# The Placing of Truth By:: [[Brian Heath]] 2023-06-16 Some people have a solid attachment to places. For these people, everything is better in these places. It becomes part of their identity to the point that it may become a secret annoyance to everyone who interacts with them regularly. If you move around a lot, you'll see each place has pluses and minuses. You'll like some places more than others. This isn't surprising; humans are judgment machines. It's a matter of biological survival that perpetuates well into the modern era, where survival is less dire. What is surprising to me are the people who think one place is the end all, be all. When I encounter one of these individuals, I want to implore them to live a little. Get out of your local optimum and climb the mountain of better. On rare occasions, I attempt to persuade these "homers" to explore and consider other places. The nearly universal response is akin to "I just know this place is great." They are primarily unwilling even to consider alternatives. Such is the power of our beliefs to transcend the world of ideas and manifest themselves into our subjective reality. This is the post-fact world we live in. Nietzsche claimed God is dead, we killed him, and no amount of water will wash away the blood. Here I believe God to be the idea of a singular truth. We tried to replace God in the Enlightenment with science, but it is flawed because humans are flawed. Some people believe God is alive, others believe truth is discovered via experimentation, and others believe power obscures truth from ever being found. It turns out that truth is fragile outside of one's beliefs. Even the rejection of truth through beliefs creates a new truth for you to believe. Some people embrace these paradoxes, but many stand firm in their beliefs as an existential defense mechanism. Those firmly rooted in their beliefs are unlikely to budge on what is true, regardless of evidence and arguments. The best you can do is acknowledge this as a rule of the game. If you want to make progress, find the truth gaps and offer solutions that build bridges. People will cross when the time is right or because you've embraced some of their truth while all other factions rejected it. #### Related Items [[Truth]] [[Beliefs]] [[Philosophy]] [[Enlightenment]] [[Reality]] [[The Human Condition]] [[Development]] [[Progress]] [[Metamodernism]]