Personal essays
Two decades of truthiness
Gut check
Steven Colbert has hosted the Late Show on CBS for eight years, but before that he played a fictional character for more than a decade on a show called the Colbert Report.
That Steven Colbert was an ultra-conservative. Well, he was ultra-conservative by the standards of the day. Today, that character wouldn’t be invited to conservative conventions.
But I digress.
On the very first episode of the Colbert Report back in 2005, Steven was supposed to do a bit called “The Word” around the word “truth” but decided to instead use a word he coined: “truthiness”.
He even acknowledged that it was a made up word and doubled down in a way that is sadly prescient. Quoting the Wikipedia article as of today, “Now I’m sure some of the ‘word police’, the ‘wordinistas’ over at Webster’s are gonna say, ‘Hey, that’s not a word’. Well, anybody who knows me knows I’m no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They’re elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn’t true. Or what did or didn’t happen.” (See the video clip at)
Not long ago the dictionaries gave up and added a second definition to “literally” that means the exact opposite of “literally.”
In that same way, the word truthiness hasn’t caught on - but many people use truth to mean something they feel in their gut is true despite any facts or evidence. Truth has come to mean truthiness. The second definition of truth is the opposite of truth.
Lies aren’t lies
If truth is no longer truth, are lies actually lies?
I think it was Chris who introduced me to K.M. Weiland and her podcast. Last week’s topic was on The Lie the Character Believes.
The idea is that the characters in a book or movie go on a journey and along their character arc there is a conflict between some mindset the character has and some thematic truth that either they work towards or help another character work towards.
The lie need to be an actual lie. It’s just the current world view of our character.
The truth need not be an actual truth. It’s the truth according to this story. That could explain why I have so much trouble with Science Fiction. I often struggle to accept the world the author has built for the characters.
I’ve talked before about a mystery series I like about a burglar named Bernie who often stumbles upon a corpse while robbing a place.
Lawrence Block, the author, realized that as our world modernized, there were cameras everywhere and a burglar wasn’t likely to get away with much. Instead of continuing to place his stories in the 1990s, he decided to write one that involved time travel.
I hated it.
To me the truth of the story was a lie so I wasn’t interested in the lies in that world becoming truths.
I know. We’ve devolved into one of those logic puzzles where one knight only tells lies and the other one only tells the truth so what do you ask…
The answer in the case of the knight puzzle was the same as the answer in the case of the burglar story with time travel - I just don’t care.
Despite that, a story often hinges on the lie the character believes.
And, again, lie doesn’t necessarily mean lie. As Weiland explains, “The Lie is a limited perspective the character holds about himself or about the world. Up until the beginning of the story, it is a perspective that has offered relative value to the character and his ability to survive and succeed within the story’s ‘Normal World.’”
Comforting
There are lies that I tell myself.
I’m just going to surf the web for a minute.
I’ll start eating better tomorrow.
My vote counts.
The lie is how we get by.
I don’t consider these to be big or harmful lies.
Forget about global warming, vaccines, or other fact-based topics. What about QAnon?
I won’t repeat their beliefs here, but I suppose the question we need to ask is what is the value that this perspective provides for adherents that helps them survive and succeed in what I might consider the normal world?
In the latest edition of Crooked media’s podcast Offline with Jon Favreau, Favreau asked Will Sommer how many people in the US believe in QAnon.
I would have guessed in the thousands - maybe the tens of thousands.
Surveys from 2021 report that 3-7% of Americans - that’s millions of Americans - believe in QAnon.
But it’s worse. Lots of people believe in it but don’t like the label. If you instead ask Americans if they “believe that Global Elites are murdering children in Satanic rituals, the numbers are higher at 15-16%.”
How does one in every six Americans believe that?
And how do we possibly convince them that our world is the normal world not theirs?
Now that truth is really truthiness, truth doesn’t rely on fact and science.
It relies on emotions and beliefs.
And yet, as we learned from “My Cousin Vinnie”, there’s no way for you to cook your grits in five minutes when it takes the grit eating world twenty minutes.
The witness looks at Joe Pesci’s character and shrugs and says, “I’m a fast cook, I guess.”
Pesci looks incredulous and asks, “Are we to believe that boiling water soaks into a grit faster in your kitchen than on any place on the face of this earth?”
The laws of physics can’t cease to exist on the defendant’s stove, and yet he clung to the lie the character believes.
You can’t change his mind with logic or laws of physics.
Truthiness is a powerful adversary. It’s one we must learn to combat.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 172. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe