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Does Truth Matter?

We are said to live in a “post truth” world. In 2016 the term was named Word of the Year by Oxford Dictionaries. While the immediate motivation for the term may have been a description of Donald Trump’s “war on truth”, in reality the subversion of truth has been a strategy used for millennia by rulers, their emissaries and their spies. From the Trojan Horse to the falsehood of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, certainty and doubt, trust and deception keep exchanging places, confusing the general populations.

 History is riddled with double speak. While one hand is held out to help, the other is filling a pocket. Where the world sees genocide in Palestine, Zionists see the promised land. Artist Khalil Chishtee made a sculpture with plastic bags of two men embracing while each holds a gun behind his back. 

Taking liberties with the truth is justified by advertisers, by politicians, and by defence lawyers.  It is considered acceptable because people are aware these are strategies, and learn to read between the lines. People learn to negotiate fake news, as in the words of a song “Swipe for truth and scroll for doubt - the algorithm will sort it out”.

The real casualty is not the lie, which time always reveals, but the loss of trust. Once media, respected public personalities and institutions, and religious leaders were expected to be truthful.  Today the public finds itself undefended, left to navigate a minefield of partisan, managed or fake news. The loss of faith is understandable. Whether in USA or in Pakistan, the public feels outrage that the officials paid by their taxes to protect their borders and streets, and manage government, are only protecting their own interests.  

Seeking the truth has occupied philosophers for millennia. We often use the word, yet cannot define it. Most people would say they just know in their heart of hearts or simply sense the truth. Samuel Abel, co-founder of the Eden Foundation, concludes we have no need of truth. It’s more pragmatic to accept shared beliefs, such as nationalism, cultural identity or religion, what Socrates calls “the noble lie”, even if they are completely made up. This is because people cannot comprehend the truth in its pure sense or don’t want to face uncomfortable truths. A person need not know how electricity is produced in order to turn on a light bulb. It is enough to experience the reality that when a lamp is turned on, the room gets lit. 

While reality is an objective fact, truth tends to be subjective, measured by the limits of a person’s own understanding. A car crash is the reality, but how it was caused can have multiple versions, each true in its own way.  

In Arabic instead of a word for abstract Truth, there is Haqq (reality) or Sadaqat (sincerity). The Quran asks believers to observe reality, and act with sincerity. Yet every Sufi is on a quest for the Truth and those that apparently find it cannot share what they find. Rumi explains: "A seeker of Truth looks beyond the apparent and contemplates the hidden".

So what is ‘the Truth’? Plato describes truth as abstract spiritual perfection. The Sufis believe Truth is synonymous with God and can only be experienced through a spiritual journey and not by rational knowledge.

Yet no one would deny the existence of Truth or say it does not matter. Society’s structures could not exist without a correlation with truth: no laws could be formulated, no scientific discoveries made, no parents teaching children correct values. So, how can ordinary people, who cannot follow the Sufi path, access truth? From the earliest societies, humans have turned to the arts to comprehend the universe.

Picasso said “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth”. We all know an actor is playing a role, yet we easily trust the truth of the story told. The words of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Bulleh Shah, Shakespeare, protect and preserve universal truths from the ethos of cynicism. The arts, with their ability to delve into the depths of human experience, bypassing the restraints of rationality, reveal profound insights that are intuitively recognized as truth.

 

Durriya Kazi

January 10, 2026

Karachi

durriyakazi1918@gmail.com

 

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