From the Diary of Emile Belasco (8)

I am finding that the information age is anything but.

Now this is not another screed about my hatred of the Internet. I've certainly trod that ground enough, but it does have something to do with informational culture. I am beginning to notice as the breadth of human understanding and experience broadens, doubles, triples, and generally expands as the ability to communicate increases; the ability to discern Truth begins to attenuate. You see, information must have provenance and validity to be true. In our world before the Internet, this was a natural state of affairs, but as the Internet and communicatory culture became widespread, an interesting thing happened. Information suddenly entered a seemingly quantum state, where there was so MUCH information, it began to seem as if each and every bit of information was equally valid, and since on the internet, provenance is hard to come by, all pieces of information seem equally true. One has to look only as far the nearest Internet forum to realize that no matter what is being discussed, no matter how heinous and obviously inimical to human life, there will be some pusillanimous pipsqueak who will stand up and loudly defend it as some sort of virtue. This alone has the unfortunate effect of making anyone without dogmatic zeal backing their own arguments seem weak and uncertain. Some even become weak and uncertain.

Take a look at it from another angle: We tend to believe things that are repeated to us. We encounter so much information in the course of our daily lives that if we hear something more than a few times unless we have solid countering evidence, we tend to believe. This even extends into the emotional realms. A good friend of mine and a protégé in the mystic arts recently underwent some rather distressing heartbreak. The cause? His lady-friend's friends took a dislike to him and as he told me that, while she isn't stupid or weak-minded, you can only hear "Girl! You need to kick that loser to the curb" before you start to believe it, true or not. 
      And truth dies a slow sickening death. One only has to look as far as the political landscape of this country to see that the basic understanding of things has completely eroded. People on all sides of the political and religious divide who distort and manipulate information for personal power and wealth do so by dint of standing up and loudly declaiming their "truth" to anyone too lazy or busy to form an opinion themselves. And, if you can do that with enough sheer bloody-mindedness and perseverance, you can, after a fashion, create your own reality.

Now, of course, this doesn't affect practical truth. One cannot simply shout down gravity nor blog-post thermodynamics into submission. But since almost all of my work pertains to abstract truth, I am justifiably concerned. There used to be an adage that the opposite of a great truth is not a great lie, but another great truth. I find that these days it's a great deal more complicated than that.

My mentor used to have a saying as well. He used to say; "There is no one great truth in the world. There are many little truths, spread across the depth and breadth of creation. A wise man collects truth as best as he can. But just as there is no one great truth, there is no one great lie. There are many little lies. A wise man does not collect lies. That's what we have governments for."

Ah well. Perhaps some day, Truth will return to its essential binary state. But you'll note the lack of me holding my breath.