Truth is the Most Important Value

Here's why, and how to get good at identifying and using it

Why are human beings so naturally averse to deception and lies?

The answer is that we have evolved alongside reality, and nature has determined that both accepting reality, as well as learning to use it to our advantage, are necessary for living fulfilling and purposeful lives.

There has never been, nor will there ever be a war waged with reality in which reality comes away the loser.

Our relationship with reality is ever-present and unavoidable, and every single action we take in our lives bounces off reality and provides us with a critically important response. When a true belief bounces off reality, we experience order and success – our expectations and predictions are met, and our ability to successfully navigate the world is strengthened. When our falsities bounce off reality, we experience something unexpected – a disruption, or chaos. Bouncing truths off reality results in order and success, and bouncing falsities off reality results in chaos and failure, even if we might not notice or understand how, in the moment.

Reality always provides us with feedback, the difficulty lies in looking for, listening to, understanding, and accepting the response.

For instance, say you wake up one morning to find that several inches of snow have covered the ground. For any number of potential reasons, this upsets you, and so you decide to believe that, in fact, it has not snowed at all, and that it’s a warm, summer day. Every single action taken which demonstrates that belief will bounce off reality and provide you with negative feedback – feedback that produces failed expectations, chaos, learned helplessness, and a disconnection from reality and yourself.

Helplessness, as it turns out, is the main ingredient of anxiety, depression, and trauma.

Wear shorts and flip flops, reality will check you. Drive your car as if there is no snow on the roads, reality will check you. Start a temperature-sensitive project outdoors, reality will check you. Put simply, things will not go the way you expected, and you will experience negativity and disorder as a result.

Now say you accept the truth that it has, in fact, snowed. Well, reality is going to agree with you and bounce back validation and order, resulting in a drastically increased ability to successfully navigate the day and, ultimately, the world and your own life.

This example may seem overly simplistic or even ridiculous, but human beings have a tremendous ability to impose their desires onto reality and ignore, avoid, or deliberately misinterpret reality in order to see those desires realized and/or avoid the pain of having them invalidated. It happens constantly, and to degrees much more severe and ridiculous than the example I gave.

I promise you that absolutely nothing could be more antithetical to living a fulfilling and authentic life. Truth is, by far, the most important value we have. Without it, we find ourselves waging war with reality itself.

The Pillars of Truth System

Since truth has always been my highest value, it became important to me to develop a system for myself that can accurately and reliably work to strengthen my relationship with reality – one that, so long as I honestly adhere to it with openness and integrity, would never fail to develop and improve my understanding of truth. For many reasons, it’s not perfect, and it never can be, but honest adherence to it has never failed to develop my understanding of reality, over time. I call this system the Pillars of Truth.

This system, or a similar system of truth-finding, is absolutely critical to living a happy and fulfilling life. Such a system is critical because introducing untruth into any path towards happiness will result in chaos, missed expectations and goals, misunderstanding of vital information about ourselves and the world, and an eventual fracturing of our relationship with ourselves and reality.

Truth is about establishing order out of chaos; giving us the ability to make sense of reality, and to trust in it and ourselves. Any set of beliefs built on a foundation of untruth will catch up with us eventually, as the checks of reality never end, and cannot be avoided indefinitely. Of course, we could choose to ignore it forever, as many do, but I promise you this will lead to nothing but tremendous suffering, sooner or later.

The truth does not care what we think or feel, it simply is, and we can choose to acknowledge and understand it, or we can choose to ignore it at our own peril. This isn’t to say that our minds and bodies are incapable of influencing our existence or certain outcomes in reality – this is not only possible, but necessary at times. It’s important to understand, however, that the truths of our shared reality will not bend to our desires simply because we want them to. If we want to change our reality, we must take action to change the way we both interact with and perceive it. To do that, we must develop a healthy relationship with and understanding of reality, as well as accept the truths we cannot change.

I don’t claim to have invented this system, as it is essentially just a tool of reason, logic, honest observation, critical thinking, objectivity, epistemic adequacy, causality, and acceptance of information and results (among other things). It shares similarities with other systems of truth-finding, including natural philosophy, the scientific method, objectivism, rationalism, empiricism, and too many others to name, though in a more simplified form.

Ultimately, the system seeks to avoid over-investment of belief into that which cannot be proven or disproven, and to encourage investment of belief into that which can, through a variety of means. The system leaves room for that which can be conceived of or proven in theory or other abstract means, but attempts to direct the majority of focus toward concrete, observable, and testable methods. In other words, the system leaves room for what might be described as “unknowable”, but makes every effort to “know” first.

Sound complicated? Don’t worry, it’s not. You’ll see!

So, what exactly is this Pillars of Truth system?

In order to navigate the difficulties of life and come to understand reality as best I could, I needed a system which was proven to work, and was subject to the rules of the system itself – a system that, like all of us, is ultimately beholden to reality, and must be able to coexist alongside it without returning errors. If the system failed even once to coexist with reality, then it was of no use to me. Luckily, we are all born to use systems like this by default, whether we realize it or not.

