What do I know that I didn't first hear from someone else? What do I think is true that I didn't first see? (Is the sky blue or not?)
How do I confirm my knowledge of the world? Is it possible to enter the mind of another person and look through their eyes or hear with their ears? Of course not. That leaves language as the medium of knowledge confirmation. Now, any knowledge others have is a function of the genetic quality of their brain, nurturance of their upbringing, depth of their education, and their perceptual discernment all rolled into the countless cumulative decisions they made, decisions which grooved patterns of lying or truth telling. To depend on others is, to say the least, problematic.
Then again, certainty has various levels of scope. There is the personal level on which I relate to my friends, family and neighbors. There is the professional scope which is based on much wider fields of inherited knowledge such as the scientific, literary, cultural archives, the sets of social values and customs, traditions and mores. What piques my interest just now is how we determine the public good based on sensible principles of public policy.
Why do I care? I care because uncertainty quickly leads to anxiety. If I cannot verify truth that is external to my person then, ultimately, I have no reason to believe it exists. If, while going through the motions of living, I find no reliable external reference points for my internal knowledge, then all remains uncertain.
For instance, are the 2024 U.S. presidential candidates lying to me? If so, what standard reveals the lie?
It is no good consulting media outlets. They are corrupted by their slavish need for revenue. No revenue and they go out of business. So telling me the truth is not in their interest. Facebook and YouTube proved over the past few years that if what is presented to me angers and outrages me, then I will keep clicking. For every click they make a buck.
It's no different with Real Clear Politics, Reuters, The New York Times, the BBC, Fox News, UPI, the New York Post, Al Jazeera, SkyNews or The Guardian. The media is in business to make money. Their biases are so obvious (to any thinking person) that to get anywhere near certainty requires a great deal of informed skepticism on the part of the reader. Their editors keep pushing the hot button. Lying (a flexible stance toward truth) actually pays the bills. The reader is left sifting the same stories from nineteen different platforms. When is the plain double-edged truth presented? Blinkered jingoism for breakfast, propaganda for lunch and the void-of-all-solutions Critical Theory for dinner. The Left and the Right are both guilty.
Being less guilty of bad reporting is hardly a badge of honor.
The best I can do, since I still desire to obtain some level of certainty about my world, is identify their lies. That gets tiresome. Their lies come as if handed down from on high - wherever that is. Handed down, I say, because they all lie in the same way about the same stories on the same day. What a sham. Isn't there a law against this? No. It's called freedom of the press.
And what if I speak out and offer truth reliable enough to lead one to certainty? I get the backlash censorship of Google, Facebook, and others. Apparently my right to free speech is less important than their right as a free press.
The bottom line is, unless I interview Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, Merrick Garland, Christopher Wray or states' governors myself, I am not likely to learn the truth - much less who is capable of revealing it. Uncertainty persists.
Even so, I don't necessarily have a right to the truth, do I? And if I am so skeptical about who tells the truth, what action is left to me? How does a solitary citizen draw up business and government leaders on charges of perjury, defamation of character, or slander. There is certainly enough video of each for many to be convicted.
It's out of the question. So, I console myself within the innermost band of certainty: family, friends and neighbors. I bitch about it. On Substack.