Audio Transcript here:

Alright, welcome to Thomistic Womanhood. And today’s video. This is actually going to be really foundational to a lot of the stuff we’ll talk about. But in today’s video we’re going to talk about what is truth? How do we know it? Can we know it? Obviously we know truth in the simple things like, you know, like, we know there’s gravity, we know the sky’s blue. But for the bigger questions in life for things around, like how we should live our life, the decisions we should make as far as like our actions, Can we know the truth about that? Or is it just too confusing? So that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

Alright, welcome to Thomistic Womanhood. So today we’re going to talk about truth. What is truth? I don’t know if you ever seen a night at the Roxbury but there’s a song called What is love? And I think that song every time I say what is truth Probably, you know, everybody kind of calls us into question nowadays, there’s a lot of talk that truth is relative. What’s true for you isn’t true for me. So there’s a lot of confusion swirling around like what it means and how you figure it out. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today. 

So first thing I looked up the dictionary definition of true and it was not very helpful it was that which pertains to truth. So as you can imagine, that’s kind of a circular definition. Because if you don’t know what true is you’re not going to know what truth is. So that wasn’t very helpful. So I turned to philosophy and Latin and these type of people the Latin definition is a little more clear. Online definition is adaequatio rei et intellectus, which is a really fancy way of saying, When what occurs outside your mind, is the same as your idea of it inside your mind. So when you see reality, whether that’s like a physical reality or it’s maybe a more intangible reality, you know maybe how someone feels about you with someone, what’s motivating someone, you know, things like that, when what is going on outside your mind matches what you’re thinking in your mind about that. That’s when you have truth when there’s a match there. So that’s what that fancy Latin phrase means. And I think that’s a much better way to state it than the dictionary definition. So, that is, as you can imagine, that’s really important. You want to make sure that there’s a match between what’s going on and what you think is going on. the truth. 

You know, they say the truth will set you free. And that’s true. We see that especially with like trauma and abuse victims. When you’ve gone through a lot of abuse, there’s often a lot of lying that accompanies it. There’s a lot of the belief that well, this is your fault, you deserved it. You’re bad. Obviously, those are all lies they kind of can talk about it and discover the truth of what happened. You know, the therapist helps someone that that is how healing happens. So that was just one of the ways that the truth will set you free. 

The other thing about truth is sometimes it’s not such a positive experience. Sometimes it can be painful. The truth is very serious. And it’s very precious doesn’t always tell us what we want to hear the truth is like a, we should love it like a good friend, because it doesn’t always.. Sometimes it hurts. You know, sometimes your friends have to tell you things you don’t like. And when you realize the truth, whether it comes through the mouth of a friend, or it’s just something you figure it out, it can be hard, it’s not always easy. But that is why the truth has to come first. Because of the consequences. If you even doing, it’s not easy to understand it or it’s not easy to accept it. Let’s say that you know, oftentimes you can understand it. It’s that you don’t always want to accept it. 

If you want to have a good life and you want to feel in control of your life. You want to have a very accurate judgment of reality. “Judging”/ “judgment”… all that…. it gets a bad rap. And I think judgment is very crucial to life, you need to figure out, you need to make a judgment call about what’s the best course of action for your life. You don’t necessarily have to judge people, you can judge actions, you know, you judge or somebody does and how that affected you. But you can’t necessarily judge their intentions all the time. We never know how much somebody knew about how it would affect you. So we judge actions, we don’t judge persons. 

So now that we’ve kind of talked about the importance of pursuing the truth and putting in the work to really judge correctly about stuff that’s happening, I’m going to talk about a few pitfalls that we run into, because I know talking about it can be maybe a little intimidating because it’s like, sometimes it really is hard to figure out what is true in a situation. That is kind of the whole point of this channel. You know, it’s exploring the truth. We’re kind of talking through things, coming conclusions, figuring things out. So the pitfalls are basically number one, we may include evidence that isn’t relevant, or we may exclude evidence, i.e. details, you kind of have to be like Sherlock Holmes a little bit, you know, you consider the evidence, the details.

