Truth: How The Many Sides To Every Story Shape Our Reality, by Hector Macdonald

This book is evidence of the problematic nature that truth has in the contemporary world. The author, unfortunately, is a big part of the problem here, given that he comes from a background of giving support to leftist political parties with regards to their communications. One of the more revealing moments in this book comes when the author talks about his efforts at helping one bureaucratic agency make predictions for future outcomes and what happened to them was one outcome that they never even considered–the corrupt bureaucracy was removed from existence by a new Conservative government. It is telling and remarkable that someone as deeply interested in truth and in predicting the future and thinking about the larger ramifications of one’s comments as the author claims to be would not think that the elimination of wasteful government agencies is not at least feasible as an option at every election. Similarly, this book is equally revealing when the author examines that his view of truth includes a lot of the popular leftwing views of disinformation and misinformation that seek to view inconvenient truths or truths that cut against their political and cultural agendas as being untruthful because they neglect context or promote undesirable ends. For this reader, at least, the author’s disclosure of his political perspective and the convenient alliance of his view with the operation of propaganda in the Biden regime and other like-minded left-of-center governments in the contemporary world, who see truths that speak against their political perspectives to be somehow untrue or unhelpful as a disqualification to speak as an expert on truth or as someone whose perspective deserves to be taken favorably.

That said, it is not as if this book is without value. Truth is complicated, and if the author is not equipped to give a way out of the complications of truth, he is at least well-equipped to show the complexities of truth in the contemporary world and how it is that basic understanding of the way things are have been drastically hindered by the wholesale failure on the part of contemporary communicators to be honest and candid about reality, both with themselves and with others. The denial of reality is a fundamental problem in the contemporary world, and one that is not necessarily a partisan one. Our insistence that we can ignore any sort of issues in the real world and make reality conform to our imagination has serious consequences in our ability to interact meaningfully with reality, even to understand it. Why should people respect the personal truth of those who deny reality and deny validity to their approaches? How do we avoid making truth itself a casualty of our efforts to remake the world in our own broken and corrupt image? The author is too far in the problem, and too far a part of the problem, to be a meaningful guide to solve the problem that he discusses in this book about truth, but our response to this need not be merely to find the author at fault for his failings–though this comes easily–but rather to express some sense of empathy with someone struggling with truth, even if they come to some woefully bad conclusions regarding it.

This book, in terms of its contents, has a somewhat complex organization. The author begins with a preface and a discussion of what happens with truth collides, as it always will in a self-interested world where subjective views count as truth and where objective realities are denied as being objective. The author begins with a discussion of partial truths (I), which includes chapters on dealing with issues of complexity (1), history (2), context (3), numbers (4), and story (5). Here the author casually libels some people as purveyors of misinformation whole conceding that some simplification is inevitable and that some details will be missed in any telling of a story given the perspective of the storyteller, only some of whom are given the benefit of the doubt. The author then deals with what he views (mistakenly in some cases) as subjective truths (II), seeking to demote concerns like morality (6), desirability (7), and financial value (8) as being objective bases of views. If financial value is not all that there is, it does not make such concerns any less real. Likewise, the diversity of human views of morality does not negative either the fundamental objectivity of the moral order from creation or the widespread agreement on the ways of proper living across cultures that does exist. This is followed by a discussion of what the author views as artificial truths (III) like definitions (9), social constructs (10), and names (11). Again, the author is seeking here to delegitimize the importance of having common standards of behavior and understanding as being artificial, and thus subject to change by whoever acquires social and institutional power. The author then examines the supposedly unknown truths (IV) as predictions (12) and beliefs (13). After this, the book closes with an epilogue about final truths relating to death, acknowledgements, a checklist of misleading truths, and a list of leftist “fact-checking” organizations whose biased work is well-known to many, as well as references, endnotes, and an index.