Essay: The Impossibility of Truth

What is truth? Is there an absolute truth? Does truth exist at all?
Why are there different words for truth, reality and actuality?

Whatever you consider the truth, it has a frail health. It can be distorted, twisted, hidden and even blown away in any which way.

In the last couple of years, the question of what truth is has become a pressing one. The consequences of different views on 'truths' have led to tectonic changes in the political landscape all across the Western hemisphere. In 2016, both in the USA and in UK propaganda campaigns were conducted that, like any hard-hitting propaganda campaign, were based on base emotions, false promises, fantasies presented as facts, and one-liners presented as policy based on truth. Upon close inspection, most of it, if not all of it, was nonsense. But who has the time and who wants to pay the effort and hours to inspect the utterances of politicians more closely? The news media? They have been cast aside as 'fake news' and now all promote some political agenda or another of the owners. The social media? They offer a degree of negativity and uninformed trolling like nobody has ever seen in the history of Man. The end result was that about half of the electorate believed the propaganda campaigns. It was like flipping a coin and this time the coin fell twice on heads for the trolls.

When so many people believe something, however outrageous it may be, it becomes a foundation of policy, news channels and education. And therefore one must understand the mechanisms behind how such new 'truths' can become actual truths.

By the way, a continuous grievance of mine is what science calls truth. They shove large amounts of information from their desks because it does not fit their preconceived notions or does not agree with the view of the world of their financiers. Much of science is therefore falsely called science. The system of peer reviews prevents new and better venues of research to be embarked upon.
To cut a long story short (there are publications and books about this), it all results in forms of insanity in the political and the scientific arenas.
It simply means that Planet Earth could better be renamed Madhouse Earth.
I endeavour to make a dent in this madness.
There are two elements that urgently need to be understood. The easiest one of these is The Impossibility of Truth which follows below. The other one is The Law of Multiple Causes. Both had to be retracted from this blog on order of American lawyers to get my book Predicting Donald Trump, Understanding a Stable Genius, scheduled for February 2019, published in America which eventually happened in August 2019.
Here I am publishing these two essential ingredients of sanity again, unredacted, starting with The Impossibility of Truth.

The Impossibility of Truth

 

Dictated truth

As Michel Foucault observed, before the birth of philosophy in the 6th century BCE in ancient Greece, there was only one truth and that was what the king or the high priest said what was to be considered true and what was not. What the Greek tyrant of Corinth, Periander (see picture), said, had to be accepted as true. Now, in his case, that was not a problem because he showed great wisdom and consideration for people. And this is what people expect or at least hope to get when they elect someone as their ruler.

Here are some of Periander's statements that have survived 2500 years. They show why it is only the personality of the dictator that determines whether the people are going to have a good life or good outcome of a war or not.  A person may have a talent for one thing but not for another thing. For instance, the British called on Churchill to lead them through the war but dropped him like a hot potato right after the war had ended, for a Churchill in peace time was quite something else. So, just to give an example, here is Periander and it is immediately clear why he was chosen to be the tyrant of the city.

  He who assists the wicked will in time rue it.

  He who has once made himself notorious as utterly unprincipled, is not credited even when he speaks the truth.

  Freedom is a clear conscience.

  Pleasures are transient, honours are immortal.

  He who trusts himself for safety to the care of a wicked man in seeking succour meets with ruin.

  Democracy is better than tyranny. 

  Judge a tree by its fruit, not by its leaves.

Today, you could start a spiritual group with lines like this. It is a far cry from what comes out of the mouth of most of the politicians of today. After half a century of freedom of expression and the search for truth, many countries now enter a period where it is the government that dictates what is to be accepted as good and bad, true and untrue. We see this in Turkey, China, Hungary; even the USA, that heralds itself as the defender of free speech, is heading in that direction.

Philosophy came about because some people felt the need to sow a grain of doubt in the absolute rightness of the religious tenets and the idiosyncrasies of the local dictator. 

