“Do you want the truth or something beautiful?
I am happy to deceive you.”
It is a nice quotation for the beginning, isn’t it? These are not the words of a philosopher or a wise person; but of the heartfelt song by Paloma Faith, an English artist. Although she mentions human relationships, not the fact-checking or the conflict of the truth in our minds, our way to embrace the truth is often similar.
There is a fact that we can adorn with the quotes from the fragile chains of the emotional life to the epistemology books: We do not want the truth. We believe that what we want is the truth, we strive for the truth; however, what we need is a bigger system update.
The threshold between what is needed and what is really happening sometimes turns into a ditch. While experiencing this, we forget our place within it. When we forget the threshold, we have often tripped and fallen; however, we cannot grasp why we have fallen. Because we see ourselves as the soldier of the truth. If we fall, someone should trip us up or our passion for the truth should not go with the social standards.
Now, let’s look at two separate examples in order to fill the threshold between us and the truth, that is, what should be.
“Why do you need to confirm this, what bothers you?
“What did you obtain when you confirmed this, among so many wrong things, now this?”
These are the most popular words among the comments that Teyit editors have gotten after their efforts to prepare analyses for hours or days. Let's try to pull out these questions attached to much larger pieces by a small surgical operation, leave the big and important questions to others, and discuss the details.
Why did we need the truth?
For real, why do we spend our time on this or that analysis while there are so many problems? As Aristotle said, if we wanted to know by nature, this question should not have arisen, but it showed up and was often asked. So, it is not enough to want to know by nature, to hold on to the truth, and it is believed that a trigger is required. While we often repeat that we are fascinated by the truth, approaching it with gloves instead of feeling it is like a lifeless signal that we live in Foucault's heterotopia. In heterotopias, opposites live side by side, as if they are not opposites, but still inhabitants of heterotopia believe that they continue their struggle against opposites. In other words, our relationship with the truth is complicated, but we do not find it risky to update the status as "S/he has a happy relationship with the truth".
However, nobody wants the misinformation, if the misinformation does not start to delete the values that are thought to give meaning to their lives. Truth is not kind, and if you are really approaching sensitive values that are not shock-resistant, why bother? There are three different answers to this question in Teyit’s methodology. As we have explained here, “suspicious information to be examined by editors is not arbitrary; they are chosen depending on the importance, prevalence (virality) and urgency criteria.”
These three criteria can be used for the answer to the question, “Among so many wrong things, now this?” To be able to say “Yes, now this,” is one of the characteristics that makes Teyit special before and after joining it.
While responding to these criticisms, I also think about the meanings behind all of them and feel that we will discover this meaning just below the surface. Could there be another responsible for our inability to get the same sincerity when we encounter the truth? Although it seems a little complicated, Hegel would say, “sensuous This… cannot be reached by language”, so it is not important that someone says 'this is not true' for what we perceive and define in the status of value.
Then, let's start by fixing that the threshold between what it should be, and what is actually happening has turned into a ditch long ago, that every mind has become a victim.
