Truth unites us. Divides us. In many cases, it creates us.
But despite this being the case, it is one of the more slippery concepts we use – and with such familiarity too.
I’ve been fascinated by truth and perspective since I was an eighteen year old freshman, battling my way through my first philosophy class.
However my dad, despite a nasty alcohol addiction, and only a high school education, had a deep philosophical side that would surface quite regularly in conversation. So I think there may have been some psychological priming there, but I can’t be sure.
If we look off into the world however, we’ll actually see a ton of people who not only understand the elusive nature of truth, but they’re able to use it to their advantage.
Attorneys see an increased hire rate when they have an additional philosophy credential on their resume. The flexible nature of truth and perspective are exposed in such studies, enabling the student with a deeper level of understanding which allows them to ultimately be more persuasive.
Most of the great artists and business persons you’ll find out there have a deep philosophical side to them as well, whether they promote it or not. There’s just something about looking deeply at things that the culture normally takes for granted, that turns the world into a more accessible place.
So let’s take a deeper look, to sharpen our minds, and see what types of seductive mind-traps could be overly simplifying our understanding of truth.
The Illusion of Argumentative Victory
There seems to be some confusion between articulation and truth. And a lot of really smart people fall for this one – I think because they’re especially good at articulating themselves. When someone successfully formulates their position—when the words really click into place and the logic feels coherent—there’s a neurological reward, a sense of closure. I suspect there’s a bit of a dopamine hit too. The brain experiences this as progress, as movement toward truth. But this feeling can be interpreted incorrectly – it may just actually be the satisfaction of internal coherence, not necessarily evidence of external validity. They’ve convinced themselves, and mistake that private experience for having spoken objective truth.
The Territorial Nature of Truth-Claims
We do not have a shelf-space problem, when it comes to truth. People often treat truth as if there’s only so much “correctness” available, and their claim must occupy ground by pushing others off it. This reveals an almost spatial metaphor at work in how we think about truth—as if perspectives are physical objects competing for the same location.
But reality, especially social and moral reality, is almost always multi-dimentional. Something can be true because of economic forces AND because of cultural values AND because of individual psychology simultaneously. The factors don’t compete for explanatory space. They coexist, intersect, and co-create. When someone points out that corporate consolidation harms small businesses, and another person points out that it can lower consumer prices, both observations can be completely valid—they’re describing different facets of the same phenomenon. Yet the discourse often proceeds as if acknowledging one means denying the other.
The Emotional Anchor Problem
People become invested in perspectives not just intellectually but emotionally. The perspective validates their experience, explains their pain, justifies their choices, or defines their identity. Once that emotional hook is set, the perspective becomes psychologically load-bearing. It’s not just an idea anymore. It’s part of the architecture holding up their sense of self or their worldview.
This creates a kind of motivated reasoning where the goal shifts from “understand what’s true” to “protect what feels necessary.” The person isn’t consciously being dishonest—they genuinely experience their perspective as more urgent, more real, because for them, psychologically, it is. The other person’s competing perspective doesn’t carry the same emotional weight, so it seems abstract, theoretical, less pressing. Yikes.
Looking Through The Crack in the Door
There’s also what we might call the “illusion of singular vantage.” People naturally experience reality from one point of view—their own—and this creates a persistent bias toward thinking that a clear view from one angle constitutes a complete view.
It’s similar to how looking at a building from the street, you might have a perfectly accurate view of the facade while having no idea what the back, the interior, or the roof look like. Your view isn’t wrong, but mistaking it for “the entire picture” is.
When someone articulates their perspective well, they’re essentially saying, “From where I’m standing, this is what I see clearly.” The error is the unspoken addition – “…and therefore this is all that there is.” They don’t realize they’re reporting from a vantage point. They think they’re reporting on reality in its entirety.
The Absence of Integrative Thinking
What’s often missing is the capacity or willingness to hold multiple valid perspectives in tension—to say, “Yes, AND this other thing is also true, and together they create a complex situation that can’t be reduced to either one alone.”
This requires a kind of cognitive flexibility that’s genuinely difficult.
It means tolerating ambiguity, sitting with the discomfort of paradox, and resisting the urge to prematurely resolve tension in favor of simplicity.
Integrative thinking isn’t about finding a mushy middle ground or false compromise. It’s about recognizing that reality is often structured such that seemingly opposing truths are simultaneously operative. A person can be both a victim of circumstances and responsible for their choices. A policy can be both compassionate in intent and harmful in effect. An institution can both disrupt, AND provide structure that benefits the same group.
The Social Performance Aspect
There’s also a performance component when it comes to perspective.
In public discourse, and especially on social media, people are often playing to an audience. In this case, the goal shifts from truth-seeking to persuasion, from understanding to winning. Articulating a position strongly, with apparent logic and confidence, is a form of social victory in that context—it’s a successful performance of competence, conviction, and authority. The person may conflate this social success with intellectual validity.
The applause (literal or metaphorical) that follows a well-articulated argument reinforces the sense that the argument is correct, when really it might just mean the argument was compelling, which is a different thing entirely.
Are We All Assholes?
It may just be a human challenge across the board – our shared struggle to maintain awareness of one’s own positional limitations while engaged in the act of position-taking.
It’s particularly subtle yet complicated, because it’s self-reinforcing – the better you become at articulating your perspective, the more you tie your perspective to your identity, the more your identity attracts others to form a “community”, the more convinced you become of its completeness, and the less able you are to see what you’re missing.
The antidote, perhaps, is cultivating the habit of following every strongly-held position with the question: “What would someone who deeply disagrees with me see that I’m not seeing? Not because they’re stupid or malicious, but because they’re standing somewhere else”.
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