If it is the government or the king or the priest who dictates how to interpret that what is visible to everyone, it is possible to hide something while it is in plain view. Mao Tse Tung was clever at that. He was incompetent at economics and government, but he understood power. King Mao was the worst scourge for China in more than 1000 years. His reign was at once unifying and disastrous for the country. He killed and deliberately starved at least 40 million of his own people and destroyed its centuries-old social infrastructure that had helped the Chinese to survive. He promoted it as necessary purges which made the population accept it. They had little choice for it was do or die, often even do and die. King Stalin did the same; in his case it were actual purges, and he did it stealthily. Only long after his death it became apparent that he was a mass murderer far worse than King Hitler. Today, King Mao and King Stalin are honoured again which is telling about the direction in which China and Russia develop. That is how propaganda works. Just the other day, King Putin forbid the showing of an English feature film that portrayed King Stalin in a jocular way. There is no lack of clarity about the direction the world is heading in. The time of real freedom may be over after electronic surveillance combines with Artificial Intelligence to force people to think and act like a tiny elite orders them to. It is unlikely the size of that elite would exceed twelve people per country. And these people will dictate what you have to think is true and not.

The problem with truth in the study of history

If you are over 50 years of age, you may have noticed that your parents or grand-parents had a different notion of history than you have. Indeed, history may be considered as an exercise in asserting viewpoints on what happened. People tend to be very selective in their data in order to make their point and look good. People have preconceived notions, perhaps taken from their subconscious fears or innate desires, perhaps taken up out of political or financial expediency. They subsequently see news as confirming those preconceived notions after which these become 'truths' that are constantly reinforced by the news they get. They see the world and the information about the world through a filter that makes them view things in a certain way. It is not a sieve or something that discards data, like the theories of the 1960's would have it. It is not that people have selective perception and cognitive dissonance that makes them unable, or unwilling, to digest information that does not confirm their ideas. It is a filter that colours everything in the way they want to.
The new-found data is that people translate things towards their preconceived ideas. An idea popped into your head and you think you thought that thought; sometime later you see something and you interpret what you see as a confirmation of what you thought. 
This is how a filter works. More often than not, the filter is installed by someone else. 
This is called framing or positioning or advertising or public relations or preaching or 'the wisdom of guru X' or 'implanting a thought into the mind of people'. It stacks up. You accumulate and then go unaware of these accumulations of fake thoughts. They are fake because they are not your own even though you may think they are. They may become your own, of course, but only after conscious inspection and objective evaluation and verification by comparing it with observed actuality. 

Never ever believe anything anybody says to you outright. Label it 'still to be verified' or something like that and make up your own mind. Anyway, this is how anything gets confused and manipulated. This happens especially with history. People want to know what happened. When they do not know, they willing to accept any datum about what happened. 
A notorious example of the above is the Armenian genocide. The Turks deny they assassinated millions of Armenians between 1914 and 1923, even though abundant documentary proof exists. Today, genocide is unacceptable so they simply deny it. They also had a Greek and Assyrian genocide policy in the Ottoman Empire, but they managed to keep that out of international scrutiny quite cleverly. A similar thing is happening right now with the Jewish holocaust of 1942-1945. An increasing number of people deny that it ever took place even though abundant documentary proof exists.

It simply means that 'an historic truth' means something different within as little as two generations.

History can be seen as an effort to get agreement on what happened. And when belief systems and value systems change, so does history. 

In my life, I have been taught three different versions of the birth of my country and two different versions of our colonial era. When I was in elementary school (UK: junior school), the colonies were a wonderful thing. I never heard a word about suppression of the peoples in our colonies nor anything about something like slave trade. When in high school (UK: grammar school), the idea that the colonies have profited from our governmental institutions began to fade and ideas about suppression and exploitation started to be taught. Today, it is about slave trade and our country seemed to have done no good at all in the spice colonies. This happened to coincide with the propaganda of the revolutionaries who wanted to establish their dictatorships with the consent of the people. 

