Truth Is Not What's Useful

Truth Is Supposed To Be Simple

Something is true if it corresponds to reality. The thing happened or it did not. The claim matches the world or it does not. This is the definition that makes airplanes fly, bridges stand, and antibiotics work. But the longer I have been alive, and the more I have argued with people, the more I have realized that truth is rarely what people are fighting over. Most fights are about status, identity, belonging, comfort, and/or control. Truth is the weapon everyone claims to be holding, but most people do not want to put down the other weapons long enough to actually pick it up.

This essay is an explicit synthesis of structural fractures I keep returning to in my own life and research.

1. We have the long exchange with a gentleman I'll call Kevin, where truth is transformed into a vague vibe-word to defend spiritual beliefs that cannot be justified, utilizing weaponized skepticism to slip absolute dogmatic certainty through the back door.
2. A group-text exchange between two friends I'll call Dan and Tony which spiraled into a debate over faith and evidence, culminating in the classic defensive dodge: "He who has ears, let them hear".
3. We have the underlying philosophical problem popularized by Jordan Peterson, who oversimplifies Friedrich Nietzsche to assert that truth is merely "what serves life", thereby collapsing objective reality into narrative utility.
4. Finally, we ground all of this in the biological machinery of the primate brain, looking at how predictive processing ensures that tribalism remains our default setting.

Two Definitions of Truth

Let's untangle two definitions of truth that people confuse constantly. The first is truth as correspondence. A proposition is true if and only if it accurately maps onto objective reality. If the claim fails to match the coordinates of the physical world, it is false. It remains false even if it is helpful, even if it is poetic, even if it makes you weep during a Sunday sermon.

The second definition is truth as utility. This is the seductive, adolescent framework where a claim is deemed 'true' simply because it helps you cope, gives you purpose, or creates social cohesion. This is the playground of phrases like "that's my truth" and the classic anti-intellectual claim that "science is just another religion".

When my conversation started with Kevin it was obvious he just recently came across Eastern Philosophical thinking. After he read and article that claimed that workplace gossip is a form of "black magic", he was engaging in this exact semantic slide. Gossip is real; it is a documented mix of social contagion, psychological incentives, and reputational injury. But calling it "magic" is a deliberate attempt to inject a supernatural aesthetic into basic human behavior. It is an effort to make the narrative feel heavy and mysterious.

If we mean that gossip can ruin an individual's life, we are in complete agreement on the facts. If we mean there is an invisible, metaphysical force floating through the air doing supernatural harm, we are now dealing with an entirely separate claim that requires an entirely different level of proof.

This brings us directly to the classic escape hatch, weaponized skepticism. A certain brand of spiritual seekers love to invoke absolute Cartesian doubt as a shield against accountability. They will look you in the eye and say, "You can't prove that a guru's body didn't decompose for eight months in the West", or "You can't prove that spiritual masters in India can't execute nonlocal mind control".

They love to point out that outside of hard solipsism, we can never be one hundred percent certain of anything. This move is technically correct but functionally worthless.

Adults do not build a worldview on what cannot be explicitly disproven; they build it on what they have good reason to believe. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary support, and personal anecdotes extracted from Paramahansa Yogananda's autobiography does not count as empirical evidence.

If your framework allows for unverified gurus to execute mind control over homeless men stealing cucumbers, your framework also allows for Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and literal magic.

Falsifiability: The Line Between Genuine Inquiry And Dogma.

If a claim cannot possibly be wrong, it cannot possibly be true in any meaningful sense. A claim deserves belief in exact proportion to how well it explains the data without special pleading and with how cleanly it predicts new observations. Science is not a fixed library of facts; it is a performance filtering mechanism designed to destroy bad ideas before they become sacred. Religious and spiritual systems do the exact opposite; they immunize ideas from disproof by labeling doubt as a moral or spiritual failure.

A Group Text With 2 Friends

When my buddy Dan dropped the line "He who has ears, let them hear" into our group text, he wasn't offering a profound mystical insight. He was deploying a social weapon.

He was asserting that if I failed to understand or accept his preferred reading of Jordan Peterson, it wasn't because the argument was a tangled web of word salad; it was because I was functionally or spiritually defective.

Once you frame disagreement as blindness, you no longer have to carry the burden of proof. You don't have to present evidence, analyze mechanisms, or maintain logical consistency. You just have to signal your own membership in the circle of the illuminated.

