Truth Is Not Short, Which Is Why Falsehood Spreads

I have been circling this idea for years and have never managed to write it down properly. It wants to be a book, and the working title would be On the Evils of Art and Storytelling, or perhaps On the Difference Between Beauty and Truth. What follows is a sketch of the argument.

It is an antithesis to the culture I find myself in — a culture that treats beauty and truth as near-synonyms, that regards storytelling as our highest achievement, and that permits people to float entirely free of facts while thinking well of themselves.

The Core Mechanism: Length

Here is the claim everything else depends on.

People admire what is short. Truth is never short.

As every science discovers on contact with its subject, the real account of anything is longer, more qualified, and more conditional than anyone hoped. Facts are never small enough to comprehend comfortably. The honest version of almost any question comes with a list of exceptions, a range of applicability, and an admission of what remains unknown.

Ideologies are transmissible because they are brief. Not because they are true — sometimes they contain grains of truth, but that is not why they spread. They spread because they fit in a sentence, and a sentence can be repeated.

Now the empirical regularity that follows: almost any subject can be treated briefly or at length, and it is nearly universal that the shorter the treatment, the more adherents the position gathers. Libertarianism is among the most simplistic political positions available and among the quickest to state. That is not a coincidence; it is the same fact twice.

Religion is the limiting case. You barely need to read the book — the first chapter suffices — and you emerge with an account of the origin of everything, a moral system, and a solution to death. All of it false. But short.

Truth Is Ugly

The corollary is one people resist.

Truth is not beautiful. Truth is what you accept despite its ugliness, because the evidence compels you. Rarely does a complicated collection of facts yield beauty; usually it remains a complicated collection of facts, and the honest response is to hold it as such rather than to smooth it into a story.

We have inherited the opposite idea — that elegance is a mark of correctness, that the true theory will be the beautiful one. In mathematics and fundamental physics this has some purchase. Outside them it is mostly a trap, and it is the trap that makes ideology feel like insight.

What Brought This Into Focus

The internet.

Online argument is vile, toxic, and above all disconnected from the world. People mobilise against dragons, build elaborate cases against dragons, defeat dragons. The positions being attacked are frequently held by nobody.

And the thing that could stop this — facts, figures, statistics, actual measurement — is precisely what people detest. Introduce a number into an online argument and watch what happens: not engagement, but a change of subject. The number is treated as a rhetorical move rather than as information.

The Historical Arc

Cultural evolution began with enormous stories. Gods, creation, cosmic purpose, our own centrality.

Over time the stories shrank. Capitalism and socialism are smaller stories than Genesis — they make narrower claims, about a specific domain, in a way that could in principle be checked.

That shrinking is progress, and it is the essence of the scientific revolution, which is fundamentally a discipline of refusing to say more than you can support.

Religion is obviously a story and can be shown to be. Capitalism and socialism are also stories, harder to expose because their claims are narrower and their domains messier — but still stories, and still wrong in the way stories are wrong, which is by being tidier than their subject.

The permanent temptation runs the other way: to inflate your story as far as it will go, make it pervasive, make it an ideology, make it a complete account of history. Progress consists in watching those stories fail and deliberately minimising the scope of the ones you tell. Small claims. No ideologies.

Ideologies as Stories with Varying Commitment

A refinement worth keeping.

As we progress we adopt ideologies that commit to less. Democracy is a less committed story than theocracy: it specifies a process and declines to guarantee an outcome. Capitalism does not promise good results either; it commits to a mechanism and lets the results fall where they may.

That is the direction of travel — away from narratives with fixed targets and toward ones that specify a procedure and stay quiet about the ending. It is the same movement as the shrinking, seen from a different angle.

Why This Is Now Urgent

Sam Harris observes that the world is fragmenting into millions of sub-communities, each following its own podcaster, each drinking its own Kool-Aid.

In a shattered epistemic landscape, tethering to reality stops being a philosophical preference and becomes the only available common ground. The sciences are tethered. Our politics, our philosophy, and our worldviews are not — which means they can drift arbitrarily far apart, and there is no mechanism that brings them back.

The only thing capable of uniting people who have nothing else in common is a shared discipline of checking against the world. Not shared values, which we do not have. Not shared stories, which is what got us here. Shared measurement.

That is the book. I have not written it and I am not sure I will, but the argument seems to me correct and I would rather have it down badly than not at all.