People Believe only What they Think is True
In the end, people only care about what they believe to be true, not what is actually true.
Truth often resides in a gray area. There are absolute truths, like the time you picked up a pizza last night, and there are partial truths, like someone’s interpretation of a complex event that involves many subsets of absolute truths, together comprising an additional umbrella truth that is often presented as fact. Often, by definition, these attempts at establishing umbrella truths are not based on factual events.
When you disagree with things that you believe to be facts, remember that no one knows the absolute truth about everything. Facts can also be manipulated through presenting them in various ways. In turn, they stop being facts and start becoming opinions. Opinions can be facts, but they often aren’t. That’s why courts are important in eliminating prejudicial elements of a case. That’s what we mean when someone is awarded their right to due process.
The more facts that have to align in a union, the more chance there is of a distortion of the chain of events leading to a full presentation of “truth.” The U.S. court system is remarkably good at eliminating distortions if you have enough money to go through all of the courts required to unearth those distortions. Sadly, most people get stuck with their first verdicts. Many innocent people end up convicted because of this.
Once you accept that opinions aren’t facts, and that complex events are hard to understand as a factual process, you will begin to make progress in moving beyond sound bites and will soon be shrugging off all the differences in opinion you’ll encounter each day. Most people can’t help but mix absolute truth with partial truths, conflating their opinion of details with certainty that something is “this” or “that.” It’s better to take a detached view on complex events.
The truth often emerges, but it doesn’t always. Try to only be certain on events that are easy to observe and singular. The time of the pizza. The time of a call. A signature on a document. The amount someone was paid with a check, etc.