and beliefs are key to understanding how we have build our different worldviews. And in that sense, such a person who believes in an afterlife, has laid down their experiences and others beliefs brick by brick on top of their idea of afterlife, and has cemented that idea as a foundational stone in their head for the past ten years ago. This is why it can be incredibly disorienting and uncomfortable to hammer through our conception of reality and pull out that foundational stone — and then to toss it out.
When discussing an idea with someone, you may not realize their biases unless they are unwilling and stubborn against what you are saying. Humans excel at rationalizing irrational beliefs, concocting plausible excuses for refusing to accept a reality without afterworlds. Yet, with sufficient self-reflection and the courage to question their beliefs, these rationalizations would easily unravel. This is what the philosopher Socrates tried to do by questioning religious people in his society, i.e. show that none of them had any idea why they believed what they did and how all the beliefs they had were irrational.
Dissecting beliefs and worldviews
Human beings in general are the most irrational creatures that are led by feelings and what we consider as beliefs are not rooted in rationality. And so when you go in to study the truth, your irrational beliefs will affect your biases and your perceptions. And the more people work with you in your pursuit of the truth, the less likely it will conclude close to the truth. In short, the less biases you bring to the table, the better it is. Hence, it is better to confront things independently, to acquire knowledge on your own. You can make jumps based on your thought processes and you would only be tormented and pulled to a comfortable path by your own beliefs. You are far more capable of understanding and dissecting your own biases and beliefs through self reflection, and building a new conception of yourself from the shattered pieces, than you are of gaining anything beyond a superficial understanding of someone else’s life.
You cannot lie to yourself but your drives and instincts can lie to you. You have full freedom to dissect it endlessly to understand yourself more clearly. But when somebody else is helping you, you don’t know what their drives are. You don’t know if they have ulterior motives. Most people are simply looking for a version of truth that they can live with, because they cannot knowingly live a lie. So they are trying to find a comfortable truth that isn’t too far off from what they would like to believe. To a great extent, they can’t even explain their drives and most of them don’t even realize this aspect of themselves. This is why you can’t assume either about what it is that drives you to the truth. You may think that you understand everything that drives you, and the fact of the matter is that you don’t.
It is already a near impossible task to understand what the truth is, while overcoming your own biases, and so you are far more incapable of separating the comfortable lies in other people’s lives from the truth. People will make you believe that you are wrong, even when you are correct, because they are unable to give up their comfortable lies. Recognizing when you are attempting to bite off more than you can chew is crucial, and the more people you involve, the more challenging it is to see things clearly.
“First take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.” (Matthew 7:3–5)
You cannot and should not bear the responsibility of convincing someone else of the truth. Their biases, inability to accept the truth, and failure to dissect their experiences should not burden you; it will only weigh you down.
“Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
This echoes the idea that you can lead a horse to water, but you cannot force it to drink.
More on understanding the truth
“There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
To add to that, for a complete understanding of yourself, you must be able to articulate things that cannot be put into words or discussed. This represents the purest form of truth, i.e., things that cannot be expressed. Also to understand truth, you have to use your experience and beliefs as the threads to help you weave together a consistent truth. Anticipating an understanding of the truth without investing the effort to grapple with it, or without taking the time to learn from others and tying it to your experiences, is akin to wanting to comprehend the intricate imagery in a poem when you scarcely know the letters of the language in which it is written. And as if it wasn’t difficult enough, the simpler the questions about the deep truths, the more you need to navigate through before you can earn your right to understand it.
Truth is inherently complicated. For example, when you have a loss in your family, how that makes you feel is inexpressible. Even if you express it, it will always be a diminished representation of what you are actually experiencing. And the same for if you’ve sprained your ankle. If you’ve gone through something, it’s always harder to explain to others, and it always gets reduced when you explain your experience. You are only explaining things in the terms that you understand and also in terms of things that they would understand, that’s what makes this a reduced form of the actual experience.