The glorious history of my country is full of heroes, conquests and civilisation programs of the indigenous peoples, but today it has been construed into a botched bunch of mishap adventures driven by greed and carelessness, which is best to forget altogether. 

Of course, actuality was a bit different. As ever, there were good things and bad things. One of the things that tends to be overlooked is that the indigenous populations of villages in our colonies were terribly exploited and suppressed by their own rulers and hoped that my countrymen would protect them, just like the Afghan people had hoped that the foreign troops of the International Security Assistance Force, ISAF, would protect them against the feared and hated Taliban. The complaints were and are not about wrongful exploitation by foreign governors and troops but about them not protecting the peoples from their own ruthless and intensely corrupt chiefs. 

Another element that we are not supposed to talk about or even know is that the slave trade from Africa could only have existed because there was an abundant supply of black slaves sold by black Africans themselves. Slavery was common in Africa from Dakar to Djibouti and in some places it still is.

 

Frankly, I do not think that if people were free to research and write their history that it would be any better. People would rewrite history to suit their personal taste and keep rewriting it until it was as they wished how it would have happened. This means that when we read historians, we first need to ask ourselves "What does this writer try to achieve? What are his personal and political objectives?" Only then can we interpret what we read. 
For instance, I read two biographies about Siegmund Warburg, the Jewish banker who invented the hostile take-over via the stock exchange. There was a big difference between the biography written by a Jewish writer, the French genius Jacques Attali, and one written by a Cambridge professor who is a prolific publisher of popular history books, Niall Ferguson (I don't think he wrote it all himself but can't prove that). 

Another example is the news channels. I once watched 8 news channels for three months, including CNN, BBC, Al Jazeerah, CGTN and RT. To my astonishment, the Al Jazeerah channel was the best by far and CGTN was the only channel that brought good news. CNN and BBC were not neutral at all and were very selective in what they broadcasted. You do not learn much about the world from watching CNN and BBC, you need to watch other channels, too. For instance, I had been completely unaware of the Chinese efforts to combat climate change on a large scale. China is being portrayed as the bad guy while my current evaluation is that it is the only hope for peace in the world and a better climate. The USA is belligerent and destroys the climate of the Earth on an unimaginable scale, for the sake of a few billion more in the pockets of some fossilised oil billionaires and financial supporters of the Republican Party - currently the only group of people in the world that still denies the fact of human induced climate change. This is all the more poignant as the USA is one of the countries that will be hardest hit by climate change. Scorching heat waves, ice-age colds, long droughts, floods and torrential rains from hurricanes, they will get it all in spades. But the pocketbooks of the sponsors of the Republican Party are far more important than the plight of 327 million people living in the USA and the 7,200 million living outside of the USA. 

 
How will history interpret this? 
It all will depend on the way you feel a person should live, and on who is in power.

New relevance of the philosophy of truth

The question what truth is, has become a hot topic again in 2017 with the advent of a way of thinking that could be called Trumpism. 

Advertisers have known for long that people follow their emotions and feelings instead of their reasoning. Feelings supersede facts because people are not able to think rationally. People happen to be irrational but believe they think and act rationally 90% of the times, give or take a few percentage points. 

Apparently, rational and logical thought are rare and it follows that it must be very hard to do. Proof of this is simple. If people would be rational, they would take the right decisions all of the time and this would make them happy as a clam at high tide. They would come together and live in peace and prosperity without wars, without drugs, without hunger, without crime, without illnesses, and play the game of life to its fullest extent and enjoyment. Instead, depression is rampant, young people are unhappy, many are at a loss about their future, and Mankind is on the brink of destroying its natural habitat, and we consume natural resources at a rate like we have two planets instead of one. To destroy the very things that keep you alive, absolutely is the stupidest behaviour any living being could do; and mankind does it. In this essay, we are not going to try to understand why that is. We are just considering the impossibility of truth.

