When you’ve been convinced of something and believe it to be true, it becomes a load bearing part of your self. Truths are nice because they seem to be constant. People are looking for consistency and predictability in life. A decision is easier to make if you have all the facts. Morever, if you know something to be true, it spares you the tedious task of reflecting upon it’s validity, checking it against your experience. Because the truth is certain, you dont have to worry about it changing like everything else in the world. This predictability is inherently comforting, and it makes life seem a bit more manageable. Life may be difficult, but at least there are rules. A truth won’t be modified by the person, in fact it’s more likely the truth will be the one modifying. In the absense of some other form of positive reinforcement, a truth may even provide meaning for people’s lives. Something that doesn’t move with the rest of your consciousness is going to be built upon. People will anchor other imporant things to this permanent structure, lest they get swept away in the tide of life. This sort of cognitive clumping proceeds until everything that matters to that person is in one way or another tied to this truth. This is all very well and good if the truth is something like “all you need is love” or “honesty is the best policy” (though even these fail to be true all the time.) Truths like “we’re the best” or “there’s plenty of resources” or “the man is the head of his household,” basically truths which devalue other perspectives, these are the dangerous ones. These truths aren’t just infectious of societies as a whole. Just look to your nearest misanthrope to see the negative effects of an idea. The misanthrope hates people, he think’s he’s better than everyone else, this is truth to him. No matter what insight another person might offer, it doesn’t matter because he is the sole arbiter of his own truth. ‘That may apply to you, but it doesnt apply to me.’ Just as the misanthrope cannot change his ways because he believes them to be infallible, or at least more valid than those suggested by others, so too, a society trapped in a truth of its own inherent betterness will have difficulty changing with the times.
The truth of the matter is, there are no truths in life, nor even in the world. The world is in a constant state of flux. People change by the minute, as wind slowly wears away rock. It is this unpredictability that inspires people to invent truths, to make life more navigable. In fact people will believe something that their own senses tell them is wrong, rather than facing the chaotic nature of their existence. People don’t want to feel afraid or impotent. So when things come along that scare us with their unpredictability, we try to find rules and truths to systematize them, to tame them to something we can predict and plan for. Religion may be one of the earliest forms of truth invention. The ocean is wild and dangerous, but there’s a god who controls that ocean. You can appease, and therefore control that god with some sacrifice or rite, and therefore you can indirectly control the ocean. By having that truth in hand, a person can feel safe enough to function in unfamiliar or dangerous situations. We’ve come along way from sacrificing lambs. The continuous effort of generations of humans have yeilded laws of motion and patterns of change. This is the soul of the scientific method, finding things which are predictable. Yet scientific truth is incomplete. Any real scientist will tell you that all theories are tentative. They express what happens most of the time, but they do not express certain knowledge. Research into quantum mechanics is revealing a whole world of chaos beneath these orderly patterns of motion. It seems the only reason that things fall down is that the majority of the sub atomic particles aggree that this is the thing to do. A few little bits will persist on doing “their own thing,” however. This does not render these laws and theories invalid. Truly they are fantasticly useful. It just means that even gravity is no more a truth than “wear a coat or you’ll catch a cold.” So unless we’re talking about mathematics or some other realm of theory, there is no truth. Not in the real world.