On the sharing of my own truths
I cannot tell you how to live your life. I don’t know what it is to be you and what barriers you face in living your life. I can only speak from my perspective, and my perspective is based on things that are in terms of how I value things and how I have experienced them, so I cannot speak on your behalf. You have to find the truth in yourself. You have to find the truth that makes sense to you.
The most important part of truth is experience. Your mind and body keep score, persisting long after you have forgotten all about it. Your experience frames everything else together, and when your experience doesn’t align with what I’ve said or appears contradictory, you must grapple with and resolve that. You have to either reject my claims as entirely false, or you have to blend them together in a consistent manner and see how it would make sense. You need to find a new form of truth that combines both, where both things are possible. As stated previously, most people are simply going to reject the truth because it’s uncomfortable.
You have to make sense of the ideas that I have presented to you, with the worldview that you have. I can assist in guiding you through it with my experiences, but ultimately, you have to be the one to walk the path, as you are the one who must believe in it or choose not to. Your own personal experiences will always be considered as more convincing to you than any research or story that I share with you.
I can only teach somebody who’s willing to learn and who’s willing to walk that same path with me to understand through their experiences and through their ideas about the world. You can’t memorize any secret to life because you cannot study what it is to be human. You have to experience it and link up your experiences with the ideas that you come across, then you can connect with them. However, this is your journey because I cannot live it for you. I cannot connect the dots for you because I don’t know what it is to be you because I don’t know what it is to live a life like yours. And you wouldn’t know what it is to live a life like mine than what I chose to share.
I can only be responsible for my own understanding of the truth, because considering the fact that every explanation of an experience, is a reduced form of it, that leaves ample room for others to misunderstand and mis-interpret ideas because they constrained to understand it through the lens of their worldivew. And I can only express things in general terms so that you may also relate to it, but to also express it in a way that will convince you is neither my duty nor my responsibility, because that is your responsibility. It is not my goal to win you over, and it is impossible to do so without your willingness. This is similar to the concept of how you alone are responsible for your health ultimately because it matters the most for you than anyone else. Others can guide you with their experiences, but it is not worth it for them to painstakingly drag you to the finish line and beat your head with the truth. Those with ears to hear will listen, while those who choose not to follow will continue to live life as suits them, because they were never meant to understand. Truth-seeking isn’t for everyone, and it is particularly not suited for large groups of people.
“Nobody is going to pour truth into your brain. It’s something you have to find out for yourself.”
— Noam Chomsky
There are other variables that control your life that are unknown to me. I can only know the variables that control my life. I can only attempt to know my biases, the influences on my life, and the restraints and the limitations of my own thinking.
Learning and surpassing the teachers
This is why students must always surpass their teachers. I have written an article in depth on this subject if you want to learn more. Students learn from their teachers and then surpass them with their new experiences and perspectives. They reinterpret what the teacher has imparted through their own life experiences, discovering new truths that are shared and built upon by others. With more experience it becomes purer, but also gets reduced when it is more widely accepted by a greater number of people.
So whatever is known for certain, i.e., something you can touch, observe, or look at — those are all reduced forms of the truth. The purest form of truth is the inexpressible truths known to oneself. Unraveling these truths without losing their meaning allows others to learn, relate, and eventually build upon them.
“One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
This is not meant to devalue the idea of teaching, because through teaching, the teacher also gets to be a student. Explaining things to others also reveals parts of yourself, offering insight into your beliefs, how you hold them, and exposing gaps in your belief system as you express your ideas to others. Remaining open to ideas that oppose your beliefs and seeking to integrate them is crucial. This is the only way to ensure that you are not merely settling for a truth you can bear. Endlessly going over what you believe and integrating it continuously with new experiences, is the key to understanding your world better.
“ If you want to master something, teach it. The more you teach, the better you learn.”
— Richard P. Feynman
Again, this isn’t meant to be achieved by everyone, but rather a task only meant for a select few that consider themselves to be seekers of truth, or as Nietzsche would say — the philosophers of the future.
Further reading:
How to use Truth to Uncover Life’s Meaning (part 1, part 2, part 3)