 

One of the impossibilities of truth comes about when people cannot confront any more the real world, i.e. actuality. This is now happening with regard to climate change. The last opportunities to do something about it was December 2015 in Paris. 195 countries had agreed to combat climate change, including the USA and China but with the exclusion of all oil states. This last chance has now been thwarted by Donald Trump himself and his Administration. Why? Because Trump tears up anything Obama has achieved, for Obama is black and highly intelligent and very well educated and well balanced, things Donald Trump can't stand nor understand. 

So, climate change will come in the worst possible form. And you should remember who caused it. I think it will be the longest-lasting legacy of Donald Trump and his Administration. This is not a political statement, it is a registration of a fact of history that may or may not be considered to be true in the future. It all depends on who will write the history.

By now, people are so confused that they do not believe any official statement any more. And therefore they prefer the imagined history or, better still, a fantasized history, like The Lord of the Rings or The Game of Thrones or in a more devious form, The House of Cards (BBC, 1990; Netflix 2013 - 2018, left) that looks so actual that it becomes believable. And then people start to project what they see in a fantasy on television on real people in London or Washington and vote accordingly. This is happening right now. The imaginary world is being projected onto the real world and many people who cannot confront reality or who want to bend public view of reality for their own private purposes, now say the real world is 'fake'. 

In itself, this makes for a highly interesting philosophical conundrum but that is beyond the scope of this essay.

A new contribution to the philosophy of truth 

In 2017, there has been an unexpected contribution to the philosophy of truth from a most unexpected source.

The communications director and surrogate for Donald Trump in the White House, Kellyanne Conway (left), may have become immortal in philosophy for having introduced a brand-new philosophical concept, "alternative facts". It has a ring of familiarity so strong, it is like it has always been part and parcel of everyday parlance but it was not. Before she said it, there was no reference to it. We even have an exact date that the expression "alternative fact" was used for the first time in history: January 22, 2017.

It sounds simple, too, but it is not. Its idea goes rather deep. Let me explain.

A person has a viewpoint and sees things from his of her point of view. So it follows that any particular thing is being viewed in 327 million different ways in the USA alone. Therefore one can state with certainty that no fact is a fact until it has been agreed upon amongst all of the people in their peer group. It also means that facts differ from peer group to peer group. 

A peer group is a collection of people with a similar status or interest that you use as a reference for yourself.

The conservative soy farmers in the mid-states will have a different view on what is happening in Washington D.C. from the moneymakers on Wall Street.

A complicating factor is that it takes quite a lot of effort to get to what is actual, i.e. what is really real. It takes research and training in the art of observation to see an actuality instead of just seeing what you think you see, i.e. your own reality. 

It is a well-known fact with police officers and lawyers that witnesses seldom give the same rendition of the same event. Experiments have been done where people were put in a room. All of a sudden, some students burst upon the scene who are in some kind of fight. It lasts less than half a minute and then they disappear. After it has happened, the onlookers, i.e. the witnesses, cannot agree on what has happened, not even on the number of people they saw. You can experiment this for yourself at a cocktail party or BBQ with your neighbours. 

The common observer sees what he thinks he sees. He interprets what he sees and considers that to be the truth, for he has 'seen it himself', didn't he? But that is just some image plus some chimeras from his subconscious plus some memories and preconceived ideas that he is projecting upon his perception. This concoction of perceptions, ideas and hidden traumas is his reality. In one word, every perception is filtered. The layman observer thinks his observation is the actuality but it is not. It is actuality filtered by his personal filter and that filtered observation becomes his reality. 

 

On top of that, there is the problem of shifting values in a society that influence perception. This complicates matters immensely. For instance, 'nerds' used to be looked down upon and were considered unacceptable people. Today, they are highly valued and sought after; they command salaries beyond imagination. Of the ten richest people in the world, five are certified nerds.

