Balaji Prasad
By Balaji Prasad
The truth generally lies.
The statement above is a strong one. And troubling. Let’s examine it a bit closely.
What is the Truth?
We may never be able to fully know any truth in our lives. Reality is far more complex and richer than what our senses – let alone our words – will ever be able to access. Even with all the fancy technologies such as telescopes, microscopes and other such devices designed to augment our senses, a large part of the universe is still dark to us. And, while human brains are powerful too, as can be seen with AI technology struggling to catch up with us in tasks that feel effortless to us; our brains fall short, though: they are not up to the task of fully grasping and properly piecing together even the little that we can directly see and what we can indirectly “see” through our technological “eyes”.
Fortunately, we never need aspire to that degree of truth. We are remarkably resilient beings who can get by even though we may be wrong – even grievously wrong – a lot of the time. Our decisions based on our “truths” are often good enough for the day-to-day things we need to deal with.
And why is it that we are often wrong? Because we have a technology that we use all the time to discern our “truths”: a technology that we are barely aware of unless we pause and reflect a bit.
Words: Our hole-ridden technology
Since the universe of things that we encounter far exceeds our cognitive capacity, we are compelled to shrink the world so that it fits into it, and so that we can make decisions that keep us alive and on our feet. We may not usually think of words as a technology, but it can be helpful to see this. Otherwise, we might labor under the strange (and, sometimes, dangerous) misconception that the gymnastics we do with words and word-based “logic” have anything to do with the real world. There are probably too many – way too many – things we get wrong. It’s a miracle that we even survive, with our penchant for word-based “reasoning” that often misses the world by a mile!
Why are words so fraught with trouble? Words are abstractions. They are proxies for the real thing. Or, impostors, if you like. They are like fingers that point to the moon, and, if we are sloppy, we engage with our fingers instead of the moon. Our brain’s capacity can get taxed and confused at having to deal with two very different kinds of things: “things” and things. It is challenging when both of these look and feel the same inside the human brain: there are no clear demarcation lines between what our imagination and linguistic creativity concoct versus the real-world things that matter.
So, we can spend an entire lifetime believing in things that don’t exist, never existed, and will never exist. Alongside things that do. We should be thankful for the latter, because the living thing inside us will never outsource everything to our conscious scrabble-playing brain that could otherwise play mischief with the things that really matter, such as our instinctive abilities that protect us from lions, tigers, humans and other predators.
And, so, we see the world, hazily, through our words, numbers and other symbolic substitutes. There are lots and lots of holes in what we see. The only thing that can save us from our hole-ridden “truth” is some modicum of humility, so that we stay open to the possibility, at all times, that we could be wrong in some important and impactful ways.
But … There is something that is even more dangerous to our existence than words.
An I for an eye, a soothe for a truth
We like to feel safe. Soothed. Our eyes see, but the desires and fears of the I inside can be motivated to warp and distort things, unless we put it on a leash. Our words and “logic” can be the puppets of this puppet master, endorsing and providing a “rational” basis for everything that we would like. The truth in the universe cares little about our feelings or our words. It goes on. Like a juggernaut. It can crush us under its weight as it pushes ahead on its relentless march unless we seek to understand it and align with it.
Wouldn’t it be good to monitor our integrity at least every so often? Can we be sure that our words inhabit the real world? Can we be sure that our fears and desires aren’t making us blind? Are we superstitious beings? Could it be that our animal brethren are less superstitious than us because they don’t have the technology of words with which they can make up stuff, and blind themselves?
The New Year beckons! Here’s to a year of integrity: a year in which fears, desires and words will be a distant second to the glorious universe out there. Here’s to a year of humility and self-awareness!
Balaji Prasad is an IIT/IIM graduate, a published author, SAT/ACT Online and in-person Coach, and K-12 Math Tutor at NewCranium. [email protected].