We may not all be equally adept at using these systems but, make no mistake, we are all using them to some degree, all of the time. Making sense of reality is simply one of the many programs baked into us, as surviving without these programs would not be possible.

So how does it work?

It’s simple: Since we can’t possibly know the truth at all times, we must “ping” reality for information that can help us determine whether something is true or false.

For this particular system, we must first identify our beliefs and understanding of reality as “Pillars of Truth”. These are mental structures we erect that serve as reality checks against our experiences; the flow of reality through our perceptions. As the data of reality flows into our minds, it comes into contact with our Pillars (our beliefs), and provides us with an opportunity to determine the truth of our experiences.

When one of our Pillars fails to objectively make sense of the data reality is sending us, it must change or collapse, and a new Pillar must be erected in its place – one that attempts to accurately make sense of the experience which toppled the previous pillar. The only exception to this rule is when we have insufficient data to make a change in either direction, though, even in those cases, it is likely that another, less obvious Pillar needs to be changed instead.

For example: Say my experiences with reality have caused me to erect a Pillar that contains the following truth:

All cars run on gasoline.

If I have only ever encountered and heard about cars running on gasoline, then it makes sense to erect this Pillar to invest in and confirm that belief and, in return, gain a better understanding of reality. However, as soon as I encounter evidence that a car can run on something other than gasoline, I must destroy or alter that pillar and erect a new one in its place. Failing to do so would be an exercise in ignorance and/or cognitive dissonance, and my understanding of reality would be corrupted as a result, as well as all possible implications of holding onto that belief (all other Pillars affected by the corrupt one).

We must allow our beliefs to die when confronted with information that disproves them, or else we become slaves to them.

Again, we are all doing this constantly, by default – literally every single person. In fact, I can practically guarantee you’ve already felt some of the assertions in this post come into contact with your own Pillars of Truth! The difficulty lies both in our ability to allow our Pillars to crumble when appropriate (letting our false beliefs die), as well as erecting new Pillars that accurately explain and account for our new experiences and the information of reality.

As I mentioned earlier, it is often the case that a reliable Pillar of Truth simply cannot be erected or destroyed, as we sometimes don’t even know what it is we don’t know – we have incomplete or insufficient data, and that’s okay! I believe it is better to occasionally leave some plots of mental land “Pillarless” until we come across information that would allow us to construct a Pillar and invest belief into it. This is essentially the same as saying, “I don’t know”, because sometimes we just don’t know!

Having said that, we do not want to end up with a mind devoid of Pillars simply because we have convinced ourselves that the information we have is never sufficient to build a Pillar with. Again, balance is key, and that balance will look different for each of us. Pillars are not perfect, and so they need to remain open to changes, but we should still attempt to erect them whenever possible, otherwise we have no means of pinging reality for feedback, and nothing to construct our beliefs and navigate the world with. I’m a big fan of skepticism, but not at the expense of refusing to ever construct beliefs.

So, let’s break down the steps of using this system in a simple and concise way.

Step 1: Construct a Pillar of Truth (a belief) that can accurately account for the information of reality you have experienced.

Step 2: Observe what happens to this Pillar as it continues to encounter the information of reality. Does it stand strong and make sense of our experiences? Is the Pillar being repeatedly validated and fortified, or is reality telling us this Pillar fails to identify truth and needs to fall or change?

Step 3: Make an honest effort to listen to, understand, and accept the reaction your Pillar has with the information of reality. If reality bounces off a pillar and returns an error (like with the belief that all cars run on gasoline), we must accept that something has disrupted our system, and that one or more of our Pillars need correcting.

When one of my Pillars have been disrupted and return some kind of error, my body/mind never fail to alert me that something has happened. I may not immediately understand what it means or even what direction it is pointing in, but a feeling of, “something is wrong” is always present – there is a disturbance in the force...

It turns out that our bodies are pretty good at alerting us of important events and experiences regarding our relationships with reality, even if we don’t always know what they are communicating to us in the moment.

Step 4: Use the information to disassemble or fortify existing Pillars (depending on how the Pillars respond to reality) or erect a new one entirely. If you are confident the data is insufficient, then admit you don’t know, and come back to it another time.

Step 5: Repeat endlessly.

As we practice this five-step process, we develop our skill in utilizing it effectively.

Adherence to the system improves our intuition, critical thinking skills, and ability to identify truth and make sense of the world. Non-adherence strengthens our own ignorance and cognitive dissonance, corrupting our ability to recognize, accept, and coexist with reality and ourselves. If we continue down the path of non-adherence, we eventually become zealots and slaves to our perceptions, beliefs, and emotions, as we grow emotionally inseparable from our Pillars, and are unwilling to destroy them when necessary.

Meanwhile, our intuitions – a crucial component to listening to, understanding, and accepting ourselves – become frequently untrustworthy and confused, as the information they are being fed is not based on reality. Eventually, our faulty perceptions will rule us, instead of what is true.