 

In conversation, people offer what they want to convey as actuality and often convey what they consider to be actuality or truth. But in actual fact, they do not convey truth at all. They convey their filtered viewpoints mixed up with some facts they know. And where do they get these facts? From their subconscious, from their observations of yore, from their interpretations and misinterpretations of prior perceptions, and from people and news outlets that had an agenda. E.g. the news from Fox News is almost opposite that of MSNBC. The official news in Western Europe about China is very different from what is actually happening in China. All these biased renditions and mixed up interpretations are baked into a cake, in other words, and served up as something that the speaker or anchorwoman considers palatable for her audience, i.e. it is presented in a way people will accept. 

 

All this makes 'truth' a highly contested thing. There are as many truths as you can make up. And so we get this concept of 'alternative facts'. It is just facts from the viewpoint of the speaker. And the speaker may deviate from what his audience considers to be facts, which results in the view it is all just another mixed-up broth. It is one confusion juxtaposed to another.

 

Here I define a fact as something that is said to have been observed and is given a name and meaning regardless of the truth of it. A fact may be a lie or an actuality, a belief, a conviction, something said by someone, anything at all. Without further data or observations one cannot evaluate the truth of a fact. This definition of the word 'fact' used to be the definition for 'a datum' but today facts and data are conflated concepts, unfortunately. A fact may be a datum that the despot says you have to accept as true. And then, after a while, it becomes 'the truth', especially when it is repeated over and over again by multiple sources. The Trump Administration is a rare example of how this is done. It is a rare example because everything is in the open. Elsewhere, it is done this way, too, but the operatives are hidden. 

So you get one fact and then another and, perhaps, another and yet another. If applied to the same situation you get an array of facts that may contradict one another or not. Each fact is an alternative fact about the situation. 

It might be argued, from the way 'facts' are created in a person's mind, that for any situation there are as many alternative facts as there are people observing it. On this planet, then, there are 7 1/2 billion minds that produce alternative facts. Donald Trump is just one of them. 

 

I consider this philosophy of 'alternative facts' an interesting and significant contribution by Mrs. Conway to the philosophy of truth.

 

Let us elaborate on this a bit more.

A peer group is defined as the group of people that one uses as reference for one's belief system. After a while, the members of peer groups tend to hold the same beliefs and opinions. They tend to see things in the same light. Newspapers, television channels, magazines, even city quarters and villages tend to be home to one dominant peer group. Some of these are very easy to distinguish, like China Town, the Jewish Quarter, the old black Harlem, but also the Hamptons on Long Island in New York, and foreign residents in Monaco.

Within one population, one has a whole range of peer groups. So it follows that the peer group of Trumpists have a different agreement on what constitute facts than other groups may have, like a particular television program with pundits who have all been selected because they are known to agree with one another and with the viewpoints of the network presenter and his or her editorial crew behind the screens.

 

It follows that one could say that the larger a group is that holds a common agreement about a fact, the truer that fact is.

 

There has never been a word for this phenomenon of shifting truth values with regard to observations. And now we have one: alternative facts, thanks to Kellyanne Conway.

 

By the way, now that we are at it, the above philosophy of truth of facts leads to the philosophical question of what would be an ultimate truth. Well, an ultimate truth of course would be what everybody has agreed upon that exists.

And in that forever receding horizon of ultimate truth, we can discern two shadows against the light of truth, the only ultimate truths found so far, and even these truths are only true for you. They are:

1. you exist;

2. you put something out (to observe or enjoy or whatever you want with it).

Isn't that a funny idea?

To be honest, I encountered this idea of absolute truth when reading a book on philosophy by Ron Hubbard. It ends off thousands of years of philosophical discussions on this subject. Of course, philosophers don't like that and perhaps that is one of the reasons he is considered controversial. But the Canadian philosopher of history and media, Herbert Marshall McLuhan, wrote about Man in this way, too, exactly ten years later, in 1964. Today he is a hero but in his time he was attacked because he said Man was basically extensions of himself.

