What If Truth Wasn’t a Side?

Opinion – By Rusty (from the library computer)

April 28, 2025
Everybody wants the truth. The trouble starts when we decide it already belongs to us.

I’m not much for politics anymore. I used to be. I’d yell at the radio, argue with strangers, spend an afternoon angry about something happening three thousand miles away that I couldn’t have found on a map. I had opinions about presidents, wars, taxes, schools, things I understood and things I didn’t. It felt important at the time.

These days I spend a lot of afternoons in the library. Nobody bothers you much if you keep your shoes on and don’t sleep across more than one chair. I read the newspapers people leave behind. Sometimes I use the computers. Mostly I watch young people argue about the same things my generation argued about, except now they can do it with several thousand strangers before lunch. Something has changed, though.

People used to argue about what was true. Now they argue about whose truth it is. That bothers me.

A fact shouldn’t become suspicious because the wrong person said it. A lie doesn’t become respectable because somebody you trust repeated it. Neither one checks your voter registration before becoming what it is. But people do.

We’ve gotten very good at sorting information according to where it came from. This network lies. That newspaper lies. This professor is biased. That scientist is bought. This politician is evil, therefore anything he says must be false. That politician is good, therefore there must be some reasonable explanation for whatever he just did. It saves a lot of time.

The problem is that eventually you stop investigating whether something is true and start investigating whether believing it makes you one of the good people. Those are different questions.

I’ve been wrong about plenty of things. If you live long enough, you collect old certainties the way a garage collects broken appliances. Things you would have sworn were obvious turn out to be complicated. People you trusted disappoint you. People you dismissed occasionally turn out to have had a point.

That doesn’t mean there is no truth. I think people sometimes confuse humility with surrender. Saying “I might be wrong” doesn’t mean every answer is equally good. It just means you’ve left yourself somewhere to go when the evidence changes.

The internet seems particularly bad at allowing that.

Everybody has receipts now. Studies, screenshots, clips, graphs, articles. You can spend five minutes searching and find somebody with impressive credentials who agrees with almost anything you already believe. We have more information available to us than any people who ever lived, and somehow we’ve developed the peculiar habit of using most of it to confirm what we thought before we started looking.

Maybe that’s human nature. The computers just made us faster at it.

I watched two students arguing near the printers last week. I don’t know what it was about. One kept showing the other something on his phone. The other wouldn’t look at it because he already knew the website was bad. Eventually they were yelling about fascism.

Neither of them printed anything. That stuck with me. There’s another problem with turning truth into a side. Once you do that, changing your mind becomes betrayal.

If admitting one fact means giving something to your enemies, you won’t admit it. If questioning your own people means helping the other people, you won’t question them. Pretty soon everybody is defending things they would recognize as ridiculous if somebody else had done them. Then everybody wonders why nobody trusts anybody. I don’t know how you fix that. Maybe you don’t. But I think a decent place to start is becoming a little less interested in who gets credit for being right.

You can dislike somebody and still admit they told the truth. You can love somebody and admit they lied. You can hear an argument without joining the person making it. You can change your mind without changing teams. And sometimes you can just say you don’t know.

That one seems especially difficult for educated people. I don’t mean that as an insult. Education is good. I use your library almost every day.

I just think there’s a peculiar kind of freedom in admitting that the world is larger than whatever explanation you currently have for it. It gives you permission to look again.

Truth doesn’t need to belong to you. You’re only supposed to find it. Anyway, somebody left half a turkey sandwich outside the faculty lounge, and I’ve been watching it for about twenty minutes. I think it’s mine now.

—Rusty
(from the library computer)

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