On Truth: It Isn't What We Think

Tue Aug 26 2025

The whole truth and nothing but the truth

“Tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

The courtroom ritual is supposed to sound sacred, but it’s theatre. Juries don’t discover truth, they simply ratify narratives. Lawyers spin, witnesses perform, and the jury decides which story to validate, which version resonates more with them. The result is called “truth” not because it corresponds to reality, but because the group recognizes it as such.

This isn’t unique to courtrooms. Everywhere you turn, schools, politics, churches, media, “truth” is invoked as a foundation. But no one can define it universally, everyone accepts that you have your truth and I have mine, and no one bothers to separate what’s fact, what’s fidelity, and what’s theatre. That’s why the word is slippery, and why every system built on it feels hollow.

The Corruption Point

The word truth didn’t always mean what we pretend it does today. In Old English it was triewþ or trēowþ: fidelity, loyalty, keeping faith. From Proto-Germanic treuwaz: steadfast, trustworthy. The same root that gave us tree and trust. To be “true” meant to hold firm, to remain constant. A true friend. A true arrow. Truth was about constancy in relation, not correspondence to an external dataset.

Fact was something else entirely. From the Latin factum: a deed, a thing done. A fact was an act, not an objective nugget of reality. Only centuries later did “fact” shift to mean “the way things really are.”

At some point, the two collapsed. Truth was absorbed into the domain of fact, reframed as “that which corresponds to reality.” Fidelity disappeared, replaced by correctness. The moral became logical.

That collapse is the corruption. Once truth was turned into fact, it stopped belonging to people in relation and started belonging to institutions in charge of certification. What used to be measured by loyalty and integrity was now measured by alignment to whatever authority declared a “fact”.

Fact vs. Truth

The distinction is simple once you restore the older roots.

Fact comes from factum: a deed, a thing done. Its modern sense as an objective “given” is a late mutation. Facts endure whether or not anyone recognizes them. The Earth orbits the Sun. Water is H₂O. These don’t require belief. They just are.

Truth comes from triewþ: fidelity, faithfulness, being steady and trustworthy. Truth was never about objects, but about relations. To be true was to keep faith, to stand by, to align yourself with your word or your bond. Truth needs recognition to survive. Without it, fidelity rots into secrecy, manipulation, or betrayal.

Facts exist. They are external, enduring, indifferent to belief.

Truths transact. They are temporal, relational, and always require recognition.

Even the simplest examples show the difference.

“The sun shines.” Factually true from Earth at noon, false at midnight, meaningless in deep space.

“Water is wet.” A tautology in daily speech, but not a fact in itself. Wetness is the condition of something else when touched by water.

These aren’t failures of fact, they’re failures of language. They show how easily “truth” slides depending on time, context, and recognition.

When we confuse the two, we collapse endurance with transience or object with relation or evidence with integrity. The result is a word that tries to do everything and ends up meaning nothing.

‘Truth’ as become an umbrella term that relies on the context to determine what it is referring to. But this makes things tricky because people all perceive things in a slightly different way. With language, specifically, this is much more prevalent and interpretations, associations and meaning can differ wildly.

It’s worth noting that even facts aren’t as pristine as they appear. “Water is H₂O” depends on chemistry’s frameworks of measurement and categorisation. What counts as a “fact” always requires some shared scaffolding.

The difference is speed. Frameworks of fact shift slowly, decades or centuries at a time. Frameworks of truth shift instantly, depending on time, context, intention, and recognition. That’s what makes facts endure while truths expire.

The Umbrella Problem

Once “truth” was collapsed into “fact,” the word began to bloat. Instead of keeping its older precision, it swallowed multiple meanings at once.

Today, “truth” and “true” are umbrella terms, used to cover:

• Correctness: “That’s true” (as in accurate).
• Loyalty: “She’s a true friend.”
• Alignment: “The arrow flies true.”
• Perspective: “I need to speak my truth.”
• Fidelity: “He stayed true to his word.”

None of these are the same. Yet we use the same word for all of them. That muddification ensures confusion. People argue endlessly, thinking they disagree, when in reality they’re using different senses of the same term.

This ambiguity is not neutral. It’s useful. Authority thrives when meanings blur. If the word “truth” can mean fact, fidelity, perspective, and correctness all at once, then whoever controls the context gets to decide which sense applies. That control becomes power. This is not a conspiracy theory, it’s just the observation of how things are.

This is the politics of the umbrella. Language that once clarified now clouds communication. A word that should anchor fidelity or describe fact is instead a foghorn. Loud enough to silence dissent and yet vague enough to mean whatever the speaker wants. Convenient.

The Church and the Capture of Truth

Latin once kept the categories distinct. Veritas was truth as correspondence. Fides was faith, loyalty, fidelity. The Catholic Church fused the two: to be faithful, or loyal or obedient was to hold the Truth.