But you know, sometimes we may include evidence that doesn’t really mean anything, or we may exclude evidence that does. So a perfect example of this. Let’s say you’re dating a guy, and he’s telling you about himself. And then later on, you find out that he wasn’t actually single, he was married. Well, him being married, that was a pretty relevant detail. And when you made a judgment on whether or not he was a good person and date, that was evidence you excluded because he didn’t bother to tell you. So that’s naturally going to lead you to a wrong conclusion because there’s a detail there that you’re leaving out, through no fault of your own. But that’s why it’s important to ask questions and get all the data, before you make a decision and you try to figure out what’s going on. The second pitfall is we can give an unreasonable credibility to the evidence we do know so we can be too gullible. And we can take every detail as super important and we can just believe whatever we hear, or we can go on the other extreme, we can be too skeptical. You know, nothing is ever good enough. You know, oh, yeah, that’s this guy. You know, he’s this and nice, got a steady job. He seems to really care about me this, this and this, but it’s still not good enough. I still don’t feel like he loves me. Okay, why do you feel like he doesn’t love you? Well, I don’t know. You know, so there can be an issue like that. The third one we can oversimplify and fail to make a distinction. And again, I always use relationship examples because I feel like they’re the easiest for us to grasp. So the third one is, yeah, we can oversimplify. And we can fail to make a distinction. When you want to figure out the truth, making a distinction is always important. If you feel stuck, and you’re like, you know, my gut feeling is that there’s just something here, but I’m not sure what it is, chances are, you probably just need to make a distinction. You need to kind of separate out, you know, something. And so a good example of that would be, let’s say you have a friend and she’s been burned a few times. And she goes, we’ll all men are cheaters. Well, she’s kind of oversimplifying that, you know, yes, the men she’s dealt with have been cheaters. But that doesn’t mean all men are cheaters. You have to make a distinction. We have to distinguish, kind of separate the good men from the bad men. Now, there are men who don’t have any character. And yeah, they’re gonna cheat because they’re selfish and they don’t care about how their actions affect other people. And that’s One kind of man, then you kind of split that out. You have the men who have good character, they may feel an impulse to cheat, but they don’t act on it. They’re not run by their feelings. And so then there’s those kinds of men. And so you have two kinds of men, you need to make that distinction there and go, Well, these kind of men cheat, but those kind of men don’t. Therefore, not all men are cheaters. So that’s an example. Another one you can over investigate or you can under investigate something in proportion to its importance over investigating. We know this analysis paralysis, you keep analyzing, you keep thinking and you just never make a decision. That can be bad. Or you can under investigate, you know, people who rush into relationships, there’s all these red flags and you don’t look into the red flag. You just rush forward and you don’t give it enough weight and you don’t give it enough thought and time for the gravity of the decision. You know, choosing to marry someone or you know where to go to college or what career to do, those are all weighty decisions. They deserve a certain amount of time and reflection, to allow you to gather all the details you need. So you can make a good judgment. And then you need to kind of sift through and think through those details and decide, you know, well, is this detail relevant? is that we’re not? should I give this credible? Am I being a little too gullible? Am I rushing forward? so things like that.

