Why does everyone want to know the truth, if no one dares to listen to the truth?

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Truth is both contextual and personal. Personal means that one person’s truth is another person’s garbage. Unfortunately in the English language we fail to have a good word for “actuality.” A good way of articulating the difference between truth and actuality is to interview three witnesses. They may each have different narratives, and all the narratives could be true, from the point of view of the witness, but actuality is what happened on the security tape.

The contextuality of truth means that things that are true one moment may become untrue the second. If you’ve ever heard the idiom, “you made a liar out of me,” you’ll know what I mean. In the most dead simple case, the truth of the statement “John is alive” is irrevocably changed once John dies.

There is no “one” truth. Actuality is actuality, but actuality can’t tell you anything meaningful. Events need interpretation. We can use moral philosophy to approach a universal truth, but there’s plenty of unsettled questions. When is killing another person justified? This question is a minefield of edge and corner cases.

A naive interpretation might be “only in self-defense.” Well what if you’re at war? International war law help us to understand some of the nuances. But nothing’s ever truly settled. “Truth-seeking” can be seen as only really being able to apply to a very small domain. There will always be contexts in which the truth you find won’t hold.