I now speak and walk on.
2020 to 2025 has both stolen and returned my peace.
Do read on. Many of you will concur.
I will no longer try to convince people of the truth.
Not because the truth is weak, nor because it lacks evidence, nor because it cannot withstand scrutiny, but because persuasion presumes a willingness to see. And many are not willing. They are frightened.
This is not speculation. It is psychology.
When confronted with information that threatens identity, belief, or prior allegiance, the human mind does not respond with curiosity but with defence. Leon Festinger named this discomfort cognitive dissonance, showing that people will reject, distort, or attack truth rather than revise a belief upon which their sense of self depends (Festinger, 1957). The truth is not weighed; it is treated as an intruder.
Later research confirmed what experience already knew. In controlled experiments, people presented with the same factual evidence did not converge on truth; they polarised. Each side left more convinced of what it already believed. Evidence did not enlighten, it entrenched (Lord, Ross & Lepper, 1979). The mind, it seems, is not designed to discover truth, but to protect narrative.
This explains much.
It explains why corruption survives exposure.
Why institutions persist long after their premises collapse.
Why the lie is defended with more passion than the fact.
Truth does not merely inform; it destabilises. To accept it may require admitting error, misplaced trust, or moral cowardice. It may require action. And action carries risk.
Thomas Kuhn observed that even science, ostensibly the discipline of evidence, does not surrender false paradigms when they are disproven, but only when they become socially untenable. The old guard does not convert; it expires (Kuhn, 1962). Progress, it turns out, is not enlightenment, it is attrition.
When belief hardens into identity and identity is fused with power, resistance to truth escalates. What begins as denial becomes hostility. The truth-teller is no longer inconvenient; they are dangerous.
Hannah Arendt understood this well. Totalitarian systems do not fear lies, they rely on them. What they fear is a person who insists that reality exists and can be spoken aloud. The most effective form of control is not to make people believe falsehoods, but to make them indifferent to whether anything is true at all (Arendt, 1951).
And so, historically, truth is not debated. It is silenced.
The pattern is old and unoriginal. The method changes; the motive does not. Censorship is framed as safety. Exile is called responsibility. Character assassination is rebranded as concern. And when fear reaches its apex, people will cheer the removal, social, professional, or physical, of the one who spoke too clearly.
George Orwell did not exaggerate when he wrote that telling the truth in a time of deceit is a revolutionary act. Revolutions are rarely welcomed by those who benefit from the existing order.
This is where the cost becomes unmistakable.
Many will die.
Some will be murdered, quietly or officially, because truth exposes systems that depend on silence. Others will cause their own deaths, not by intention alone, but by ignorance: by clinging to falsehoods, obeying corrupt authority, or refusing to look when looking might have saved them. It is not always suicide by despair. Often it is an ignorant suicide, carried out in darkness, under the illusion of safety.
Truth does not kill.
Refusal does.
This is the point at which persuasion becomes not only futile, but undignified.
The truth does not require my advocacy. It does not need embellishment, dilution, or approval. It does not improve when softened to spare feelings or protect reputations. I state it. I write it. I speak it. What follows is not my responsibility.
Some will recognise it immediately. Others will circle it cautiously, sensing danger. Many will recoil, not because it is false, but because it threatens the scaffolding of their lives. A few will demand that the speaker be silenced, for nothing terrifies quite like clarity.
That, too, is data.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, writing after surviving a civilisation constructed on enforced lies, concluded that one word of truth outweighs the world (Solzhenitsyn, 1974). He did not suggest it would be welcomed.
Truth does not promise comfort.
It promises coherence.
I have chosen coherence.
Those who wish to see may look. Those who prefer darkness are free to remain there, lighting their own fires and calling it warmth. I will not chase them into the smoke.
References
Arendt, H. (1951). The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company.
Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lord, C. G., Ross, L., & Lepper, M. R. (1979). “Biased assimilation and attitude polarization: The effects of prior theories on subsequently considered evidence.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37(11), 2098–2109.
Orwell, G. (1949). Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Secker & Warburg.
Solzhenitsyn, A. (1974). The Gulag Archipelago. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
Article posted with permission from Kate Shemirani
