Praise Truth

Transcript

Welcome, beautiful thinkers! I’d like to talk to you about praising truth, praise the truth.

So, in the last couple of years, my perspicacity has increased significantly.

Now, I was a card player for some years. And an important thing about being a poker player is to notice the congruence. To ask what is the story that my opponent is trying to tell in this situation.

And perhaps I wasn’t quite as good of a card player as I thought it was. Because I couldn’t.

It’s only recently that I started to put this thing together, thinking about how congruent a person’s story is, but if a person in a card game, a person bets in a certain way, they bet on a certain bending round. And you ask how does this make sense? What kind of cards could he possibly have? That would make sense in this situation?

And sometimes the bending pattern makes sense.

Sometimes it does not.

And that is when either you have something very unusual going on some very unusual cards, which might cause you to make a mistake, or perhaps your opponent is bluffing.

Because the more incongruent, the story that he’s telling, the more likely it is to be a bluff.

Because a lot of the time, people don’t think too closely about the story that they’re creating. Especially, well, this is why poker is kind of an interesting analog for life. Because what you do on the flop doesn’t necessarily line up with what you do on the river.

Likewise, human behavior is sometimes incongruent.

People will tell us something at an early stage, which later, they contradict, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

And that is when we say, well, perhaps this person is not being entirely honest.

And, like I said, it’s just in the past couple of years, I started to put this together.

I guess the body language videos that I watched, “How polite these things like” from Derek Van Schaik, and “Body language ghost”, and “Jim can’t swim”, or “JC has criminal investigations”, these fascinating YouTube channels that I like to watch and think about human behavior and human nature and the nature of manipulation and deception.

And all these fascinating things, and also the nature of the truth.

What does the truth look like? What is a really Arliss person look like? What does a person look like when he is dedicated to the truth?

Perhaps sometimes, the truth really looks like manipulation or deceit to the untrained eye, especially if they come in with some prejudice.

Now, what happened to me when I started noticing more that people were being dishonest with me, I started to get angry about it.

Because, I thought, “How dare this person, tell me this brazen lie?”

It’s not exactly a lie. A lot of the time, people just tell you what is salient in the moment.

And they tell you what’s on their mind, or what they think, or what excuse, or what explanation they have for their behavior.

And it’s just what is salient.

So it doesn’t, in the strictest term, it doesn’t mean it’s a lie, because a lie is when someone deliberately misleads you.

When somebody, well as the great philosopher, George Costanza told us, “It’s not a lie if you believe it”. And a lot of the time the purpose of a lie is double: the purpose is at once to convince us and to convince them. And perhaps convincing them is the primary motivation. In a lot of cases, the more important thing is to persuade themselves.

We do have a lot of biases as humans. So I mentioned that the salience bias, I suppose, or the recency bias, whatever comes to mind, the availability bias, perhaps better stated, whenever it comes to mind is more likely to be considered true.

So, whatever we can come up with in the moment, if we can come up with some excuse, we might treat that as true.

And we might not know our own motivations in deceiving others or deceiving ourselves, we might be completely unaware of those things, because so much of our thought process goes on below the surface.

We don’t really know what’s going on in there.

It’s kind of black box, these things are spinning out answers, if we can come up with questions good enough to ask.

Hopefully, we ask the right questions.

The point is, I don’t think it’s such a bad thing that people lie or people mislead us, people twist the truth, actually, that probably should be expected.

And if you buy into the evolutionary model, we say, well, survival is primary.

And what we’re trying to do a lot of the time is protect our own ego.

Because we think, the ego and the life are such a similar thing.

It’s hard to distinguish a life from the ego.

So we’re trying to protect ourselves.

And that’s what people are trying to do most of the time, when they tell these little white lies of gray lies, or black speckled lies. That’s all they’re trying to do just protect themselves.

And maybe we shouldn’t worry so much about that.

Maybe it doesn’t really matter if people tell us a few porkies.

But when people do have a commitment to the truth, when people tell us what’s on their mind, especially in a respectful way, when people tell us “I am feeling this”, rather than denying that they’re angry, they say to us, “hey, you know, I am angry right now?”

Or they even say ,“I’m angry, please give me a moment.” Even better.

If they do their best to think the situation through and separate their interpretation, from the facts, their interpretation from their emotions, if they do that, that is truly worthy of commendation.

That is worthy of our praise and respect.

And that is the outstanding thing.

Lies are, for good or bad, they’re common, they’re everywhere.

And that goes for me, as well as probably just everybody in the audience.

And that’s not a negative thing. I mean, that’s just human nature, or at least human nature as it exists at the moment.

When truth is spoken, truth rings out.

Truth counts.

Truth counts more than 1000 heaps of cow dung.

Truth counts.

Thank you for taking the time to look inside yourself and find that truth and express it clearly, accurately, and respectfully.

Praise truth.