We must look at the primate brain to understand why this behavior is so incredibly persistent. The human brain is a prediction machine running on a strict energy economy. It is constantly generating top-down models of reality and matching them against bottom-up sensory inputs to minimize what Karl Friston calls "free energy" or "prediction error". When the incoming data disrupts the model, the brain experiences this prediction error not as an abstract intellectual puzzle, but as literal anxiety.

There are two ways to resolve this anxiety: you can perform the grueling expensive work of updating your mental model to match reality, or you can simply block the contradictory data from entering your field of view. This is the exact biological utility of conspiracy and dogmatic communities; they compress the staggering complexity of a chaotic world into a single, highly efficient narrative framework where everything is connected and your identity is preserved.

This brings us to the core issue with the Jordan Peterson ecosystem. Peterson explicitly argues that the ethical pursuit supersedes the scientific pursuit, stating that if a belief increases your chances of survival and reproduction over long spans of time, it is "true enough".

This sounds incredibly profound at a seminar table, but it is an intellectual suicide pact that directly violates the law of non-contradiction. If a Christian fundamentalist community and a traditional Buddhist monastery both utilize mutually exclusive metaphysical claims to achieve generational survival, Peterson's framework forces you to call both claims "true" simultaneously.

But heaven and reincarnation cannot both be ontologically real; they are mutually exclusive. Scientific truth must remain hierarchically superior because it demands logical consistency across all subordinate claims. Peterson is radically conflating our subjective perception of reality with reality itself, essentially claiming that because we can only observe objective facts subjectively, objective facts do not exist

Let's call out the real-world consequences of this obfuscation. Peterson routinely plays tennis without the net. When asked a direct question with a justifiable, empirical answer, he will use standard realist terms. But the exact moment he is asked a question where he lacks a justifiable answer, such as: do you literally believe Jesus rose from the dead?, he retreats into his "that depends on what you mean by true" routine.

He is currently aligned with corporate media structures like The Daily Wire, serving an explicit ideological agenda (*Editing Note: He could also be dead)*. By pretending that ancient literal dogmas are just beautiful metaphorical substrates, he provides intellectual cover for people who actually believe the earth is two thousand years old, that women are naturally subordinates to men, and that outsiders deserve eternal torment.

The text of the Bible is filled with explicit, low-context moral horrors, from Moses' laws of total war to the strict institutional silencing of women in the pastoral epistles. No amount of complex narrative gymnastics can transform an explicit command to stone human beings into a useful psychological metaphor.

And for all of my Jesus fans out there, he was the one who told everyone the better follow these laws…but that's a story for a different time.

Turning This Lens Inward

I must also turn this lens of self-awareness back on myself. In my back and forth with Kevin, I was completely right about the propositional logic, the fallacious reasoning, and the absolute lack of empirical receipts.

But I entirely sabotaged the convergence of the conversation through my own delivery. The moment I used status-condemning phrases like "poster child for Dunning-Kruger" or "what are you 12?", I shifted the frame of the dialogue from evaluating claims to evaluating each other. I allowed my own evolutionary machinery to take over, turning a search for truth into a status war for dominance.

Contempt is an immediate conversation-ender. If I want my content to to actually help people to be better at meta cognition I must maintain a spine of absolute steel regarding epistemic standards while completely removing the emotional ego-triggers that give my targets an easy exit ramp.

What I Might Be Wrong About

If an independent researcher can provide a documented, double-blind case study where an un-embalmed human body was preserved for eight months in standard ambient conditions without any biochemical decay, or if a call-in medium can reliably retrieve complex digital passwords from an un-networked deceased individual, my strict insistence on the total priority of correspondence truth over narrative utility is completely falsified.

My practical code of truth-seeking:

1. Require a clear claim structure before engaging in any debate
2. Second, maintain the strict boundary that phenomenology is not ontology; feeling a presence or having an intense trance experience is a real brain state, not proof of an external spirit dimension.
3. Ask what specific observation would count as a disconfirmation; if nothing can change your mind, you are worshiping, not reasoning.
4. Understand that the moral duty of an adult is not to hold comforting beliefs, but to hold warranted ones.

False beliefs do not stay private; they dictate how people vote, how they treat their neighbors, and what structural harm they are willing to ignore. Truth is what remains when you try to be wrong on purpose. It is a cold discipline, and that is exactly why most people do not want it.