Truth

I have been interested for a while now with the nature of truth, and the best I can come up with is that truth only exists according to some people or within some system.

• There are no universal truths: what is true for one person is not necessarily true for another. Unfortunately truth is what the majority believe (or what they perceive to be the truth, so that interestingly if enough people believe something, then it becomes true), so anyone who comes up with a new idea which is different is automatically branded insane or a dissident, or at the very least eccentric. However, you must have your own personal opinions derived from personal experience, and not based on other people's opinions. Your opinion can be the same as someone else's, as long as it is your own opinion. Coincidences happen, so don't deliberately hold a different view from someone else, just to be different (unless it's funny).
• Never believe anything anyone says. This confuses some people, who think that not believing a statement is the same as disbelieving it, which of course it isn't. There is no right or wrong, follow your heart and you will find your own way. The world is what you make of it.

Now this is going to sound really cynical, but you can never really know anyone, and you can never know for sure that anything really happened. How can you not know anyone? Well, if it's a media figure then the chances are you have not met them and you know only what they want you to know, or only what newspapers and magazines want you to know, which may or may not be an accurate depiction. If in contrast someone is your friend, lover or lifetime partner you can know what they like, what turns them on, what they do, or especially if you're both newly in love you can have intimate conversations which are incomprehensible to any casual observer, or if you find a 'kindred spirit' you can have a meeting of minds, or you can do what the hell you like really. But the problem is, you can seldom know what a person is thinking and why and people always hold back secrets unless they're very silly indeed. The best you can hope for is to know yourself. Well I'm sure that no-one's convinced. Anyway. Moving swiftly on. How can you not know whether anything happened? Well unless you were actually there it's just hearsay, the word of others. You could say why would people lie but that's like saying why do people kill, who knows why, it just happens sometimes. OK, let's say you were at a place and something happened and you saw it all and you're remembering it later. Now there's a problem here and it's this. Throughout your life your brain is recording, even when you're asleep or unconscious. All these recordings are stored perfectly in chronological order. But when you remember an event you use your mind to recall what happened, and in nearly all people the mind is corrupt in some way, it remembers different things, or part of the brain's recording, or whatever it likes really. So as you can't be everywhere, can't know when people are lying, can't read minds and can't even rely on your memories, what hope is there?

• The world is full of hypocrites and liars. Just ask a Psychologist what the word means. Meanings change my arse. I share Marilyn Manson's belief that if everyone just stopped lying, most of the problems of the world would simply disappear. Some people might argue that it is noble to lie (e.g. Casablanca) and sometimes necessary, "to protect people from the truth, which they couldn't cope with." Such people need protecting from themselves. By "lie" I mean "a statement deliberately or maliciously misleading another person for personal gain, habit, fun etc." as opposed to the rather simple "something which isn't true"

Godel's Incompleteness theorem says basically that every system contains statements that can neither be proved nor disproved within that system, which was a bit of a blow to Mathematics at the time.

If you have any statement "A" then unless you're dealing with Quantum Theory either "A" or "not A" holds. The problem is that people generalise and say that "if it's true for this then it's true for everything."

People fear Government conspiracies to make them believe all sorts of things, but they do just fine on their own without intervention.

One type of liar I hate is people who exploit children. What I mean is adults who censor movies, or claim that most Lara Croft fans are teenage boys. They do this in the name of protecting children, and/or to avoid admitting that they themselves are the ones who are offended or Lara-fixated, and need protection. A case in point is the United Nations Elephant, a statue presented by Kenya in 1998. Now the officials at the UN were embarrassed by the size of the elephant's -ahem- appendage and said that it might scare the children. But they're the ones having a reaction to it. I doubt that children would much care, let alone be scared. Children are more creative, intelligent and inquisitive than adults (well they don't have to be, but that's another story), they just lack experience. In any case, I went to see the elephant last month and it's not so bad, except they've hidden it in a corner of the garden. When are people going to grow up, oh sorry that's the wrong expression given the context. Bye now.