I have started to notice something at family gatherings that I don't know how to talk about. People I love, intelligent, well-read people, have drifted into versions of the world I no longer recognize. Not opinions I disagree with. Different facts. A different account of what happened.
One relative has decided that only two respected publications can be trusted, and by reading selectively within them has become convinced that artificial intelligence will wipe out humanity within a few years. Others have given up on the news entirely and get their picture of the world from podcasts, where whoever sounds most confident and most certain of a hidden truth tends to win the most listeners. Neither group is stupid. That is what troubles me most.
Researchers who study this have found that on charged questions, the most capable reasoners are often the most polarized. Intelligence doesn't protect us from believing what we want to believe. It just makes us better lawyers for it.
As I get older, I've had to work out for myself what truth actually is. Where I've ended up is simple: truth is what happened. Not what someone tells me happened, not what my side says happened, not what would be most satisfying to believe. What happened.
The difficulty is that almost nothing we know reaches us directly. I wasn't in the laboratory, the courtroom, or the war zone. Someone told me. So the question isn't whether we rely on others for the truth. We all do. The question is how we choose who to rely on, and here I think we have to be honest with ourselves: we usually choose the sources that already feel right. Once that choice is made, everything afterward just confirms it.
Consider a 1968 letter to a medical journal in which a doctor wondered whether a seasoning, MSG, might explain why he felt unwell after a meal. Decades of careful studies since then have failed to find the danger he worried about. Yet fifty years later, "No MSG" signs still hang in restaurant windows. A good story outran the evidence, and once it was out there, people repeated it because they had already heard it.
Compare that with a scientist who published a study suggesting a food sensitivity existed, then tested his own finding more rigorously and reported that it mostly didn't hold. Headlines mocked him for "admitting he was wrong." I think he deserves a medal. That is what honest truth-seeking looks like: being willing to be proven wrong, even by yourself.
This matters beyond kitchens and laboratories. A society can survive deep disagreement about values. We have always argued about how to live, what to tax, whom to welcome. But we can only argue if we agree on what happened. When we lose that, the other side stops looking wrong and starts looking mad or malicious, and conversation becomes impossible. People who can no longer tell fact from fiction are easy to lead, and there is no shortage of people offering to lead them.
The old Norse imagined three Norns at the root of the world tree. The first was Urðr, whose name is usually understood as "what has happened." Everything else was woven from it. I find that a useful image. What happened is the root. Cut it, and everything above it starts to wither.
I don't have a cure, but I've started asking myself a few questions about any source, including the ones I trust. How would they know this? When were they last wrong, and did they admit it? Does this make me feel good to believe? And when did I last read something that made me doubt myself?
I ask these questions of myself first, because I'm not immune. None of us are.
To anyone sitting across a table from someone they love, feeling as if they're living on different planets: I understand that grief. I don't think the answer is to win the argument. I think it is to keep asking, gently, how we know what we know, and to keep the door open. The truth is still out there, in what happened. We just have to want it more than we want to be right.
Let’s just hope it isn’t to late.