Those are important. The other thing rash judgment, I don’t mean skin rashes, rash is kind of an I think it’s an older word. But basically what it means is, you are confusing, it might be true with it is true, which is commonly called jumping to conclusions. You know, you have enough data to think that it’s true, but it’s kind of like one of the previous ones. You give it a little too much weight, you know, you give the detail too much weight and you go well, it could be true therefore, it is. I think sometimes most women do this a lot. And I’ve been there many times. where, you know, a guy gives signs that he’s in you, and you’re like, well, he could be into me therefore he is, you know, we kind of jumped to conclusions. You go of course, he likes me. Of course, you know, okay, here’s a big one. This is something us women, I think, do a lot. I think that women, when we find someone, we tend to stick to that person. Whereas men are more into like playing the field, especially in early stages of a relationship. And I think that women, we will often jump to the conclusion that he might be committed to me, I might be the only one he cares about, therefore I am. And then we can often be blindsided when maybe there wasn’t necessarily a discussion of like exclusivity. We kind of assumed it was there. And so then we started acting like it was. we started giving this guy like boyfriend privileges when he wasn’t officially our boyfriend. That can be an example of a little bit of a rash judgment. And I’m not trying to put anybody on blast. I’ve done this myself many times, it’s very easy to do, but I’m just using it as an example. Don’t read into it too much. And then the next one high emotion. So any emotion, not just love can get in the way of our accurate judgment. People talk all the time, like, oh, love is blind, but any feeling can mess with our judgment. If you’re very tired, if you’re very hungry, if you’re afraid, if you’re very afraid, that can also mess with your judgment. General Patton, he said that he made a quote about this, and I’m kind of paraphrasing it but he said, I never take counsel from my fear. And he was making the point. That might not be the exact words he used, but just the gist of it. And he basically was meaning I don’t look at how I feel about something if I’m afraid, and I don’t necessarily let that run the decision. Because when you’re Afraid, just because there’s a risk doesn’t necessarily make something a bad decision. that can be that rash judgment again, you know, you can think, oh, something could go wrong, therefore it will go wrong. I think a lot of times again in a relationship you know, a lot of times you can be burned so many times that even when you meet a good guy, you can go well, it could go wrong, therefore it is going to go wrong therefore, I’m not even getting involved here and you can miss out on a good thing that way. So yeah, any emotion can mess up our judgment and the reason for that is because the area and I’m going to do a video later that breaks down our body and our soul and that because that’s the mechanics of how we think and reason our soul and I’m speaking in a more almost mechanical, systemic kind of way. Not necessarily like a you know, people always talk about like, Oh your soul. hallelujah. You know, like, it’s This floaty entity that like nobody really knows about, but your soul is actually I don’t want to call it mechanical because it’s not a physical thing. But it is the way that we know things and we figure things out. And our emotions are kind of, they’re kind of part of how our soul and our body kind of intertwine, you know, our thoughts will kind of influence our emotions. But our our emotions are also very influenced by our body. How many times have you been tired, and you felt kind of sad? And then you took a nap and you felt better. You know, sometimes, you’re not really sad, sad because of something in your soul. You know, it’s more it can be body related, but I’m going off on a bit of a tangent there, but basically, our soul has an intellect and a will. So the intellect is kind of what we mean is like the mind. You know, it’s order toward figuring out the truth. That’s the point of your mind. That’s what your mind wants to do, it wants to know, it wants to collect details, and it wants to get it. You know that feeling of satisfaction you get when you’re like, Oh, I get it. Our mind leans toward that. We want that feeling of satisfaction of understanding. And that is what your mind is oriented toward. Now your feelings. fear, anger, lust, happiness, sorrow, things like that. Our feelings are not oriented toward the truth like that. They want what they want. When you’re afraid. All you want is to avoid whatever it is you’re afraid of.  It’s not about the truth or getting it you just want to get away. When you’re angry. You want to like, push away something bad, it’s a more active, fear is running away, you want to avoid it. Anger is when you want to like kind of go out to it and get rid of it that way. You know joy, sorrow, things like that. They all kind of have their own point. And again, I’ll talk about this in another video when we break down the soul. These things are also known in the older philosophical terms like Aristotle talked about it. That’s who this guy right here is. But he talked about passions, they were called the passions of the soul. And nowadays, we don’t the word passion is really only survived in relation to like lust. But that word used to actually apply to all the other human emotions, because any emotion is strong enough to disturb our judgment, you know, if we let it, so that’s also another pitfall. Sometimes our emotions can get in the way or being biased, you know, we can be a little bias, we cannot want to come to the truth of something because we kind of understand that it’s going to lead to some kind of maybe behavior change that we don’t want to do. So that can also be the emotion of laziness coming in there. And that’s going to help that’s going to hurt our ability to come to the truth. But yeah, those are just some things to think about to kind of help you kind of come to come to a decision. Figure out the truth of things. When we talk on this channel about stuff. I’m very big on figuring out the truth of things. And truth can be a little tricky, because there are things that are true universally, like, I don’t know, I’m having a hard time coming up with something. But so there’s universal stuff. And then there are things that are more, they come down to like prudence. Prudence is a word meaning kind of knowing what’s appropriate for you. So for example, a prudent thing would be kind of deciding on what kind of career you want to do. Do you? Are you more artistic or are you more corporate kind of person? And so then that would come down to you know, there really isn’t a right or wrong answer on that. You know, is it you know, should everybody be an artist? No, it’s not right for everybody. That’s, that’s not what they’re suited for. On the other hand, should everybody have a job? No. And that’s where prudence comes in. You need to look at all the details of your life, and you need to give them the appropriate weight. So when people say that, oh, truth isn’t black and white, you know, it’s gray, there’s shades of gray, no pun intended. But there is some truth to that, because there are certain things that are going to be true for you, but not necessarily for other people. But especially in the area of ethics and morality. There is a set of universal principles that are true for everyone. You know, don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t murder, you know, don’t steal people’s spouses, you know, like, these are things that on a deep level, we all kind of know, you know, there’s really no justifying any of that. we know. And so those are the kind of the universal things but then, you know, going back to my previous example, there’s the things that you know, they’re not universally right or wrong, you know, should you be an artist should you be an employee. Itdepends, you know. So it’s important to see that’s another distinction about truth. It’s important to know when you’re dealing with a Prudential truth, something where there is a little gray area and wiggle room versus an absolute truth where it’s, you know, it’s a principle, it’s black and white. It’s universal. So yeah, that’s kind of how that works. This is why also, you know, when it comes to morality and ethics, this is why historically, people had religion, it was an area where these questions were thought about, and people had separated out what was a gray area and what was black and white, and that is the role religion used to play among other roles. And so that is also why it can be tricky in life nowadays, and why there is so much confusion and difficulty in people’s lives. It’s because we’ve gotten rid of religion and now nobody really knows what’s absolutely true and what’s prudentially true. So then that makes life very confusing. This is also why the self help industry and informational things, informational products have just taken off like wildfire because people no longer know how to run their lives. And it’s not necessarily their fault. I’m not putting people down. You know, we are in a very changing society. So things do get very confusing, because we’re in a very different world than the one our parents came into, and our grandparents, but again, we’ve also gotten rid of religion.

And so we’ve lost our rudder, we don’t really know what’s important or the ultimate goal of anything is, and it’s all become very, like, well just do whatever makes you happy. And it’s like, we don’t always know what makes us happy. And then also there’s short term happiness versus long term happiness, like, which kind of happy are you going for? So that’s a bit of a tangent, but, you know, it is what it is. So, anyways, I hope that was helpful. But that is truth. So if you have any questions, leave a comment, like, subscribe, do all the things but yeah, maybe leave me a comment if anything about this was unclear because when I get into these like precise, like philosophical terms and things, it can be kind of weird. So if you have a question, let me know. Otherwise, thanks for watching and have a great day.