Truth is a practice, not a possession

In an age of noise, truth must become a discipline

Let me talk to you about truth.

It is the most contested word in human history. Wars have been fought over it. Empires have been built on it. People have been burned at the stake, imprisoned, exiled, and erased — all because they claimed to possess it. And yet, for a word that carries such weight, most of us have never stopped to ask: What is truth, really?

Strip it down. What is truth?

At its simplest, truth is the correspondence between a statement and reality. The stone sinks in water. The wound bleeds. The child grows. These are truths that do not require your belief to function. They are true whether you accept them or not. This is the truth of the physical world — indifferent, incontestable, available to anyone with senses and reason.

But the moment we leave the physical world and enter the human world — the world of history, of justice, of love, of meaning — truth becomes more slippery. Because human truth is always filtered through perception. And perception, as we have discussed, is never neutral. It is shaped by culture, by language, by trauma, by desire, by power. Two people can witness the same event and report two different truths — not because one is lying, but because they saw through different lenses. This does not mean truth does not exist. It means truth is layered, and the layers must be excavated with care.

This is where the hijackers enter. Because truth, properly understood, is dangerous to power. So power has developed a thousand ways to bury it.

There is the weaponization of doubt. If you can make people doubt everything — the news, the science, the courts, the historians, their own eyes — then truth becomes a matter of opinion, and opinion can be manipulated. The goal is not to win an argument. The goal is to exhaust you into surrender. When nothing is true, everything is permitted. This is the strategy of the modern propagandist: not to convince you of a lie, but to make you give up on the very idea of truth.

There is the weaponization of certainty. The opposite of doubt, but equally destructive. The fanatic, the zealot, the fundamentalist — they do not seek truth. They possess it. Or so they believe. Their truth is not a discovery; it is a fortress. It requires no evidence, no questioning, no humility. It is a closed system, and every question is an attack. This is not truth. This is dogma wearing the mask of truth. And dogma, as history shows, is the fastest route to atrocity.

There is the commodification of truth. Truth is now a product. It is packaged, branded, and sold to you by media outlets that know exactly what you want to hear. You choose your news the way you choose your cereal — based on taste, not nutritional value. The algorithm learns your flavour and feeds you more of it, until your diet consists entirely of what confirms your existing hunger. This is not truth. This is a tailored mirror.

The ancestors understood truth differently. They did not see it as a static fact to be possessed. They saw it as a living thing — something to be sought, honoured, tested in community, passed down through story and proverb. The elder did not say, “I have the truth.” The elder said, “Let us sit together and find it.” The palaver hut was a technology of collective truth-seeking — a space where multiple perspectives could be heard, where the goal was not victory but understanding. This is a profound wisdom we have largely lost.

Truth, in the ancestral sense, was relational. It existed between people, not inside a single mind. It required the community to triangulate. The proverb was a tool for this: a compressed nugget of truth that demanded interpretation, discussion, unfolding. You could not simply memorise it. You had to wrestle with it. Truth was a practice, not a possession.

This ancestral wisdom offers a path for the sovereign mind today. Because in an age of noise, truth must become a discipline.

It is not a dogma. It is not an opinion. It is not a product. It is the ongoing, humble, rigorous commitment to align your understanding with reality — and to hold that understanding with open hands, knowing that you may be wrong, that new evidence may emerge, that your lens may need cleaning. This is not weakness. This is the highest form of intellectual integrity.

It is also the courage to speak truth when it costs you. The whistleblower. The dissident. The child who says, “The emperor has no clothes.” These are not truth-possessors. They are truth-tellers. And the distinction matters. A truth-possessor wants to dominate. A truth-teller wants to liberate. The first builds a throne. The second builds a table.

And there is another dimension we must not forget: the truth of the self. The most difficult truth of all. The truth about your own motives, your own wounds, your own complicity, your own gifts. Most people spend their entire lives running from this truth. They surround themselves with noise, with blame, with busyness — anything to avoid the terrible, liberating silence in which the self speaks honestly. But sovereignty begins here. You cannot be free if you are lying to yourself. And you cannot stop lying to yourself until you develop the courage to sit alone, in the quiet, and ask: What am I pretending not to know?

So I ask you today: What truth are you avoiding? Not the political truth. Not the abstract truth. The personal truth. The one you know, deep down, that you have been bargaining with, burying, rationalising. Name it. Look at it. It will not destroy you. It will unchain you.

And the second question: Where do you seek truth? In a single source? In a single leader? In a single ideology? If so, you are not seeking truth. You are seeking comfort. And comfort is the enemy of truth. Widen the circle. Invite other voices. Read what disturbs you. Sit with those who disagree. The palaver hut is still open. But you must choose to enter.

Truth is not a trophy you win. It is a well you return to. The water is always there — cool, clear, and older than the arguments that rage above it. The ancestors knew the way. So do you. Walk to the well. Draw water. Share it. That is enough.

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I. Ras Gad Shangox owned and operated a Taxi in Toronto for 28 years before 2016 when he sold his plate and became licensed as a delivery truck driver. His series “Pocket Wisdom for Sovereign Minds” was born of his curiousity about the relationship between individual words and their impact on human consciousness and behaviour.