Everybody’s looking for the truth. Everybody wants to know what life is really about, or why we’re all really here, or what we’re supposed to be doing. Everybody wants the absolute truth.
And hardly anybody finds it.
And the reason hardly anybody finds it is because we’re looking too hard.
Whether you’re looking for the truth in philosophy, science, religion, logic, mathematics, or some other external place… you will never find it. It will always elude you if you’re looking for it externally. Because it is up to you to determine what is true. It cannot be imposed upon you from outside, it cannot be taught to you, it cannot be issued by proclamation.
We spend our lives chasing truth through various disciplines and ideas… but fundamental truth is most easily found in stories. Just stories. It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that.
It can’t be found in philosophy
I’ve spent some time reading philosophy the last couple of years. It has been a remarkable exercise in thinking (and speaking) more clearly. And it has also taught me a great deal about human beings, and about the different ways human beings see the world. Because human beings see the world through the lens of their individual values. Our eyes and ears are detectors of whatever values are important to us. Which is why there are so many branches of philosophy. Because different ways of thinking appeal to different people with different sets of values. Eyes and ears tuned to different frequencies.
Philosophy teaches you how to think about thinking. What a proposition. What an endlessly complex, over-the-top idea.
Philosophy teaches you how to ask why. Philosophy has taught me how to reason more precisely, how to construct logical arguments, and how to break big pieces of knowledge down into foundational assumptions. It’s a remarkable box of tools for analyzing the world.
But philosophy wants to offer you “the truth about life.” All philosophers are endlessly chasing their tails in a fruitless pursuit of the truth.
The more philosophy I read, the more painful the realization that it’s inadequate. The more I find that it doesn’t have the answers. It just gives me more sophisticated ways to think about what I already know. At the end of the day, that’s actually not all that helpful.
Reading philosophy gives you thrilling new ways to explain things. It gives you precise, compelling, and even beautiful language with which to explain our behavior and our world. To describe human phenomena and excesses, to describe causes and effects, to describe what meaning is or where it comes from. It gives you better language to think and speak with, and it gives you better logic to form opinions with. And of course if you intend to grapple with serious human issues, that’s a very powerful toolbox to assemble for yourself.
But philosophy also lacks… a feeling of ultimate purpose. It lacks an actual goal. It’s almost like the goal of philosophy is to assemble a big library of books and thoughts, and then just sit there marveling at it.
No matter whether it’s consequentialism, dialectical materialism, empirical skepticism, or any other branch or discipline, your library still lacks the ability to describe what human life really is or what it really means. No matter how badly you want to assemble the library that finally contains the answers you seek, that library is not complete. And it never will be.
It can’t be found in science
As I’ve written recently, people like to put their faith in science to “solve” human life. Science itself can easily transmute into a religion if it is trusted implicitly. Especially when people claim that science is “absolute truth.”
I’m not here to say that science is not true or that it should be ignored. If a biologist tells me something about my body, I’m going to believe her. If a physicist tells me something about stars, I’m going to believe him. But facts are just information. They are not pre-loaded with real-world value.
“Science is good because it shows us what is next for us.”
“Science is good because it keeps us alive longer.”
“Science is good because it alleviates human suffering and makes life better.”
To the extent that these claims are even true, I must also ask how useful they are. It’s not obvious to me, at all, that science is making our lives better. Now instead of being eaten by bears and lions, we are safe but sitting around poisoning ourselves with horrible diets and awful lifestyles. Instead of starving to death, we’re sitting around hating each other because someone else has more than we have.
And we are probably less honest with ourselves about the real value of life than we’ve ever been in history.
What you want to say about someone at the end of their life is that they lived a “good, long” life. That they found something worth living for, and lived for it. That they became a better person, and valued something. If all you can say about them is that they lived a “long” life, is that even a good thing? What, they just took up space and used up resources for 104 years but never accomplished anything?
Which one is more tragic? Someone who lived for a good 27 years, or someone who lived to be 90 but was confused and miserable and selfish the whole time?
Long life does not mean good life.
In general, we as people suck at life. And as far as science goes, we have outsourced our living to a bunch of machines that plug into the wall. Is that really a good trade? Is it even worth being alive if this is how we’re going to handle the gifts we’ve been given?
Obviously my answer is yes, but it’s a question worth asking. And it depends on how you’re living.
Science is not final, and science does not “solve” anything. Not any more than philosophy is or does. It only offers more complexity and more trade-offs.
People are a bit too fond of scientific advancement. We invent a new piece of technology, and we act like it’s a pet that’s going to automatically do our bidding, without any need for moral questions. Like we can just pat it on the head and say “good girl,” and it’ll automatically go fix or improve the world.
No dice. That’s not how science works. That’s not how anything works. You still have to come up with a way to make your discovery useful and humane. Science still requires responsible human stewards to do something good with it. Science can be misunderstood, misused, and weaponized just as much as anything else can.