With that merger, truth shifted from a matter of fidelity between people to a matter of obedience to doctrine or other authority.

The confessional is the clearest example. Branded as spiritual practice, it also functioned as an information system, an intelligence network if you like. Parishioners “told the truth,” but in practice they disclosed their private lives into an institutional ledger. What began as fidelity to one another became fidelity to the Church.

From there, the logic was simple. To betray doctrine was to betray truth. To dissent was to lie. The Church became the first great truth production machine.

What began as fidelity between people was captured, scaled, and converted into obedience. The template was set. Later secular institutions would inherit the same model: truth as whatever authority recognises and successfully disseminates.

The Modern Truth Economy

The Church set the template, but it didn’t stop there. Modernity rebuilt the same machine with new parts. Entire industries now exist to gatekeep “truth” and extract compliance in return for access or privilege.

Universities are marketed as places of learning, but function as sophisticated credentialing systems. Degrees are less about knowledge than about allegiance: proof you’ve internalised the rules of the discipline and can be trusted enough not to destabilise it. Without the right letters after your name, your claims are more easily dismissed as “not credible”.

Labs & Journals can serve the same function. Research passes through peer review which is part quality control, part orthodoxy policing. Results outside the acceptable frame rarely survive and if they survive are easily discredited or pushed out of mainstream recognition. Truth here isn’t just what’s discovered; it’s what networks, funding, and editors permit to be recognised.

The Media brands itself as “the Fourth Estate,” society’s so-called ‘truth teller’. But it consistently manufactures consensus more than it discovers fact: selecting, packaging, and amplifying some stories while discarding others. What’s broadcast isn’t “the truth,” it’s the version most useful to group recognition at scale.

Just as confessionals turned “telling truth” into feeding the Church data, modern institutions turned it into feeding systems compliance. Degrees, publications, accreditations, “trusted sources”, these are all toll gates. Truth has become a commodity: rationed, branded, and monetised.

The gatekeeping runs deeper than credentials. Universities don’t just demand allegiance through degrees, they shape what questions can be asked, which methods are considered valid, and what topics receive funding.

A credential isn’t just proof of competence, it’s proof that you’ve accepted the boundaries of the inquiry itself. Entire fields exist or vanish depending on where the funding flows, and whole domains of knowledge can be starved into irrelevance. In this sense, universities don’t just distribute access to truth, they actively engineer its boundaries.

The decorations have changed but the mechanism hasn’t. These are the secular confessionals, the same truth machine, only now verified with university seals, journal mastheads, and broadcast logos.

Truth as Transaction

If facts endure on their own, truths don’t. Truths are fragile. They only exist when they’re enacted, recognised, and maintained. In practice, every truth claim lives or dies across four axes:

Time

Truth has a shelf life. Real-time truth usually carries agency and it grants others the ability to respond. Delayed truth decays and at best it becomes reflection; at worst, manipulation.

Context

Truth is frame-dependent, subject to interpretation in other words. Without context, truths dissolve into platitudes.

Intention

Truth bends easily with motive. A statement meant to inform differs from one meant to persuade, soothe, or deceive. Intention charges the words with their actual force.

Recognition

Truth always requires a witness. Without acknowledgment, a truth claim withers into private perception, everyone is allowed ‘their truth’. This is why people obsess over validation: truth feels incomplete if it isn’t recognised by a witness.

Two modifiers sit around these axes:

• Constraint & Reality: the tether of fact that limits what truths can survive.

• Power: the leverage of authority that can distort or enforce recognition.

Together, these show why truth isn’t a static property. It’s a transaction: live, contextual, bound to motive and dependent on recognition.

Small Case Studies

The axes aren’t abstractions because you see them at work everywhere.

Personal

A person withholds their feelings for years. When they finally admitted them, the timing killed their force. What could have been vulnerability in real time collapsed into manipulation when delayed. Truth decayed.

Another person speaks in the moment, even when it cuts. That immediacy amplifies clarity. Truth, risked in time, strengthens recognition, strengthens connection and provides the information required for the receiving party to react with integrity.

Everyday

“It’s cold”. A truth at dawn in Amsterdam, false in a tropical afternoon. In other words it’s meaningless without context. Temperature is fact; “cold” is truth as lived perception.

“This painting is beautiful”. The fact is that it’s pigments on canvas. The truth is that its relational, requiring recognition. Without someone to see and affirm it, “beautiful” doesn’t exist. What is beautiful to one is not beautiful to another, perception determines truth.

“The meeting started late.” The fact is in the timestamp. The truth of whether it felt late depends on intention and context. A strategic delay, a minor inconvenience, or a show of power.

“He is a good man.” The fact is his biography. But the truth depends entirely on whose recognition observed it, in which frame it was interpreted. To some it looks like virtue and to others it looks like betrayal. Depends on which side of the fence they’re on.