Perhaps the closer one comes to real truth, the more one is crucified by official opinion. We have seen this time and time again in the annals of our recorded history that, at least officially, goes back about 5,600 years. Anyway, I thought the idea of what constitutes an ultimate truth was a noteworthy concept so I noted it.

A handy definition of truth

My habit is to read anything at all without preconceived notions and then see whether it works or is useful or not. I am certainly not a victim of the scourge of political correctness that dulls the minds and dictates the lives and opinions of so many people. 

Doing my own thing, unexpectedly, I found a handy definition of truth that does not lead to endless discussions and could appeal to a majority of people. It is by the famous L. Ron Hubbard (picture), a researcher of the human spirit who initially supported himself by writing science fiction. 

Someone gave me a book by him, called Scientology 0-8, The Book of Basics, that I found absolutely fascinating. It contained a series of lists, scales, charts, statements, foundations of logic and other things that, according to the editors, comprise the fundamentals of the philosophy of Scientology. Compared to what I had read of philosophy and psychology and about thirty other spiritual movements, I found it to be incomparably more advanced than anything I had ever encountered before. 

Obviously, the book has the characteristics of a synopsis and presupposes familiarity with other writings by L. Ron Hubbard. Frankly, when I looked it over I found it difficult to comprehend how such a thing could exist at all. It is very different from what many media, comedians, and trolls have been telling; almost the opposite, in fact. Anyway, feel free to inspect it for yourself, or browse through www.scientology.tv. The book contains lists of axioms meant to describe what all people have in common, which in view of earlier sections of this essay is a remarkable statement. One of those axioms could be construed as a mini-dissertation on what comprises stupidity, called "Scientology Axiom 38". In it, a definition of truth is formulated that I found astounding in its simplicity and precision. It reads, "Truth is the exact time, place, form and event."

If we apply this to a subject like history, immediately it becomes obvious that truth in history is unobtainable. Why, history is about what we think that has been. See my lengthy dissertation about that earlier in this essay. 

Indeed, a standard joke is that in the distant future, parking meters will be interpreted as personal systems for continuous sacrifice to some as yet to be discovered pagan god of the primitive people of the 1980's. We are still in a time and age where we understand what a parking meter with a slot for coins was but already in my city, young people have never encountered any. People park with the help of apps or debit cards, completely coin-less. It is not difficult to predict that with the help of the GPS system of the car and a bank account, the parking fees will be deducted automatically in the near future without any human interference. That is the moment people will have forgotten what a coin-operated parking meter was and will start to assign significances to the meter that it never had. E.g. a professor: "Dear students, back then people gauged the amount of new ideas their interlocutors could accept. This was measured in a meter and the higher the number, the greater the space in the head where the other person could park his ideas. So they called it a parking meter."

 

Truth in history is fully dependent upon the viewpoint of the observer within the contextual data that is available to him. When the contextual data is no longer known, only viewpoints remain, which then transform to opinions based upon educated guesses about contexts, which we can now define as educated guesses about time, place, form and event.

Applying this reasoning to pre-historical data like what induced people to make the cave drawings 25,000 years ago, makes this conclusion immediately obvious. We do not know when these drawings were made, we do not know how they did it or their context (fun? instruction? religious? boredom?), nor what actually took place. We only know where it was done.

The inexorable conclusion must be that history can only exist in the form of subjective truths and therefore, I am sorry to say, history is the effort to recover memories that have been lost forever. 

Distortion of history happens very quickly. E.g., try talking to old friends and things they remember from your common past. You will notice that your memory of an event you experienced together with them, tends to be different from theirs, sometimes even very different. Your first thought will be what the heck has happened to the memory of your friend. But as a philosopher, soon it leaves you wondering what the heck had happened then, actually, and what the heck has happened to your and his memory. 