Sure you can discover a cure to cancer. But then you have to figure out a way to go give it to people, affordably and at scale, without some evil corporation trying to stop you.
Sure you can be like Aristotle and think your way carefully into “flawless” logical arguments. But if you aren't using those arguments to help people with something, you're just masturbating. And if you believe in God, he's weeping at your hubris.
Scientific advancement still requires human value structures to be delivered or used in the real world. It is not absolute, because it still exists in the hands and values of human beings.
It requires good human work to be useful at all. Otherwise it’s nothing but facts and machinery.
It can’t be found in religion
When it comes to claiming a monopoly on “absolute truth,” religion is the number one offender.
Most Christian churches make three claims, either out loud or silently. They claim that the Bible is the absolute book of religion, they claim that they understand the Bible, and they claim that their understanding of the Bible is The Absolute Understanding of The Bible.
Which is a stupid and ridiculous claim.
There’s not one person on Earth who actually has a coherent and all-encompassing understanding of the Bible. Or of any scripture. First of all, the Bible contradicts itself, which means that in order to understand it you have to misunderstand it. Second, you could spend an entire human life trying to make one cohesive list of principles that the Bible stands for… and you would get nowhere. It’s not possible to distill something so complex down into a definite list of values. That’s why it’s written as stories in the first place, instead of as a list of rules. Third, things have changed. The Bible was written in a time when human behavior was common that we now find unacceptable. Because we’ve grown up a bit. Not much, but a bit.
And finally, stories in scripture are so beautiful because they are complex and open to interpretation. They require hard and earnest work to interpret. And in the work of interpreting comes the value. Talking through these stories with others is where you find 90% of the value contained within the book.
A list of rules would be grossly inadequate. There’d be nothing there. Because it wouldn’t teach, it would simply command. It would tell you what “truth” is without explaining why. Good luck getting people to follow rules they don’t understand.
The value of religion, in my eyes, lies in the stories it tells us about ourselves, and the way we discuss those stories with each other. The value of Buddhism lies in how well it captures, for instance, the stoic, selfless, and grounded human spirit. Not in its promises for later.
The value of Christianity, in my eyes, lies in how it captures good human concepts like sacrifice and love and bold honesty. Not its promises for later or its claims about ultimate truth.
Here’s the biggest issue with religion.
There are over 4,000 recognized religions in the world. And I’m sure there are thousands more that went extinct with ancient civilizations.
All of them have been useful to their believers and constituents. All of them contain different paintings of the human spirit and of what a good life might look and feel like. 4,000 different sets of gods, different ultimate value structures, different versions of the afterlife, and different ways of teaching.
4,000 different sets of claims, and 4,000 different sets of promises.
Four thousand religions.
So, for any person to claim that he or she has found the one single, true God or the one single, true religion is… well, mathematically very unlikely, first of all. But it’s also the most arrogant thing you could ever say as a human being.
So, after all these millennia of human worship and all of these thousands of gods, you think you’ve found the single correct one, and that everybody else who ever lived was wrong?
It’s almost unbelievable how arrogant that is. To think that you’re smarter than every other human civilization that ever existed, or that you see more clearly, or that you sit closer to the truth.
That’s not faith. That’s arrogance.
That’s someone selling you something and you buying it.
After all, religion is like a Silicon Valley startup — it requires exponential growth to sustain itself for its investors. It requires incentive structures for you to go out and sell it to more people.
God and religion are good things, if and only if they make you a better person. That is the one single condition under which religion is a useful thing. When you find what’s true about the human spirit in its teachings, and use that to make the world a better place. Anything beyond that is just you claiming superiority and righteousness over everyone else.
Some religions will teach that your only goal, really, is to maintain your beliefs until you die. At which point you’ll be welcomed with open arms into their particular version of paradise. That’s extremely lame.
Simply “getting through” this life so that you can get rewarded with your promised afterlife is… missing the entire point. You’re supposed to make this life, here and now, better for yourself and everyone else. The afterlife is not something you earn by white-knuckling this one; it’s something you earn by showing that you’re actually worthy of it.
There is no religion that possesses Absolute Truth. To claim that your religion holds the Absolute Truth is to dismiss almost the entire history of human experience as “incorrect.” That seems like a very bad idea. Because there are a lot of things you could learn from history, and from other religions, if you’d open up to them.
It comes from stories
The thing about Absolute Truth is, if it was absolute, then it would not even need to be discussed. Because it would be readily apparent to everyone involved. That’s what absolute means. It means not disputable. It means “with no need for proof or debate, and with no room for honest misunderstanding.”
And, as of February 2023, we have found only one solitary truth that everyone agrees on: that life is painful. The sum total of real human knowledge is that life is painful and we can’t explain why.