Perception, interpretation and context bends the same truth whichever way. Then it’s not ‘truth’. It’s assigned meaning.

Institutional

In courts truth is whatever a jury ratifies, not what “really” happened. In education truth is a state-approved story delivered as fact. In politics truth is whatever polling will validate. In spirituality truth is a contextual belief promoted into universality.

Across domains, the pattern holds. Truth expires without timing. It distorts without context and it bends with intention.

Truth dies without recognition.

The Dysfunction

This is why every system that claims to deliver “truth” feels hollow or numb. They’re all built on the wrong foundation.

Truth isn’t fact. Facts endure on their own. Truths are temporal, relational, and require recognition, agreement and resonance. But institutions treat truth as if it were fact, something to be discovered, archived, or decreed. The result is informational theatre.

At its worst Courts don’t discover truth; they produce consensus narratives. Schools don’t teach truth; they deliver state-approved information packaged as fact. Politics doesn’t argue truth; it tests which story polls best. Media doesn’t reveal truth; it manufactures recognition through repetition.

Because truth requires recognition, and institutions can’t supply fidelity or relation, they substitute performance. They choreograph rituals: swearing oaths, citing studies, quoting experts, publishing headlines. All to simulate the recognition that only lived bonds can provide.

That’s why institutional truth feels dead or empty. They’re trying to freeze something inherently dynamic. And in doing so, they train populations to outsource their judgment, to believe that truth lives in the credentials, the headlines, the seals of approval, rather than in the transaction, agreement or connection between people.

The dysfunction isn’t accidental. It’s structural. The moment truth was collapsed into fact, authority inherited its monopoly. Everything since has been theatre designed to sustain it. Or to obfuscate it.

Practical Implications

If truth is a transaction and fact is an endurance, then the fix isn’t mystical. It’s procedural.

Personal

Stop asking others to “tell the truth” as if it were a universally understood concept. Ask for facts when you want correspondence and ask for truths when you want fidelity. Judge people not by whether they are “factually correct,” but by whether they are true to their word, their bond, their moment. To themselves.

Institutional

Institutions should stop branding themselves as arbiters of truth. Their legitimate role is narrower: gather and present facts with transparent process. Truth doesn’t live in verdicts, degrees, or headlines. It lives in agreement and recognition between people.

Cultural

Precision in language is the solvent. Restore the distinctions and stop using umbrella concepts. Fact is what endures without belief. Fidelity is being true to word and bond. Perspective is my experience of meaning. Correctness is alignment with a rule or model. Stop using one bloated word, truth, to carry them all.

The repair is simple, if not easy. Give facts back to institutions, return truth to the people.

Starving the Monopolies

The institutions that claim to hold “truth”, courts, universities, media, pulpits, etc. don’t survive because they’re strong. They survive because people are confused. When one bloated word covers fact, fidelity, perspective, and correctness, nobody can parse claims cleanly and in that fog, authority steps in to define truth on our behalf.

But the fog is the product, not the accident. The spell only works as long as language stays blurred. Precision breaks it.

“Studies show” is not the same as “evidence demonstrates”. “Experts agree” usually means “people trained in the same orthodoxy agree”. “Tell the truth” often means “feed the system information it can process into control”.

Once you see the sleight-of-hand, the authority kind of evaporates. Agency follows clarity. The moment you realize you can test coherence, evaluate intention and demand facts without credentials, you stop outsourcing your thinking. Truth reverts to what it always was: fidelity in relation, recognition in time, meaning negotiated between people.

This dismantling will not be fast. It took centuries to entrench; it will take generations to unwind. The institutions themselves are not the enemy but they’ve been captured by incentive structures that reward compliance over curiosity, credentials over competence. They won’t be stormed. They’ll be starved.

Change starts at the smallest scale. Parents who model clarity and fidelity at the dinner table raise children who don’t automatically defer their linguistic understanding to institutions. Friends who separate fact from truth in conversation weaken the fog between them. Communities that practice language precision make the gatekeepers of meaning less relevant.

If you don’t understand your language, how can you communicate clearly?
If you cannot communicate clearly, how can you form agreement, connection or recognition? If you cannot distinguish between truth and fact, then you cannot choose consciously not to comply.

Language precision and home modelling are starting points, but they don’t have to stand alone. The way forward is also about building parallel spaces, communities, teams, even small institutions that separate fact process from truth fidelity in practice.

A newsletter that cleanly labels fact versus interpretation or a local group that tracks evidence separately from perspective. A workplace that distinguishes data from motive in every decision memo.

These are tiny moves, but when practiced consistently they become alternatives that people can trust.

Change won’t come from storming universities or dismantling courts. It comes from making better epistemic habits visible and usable, until the old monopolies wither from irrelevance.

Language, wielded precisely, makes every counterfeit monopoly obsolete.