Well, as Marcel Proust philosophised in his book "In search of lost time", nothing happened to your memory that did not also happen to their memory, too. We are all in search of happy times, as remembered but elusive forever.

Science is based on probabilities, not on truth

In the years 2014 - 2016 a new material has been developed called aerogel. It is as strong as steel but weighs nothing, literally nothing. The wafer shown here on top of a ball of fluffy dandelion seeds still on a stem can survive being run over by a car but does not make a dent in the fluffy hairs of a dandelion after blooming. It is an impossible material, yet it exists. 

The process of creating aerogel is easy to tell but difficult to do. You print the structure first with ice as the bonding material. Then you freeze-dry the ice out of it. You are left with an atomic structure that is void of anything superfluous.

The onlooker is left agape when gazing upon the actuality of what atoms actually are. For you may not realize that atoms are almost nothing but void. It is like the solar system, electrons moving around a kernel at a relatively great distance. But the constituting elements of the atom are forms of energy and energy does not weigh anything, does it? To complicate matters further, all these 'classical' constituting elements of electrons, protons and neutrons are not only just energy (E=Mc²) but also different forms of energy, called quarks, the state and location of which is uncertain.

 

In other words, modern science finds it almost impossible to define the truth of an atom at any given moment. The definition of an atom has become a set of probabilities. As everything in the material universe is comprised of atoms or parts thereof, in one way or another, it follows that everything in this universe may be considered to be a set of probabilities. And by extension, all of the universe is nothing but sets of probabilities. In other words, an aerogel is just another outcome of a game of chance. 

 

For this reason, to people who think that there exists nothing but the physical universe, modern governmentally funded philosophy (called officially dialectic materialism) makes sense. To them, everything that happens is the outcome of a coincidental event on subatomic level. To me, that 'chaos theory' is the most inane and degraded thing any being can think of, yet it is the official philosophy of today and if you do not adhere to it, you will not get any grants or subsidies. But that is beside the point. The point is that a probability has no will, no ambition, no thought, no frustration, no trauma, but you have. You are not a probability of some atoms cobbled together in some primordial miasma purely by coincidence. See the book When an Alien Speaks to You by Charles van der Hoog for an advanced and novel but far more probable explanation of how living nature may have come about.

 

To onlookers who were not present, the existence of an actuality as an outcome of a throw of subatomic dice makes truth an impossibility. The onlookers may or may not consider that the outcome of the throw of a dice was different and that what is being conveyed to them as an actuality is just a story or another lie. This is illustrated by the aerogel story. It is so beyond the realm of everyday experience, that the onlooker is apt to think he has been taken by an April Fool prank.

Looking at the dandelion with its fluffy seeds, more vulnerable and lighter than the lightest feather, it must be impossible to have material stronger than steel weighing less than such a fluffy weightless set of flying seeds. Yet it exists and we, humankind, have made it ourselves.

And so, it is easily illustrated that truth for one person can be unbelievable to another.

As of this writing, we have an American president who seems to live in a world of self-constructed fantasies that, to top it, is in a constant flux itself, too. One can observe that he seems to absolutely believe what he says even though most onlookers see it as lies or fantasy at best. The fantasy changes and then, to Donald Trump, the new situation is his truth. His wealth and position enables him to be careless of whether other people believe this new truth or not. Trump is simply dancing on the fluffy seeds of the dandelion. Other people see him do it and say to themselves, it is not possible that this is happening, yet, like the aerogel, it happens right in front of their eyes. To them, it is a truth of actuality that cannot be believed, to them it really looks like an alternative fact.

Amsterdam, 7th of April, 2018.

Photo courtesy of Chris Brannen Photography, Bath, UK ( chrisbrennanphoto.com)

Illustration courtesy of Shadow Figures, Wales. (www.shadowfigures.co.uk/)