Truth is Highly Overrated  On a one-way street in San Francisco’s Chinatown, between a Szechwan restaurant and a shop selling healing herbs, is a local newspaper office. The sign on the window reads, Truth, Semi-weekly. Rather than make things clear as newspapers should, this publication’s very name poses several curious questions about the nature of truth itself.

What is truth? Is it constant or does it change? Is the truth the same for everyone? Does truth have a schedule, an expiration date? Can truth be delivered, semi-weekly or otherwise? Is there a difference between truth and fact?

As a local Chinese-American newspaper, Truth can be delivered semi-weekly, but is truth something that can be handled at all? There are different kinds of truth, the gospel truth, the plain truth, the moment of truth and the unqualified truth, even the naked and unvarnished truth. Are there different degrees of truth as well? And, if something is not true, is it a lie?

Our legal system asks witnesses preparing to testify under oath, “Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?” However, that same legal system gives more weight to measurable, confirmable “facts” than to the “truth” of eyewitnesses. Why? Maybe it’s because while facts, or evidence, can be tampered with, they tend to be free of the beliefs, opinions, prejudices and assumptions that people bring with them.

Charles Darwin wrote about provisional truth, the best truth we have at the moment, and eternal truth, truth we do not expect to change because it hasn’t yet changed. In his book The Origin of Species, Darwin asserts that his natural selection hypothesis is based on the reassessment of current truth, that superior species evolve over vast amounts of time. The rightness or wrongness of his evolutionary concepts are only meaningful if our conventional and biblical understanding of truth and time are expanded. From Darwin’s perspective, truth is not permanent, but in a constant state of evolution, changing as a result of new context and content, documented or not.

Hemingway’s exploration of truth is a gauntlet to writers. “All you have to do is write one true sentence, and then go from there.” His novel Truth at First Light is all about truth as agreement. In fact, truth is more about agreement than about facts or beliefs. And because truth is always changing, shaped and reshaped by new information, what may be truth to one person may not yet be truth to another.

Carefully vetted information becomes truth, if only for a while, because of the credibility of its source and the clarity of its presentation. So if the publication Truth is accurate even half the time it is of real value to the communities it serves.

Most businesses, institutions and governments tend to understand, appreciate and accept only one truth: their own. They sometimes forget that other people may experience and act on a different view of truth. Conflicts occur when truth becomes an issue of ownership, not one of clarification. No matter how temporary, anything is possible when truth is shared.

Essex Two examines and identifies the elements of language and images that will help its clients present themselves to their customers in ways the promote trust and demonstrate truth. Visit the Essex Two website for case studies that demonstrate our ability to serve the success of our clients.

Worth your time:  The West Wing on NBC Television created by Aaron Sorkin. Set aside the awards and accolades from peers, critics and audiences for superior acting, writing and directing and focus on the real talent of the show: ideas remembered. From pluralism to racism, from the Constitution to the Koran, from science as culture to commerce as community, this one-hour show reexamines and explores the ideas that have shaped and defined our lives and the world. By reintroducing us to concepts sometimes too close to see, The West Wing gives us back the innocence and excitement of discovering new ideas.