Lately I've been wondering about the value of truth, about why we seek the truth even when we know that it can harm us, what make our quest for the truth more valuable than our quest for joy and pleasure?
The easy road to illusion
Before answer those questions about the truth, I started to think about how often we fool ourselves, how many times we choose a lighter version of the truth or even a lie, to avoid the suffer that the truth can cause? And the answer to that question probably is: more than we should.
If pleasure is everything, the denial of reality is a logical step
If we set happiness and pleasure as the only values in our moral code, we can easily arrive at the conclusion that we need to avoid every source of suffer in our lives, including the suffer that know the reality can cause. To do that we would need to numb ourselves, to cast aside everything that can lead us to the path of discovery that leads us to a better sense of the world we live. That path of denial, lies and illusions would leads to some kind of artificial reality some kind of world where pain doesn't exist. A world without pain sounds like a good place, so why we resist it?
For some reason we choose to suffer when the reward is the truth
There must have something in our nature that make at least some of us choose the truth instead of the comfort of lies, I don't know exactly what it is, but is certainly something that make us human, that make us different.
A deeper connection with reality bring us closer to a sense of meaning
When we distance ourselves from reality, we become alienated from the world. Our curiosity, our desire to know ourselves, other and the world that surround us, give to us a sense of meaning.
Maybe that is the answer, we find meaning in life when we see the mysteries of the universe be solved beyond us, and when I talk about the mysteries of the universe, I'm not talking about just cosmological mysteries, I'm talking about the sources of the short moments of fulfillment in our lives. A illusion cannot give us that, only something so expensive as the truth can.