The only thing I have found that approaches absolute truth is that stories are useful because they contain and move the human spirit. They contain images and feelings and maps of what is important to us. And if we spend time with them, they teach us about ourselves better than anything else can.
There's a reason why people like analogies and metaphors. There's a reason why allegory is so important in literature. There's a reason why excellent teachers are not just knowledge carriers, but excellent storytellers. It's because stories just make sense to us. They make more sense to us than reason or logic ever will.
If you are having trouble putting something into words, or a student is having trouble understanding it... a story will almost always do the trick. If you can find one to carry the message.
Stories are as close to absolute truth as you can get. There is nothing below them at the bottom of human fundamentals, and there is nothing above them in the highest levels of human analysis. Stories trump all. They are the beginning and the end of human experience.
We live out stories. We find ones we like, and we emulate them. We compare ourselves to stories.
Think about it. When you're going through your daily life, asking yourself whether you're on track... you don't assess yourself by the cumbersome logic of Aristotle's best arguments. You don't think about whether Freud would think you're being honest with yourself.
In your daily life, when you're asking "am I on track"... you're thinking of a character, and asking "am I acting like this character?" Because that's easier.
Philosophy, science, and religion may help you build that character. And, ideally, that character may be just a future or better version of yourself. But that's what you're doing. You're using an abstract and yet very specific and emotionally real character to live up to. A hero, an outcast, a thinker, an artist, a stoic... whatever it is. You're picking a character, and trying to live up to it.
That character evolves across time. And you take little improvements and changes from people you admire and stories that move you. You assimilate those little improvements into the character you're trying to live up to. And they become what you're aiming at.
And, more often than not, you can't put it into words. You can't even describe what it is you're trying to emulate or what you're trying to be. Because it's just a feeling. Or a set of feelings. Or an image or a set of images. Or a principle. It's something that can't always be explained rationally.
And that's okay. Even Aristotle, with his unrelenting logic and rationality, would have had a self-image that contained weird emotions and thick unexplainables. Because he, too, was human.
What we are doing all day every day is constructing stories. We attach stories to the people and things in our lives, filling in the who, what, why, and how, so that we can see values at work in those stories. We don't even know we're doing it, but we do. Because we understand human behavior through the stories it tells. What it shows us about ourselves. About how we behave and about what we want. About what the world is like, and what we want it to be like.
Stories give us patterns of behavior to live up to. We abstract out behaviors and principles and feelings that mean something to us. And, even without being able to put them into words, we then internalize them and give deep meaning to them.
Even if you can't explain all the reasons that Hercules is a hero story, you still understand what makes him a hero. And you still compare yourself to him.
Even if you can't explain what makes Lord of the Flies such a dark and horrifying allegory, you recognize real human behavior and the real human shadow in its characters. And you're now even more able to recognize them in real life.
Not all stories are as direct as 1984. In fact, most aren't. But they're still the most useful thing on Earth anyway.
And it's because humans are better at transmitting information through stories than we are at transmitting information any other way. Stories capture us as we are and show us to ourselves. In a way that belief systems can’t.
The Bible (or, more generally, scripture) is a collection of incredibly insightful stories. And it doesn't have to be anything more than that. In fact, trying to make scripture anything more than that is one of the gravest human mistakes and leads to more suffering than anything else we've ever done as a species.
Perhaps what’s better than scripture being literally true, is scripture being useful. “God doesn’t give you more than you can handle” might be literally true, and it might not. But even if it’s not, it’s a useful thing to tell yourself and to live out. Because it will make you pick up your suffering and bear it more nobly and heroically. It will make you a better and more patient person for those around you. Because it encourages you to live out a good story that you think could have a good ending.
Trying to turn something useful into Absolute Truth is a fool’s errand. Just let it be useful and leave it at that.
Don't get bogged down trying to find the perfect answers for who or what you should be. And don't let the world tell you.
The only absolute truth in life is the kind of relationships that you want to have, and the stories and feelings that move you. Everything else is just an incredibly complex set of distractions.
If you're bogged down in what the world expects of you, or if you're looking externally for answers... stop. Stop everything you're doing. And ask yourself what's really important to you. What feels worthwhile. I’ll bet you have at least one answer in there. Maybe even a few.
Philosophy, science, religion, logic, and mathematics can help you think more clearly about what feels true and right to you. They can help you be a smarter or better person. But they cannot make you come home from work every day and be happy with what you find. They cannot make you wake up in the morning and feel your life is worth living. You have to figure that out for yourself.
Drink more water than anyone else in the history of the world,
JDR
"It is a little embarrassing that, after forty-five years of research and study, the best advice I can give to people is to be a little kinder to each other." - Aldous Huxley
First time reader and now a future one. Beautiful, thought provoking piece.