The world we currently inhabit is technologically, socially, and politically complex. Every day we are inundated with information and bombarded by various and often conflicting claims in advertising, the news, and social media. On a global scale, we humans carry in our pockets or purses devices that allow us to access – with just a few taps and swipes – a seemingly endless and constantly updated stream of data and commentary about everything and anything under the sun … and beyond.
How can we even hope to be able to sort fact from fiction, mere opinion from sound conclusions, truth from falsehood? Is it possible to do so? Or is the attempt nothing more than an exercise in futility? Maybe, as the old saying goes, ignorance is bliss.
Perhaps ignorance in itself wouldn’t be so bad, but being deceived can be absolutely terrible. The problem isn’t simply that many of us don’t know what is true about many things; it’s rather that we don’t know what is true but think that we do. This is nothing new, especially in a democracy. It’s the same problem encountered by Socrates 2500 years ago in ancient Athens. He came to the conclusion that he was, as an oracle had told him, the wisest man in the city state – not because he knew all that much, but because he was the only one among his fellow citizens who seemed to realize that he didn’t know all that much.
To be fair, all of us sometimes have to proceed as if we have knowledge even when we do not; that is part of the price of having free will. Our lives are made up of millions of decisions, both large and small, and all of them carry consequences for us personally and professionally, for others, and for society at large. But we cannot, practically speaking, abstain from making such decisions out of deep-seated skepticism, because even refusing to decide or to act is itself a type of decision and ‘action.’ And we do not simply make decisions or take actions in a vacuum. Rather, many (if not most) of these take place through negotiations with others – in business, in politics, in worship communities, in hobby groups, and even in our home life with partners, spouses, and/or kids. And in every investigation or negotiation, we have the potential to be deceived.
It isn’t simply that others intentionally lie to us and try to pull the wool over our eyes to get us to do what they want, although of course that does happen. But much of the time deception is more like a contagion transmitted in good faith: people are themselves deceived and then simply pass that deception along to others. Now, most of us hate being lied to, but on another level, we almost want to be deceived, to the extent that we will even deceive ourselves. This is the source of cognitive biases and the reason that we can find logical fallacies so attractive in concrete practice, even when we can recognize these in the abstract.
The danger of deception lies in the fact that reality is always going to catch up with us and catch us out sooner or later – and by then it’s often “too late.” In other words, being deceived forces us to learn the truth “the hard way,” by which time so many decisions have been made and so many actions have been taken that were rooted in falsehoods that we find ourselves with a whole slew of problems that could have been avoided and a huge mess to clean up. Wouldn’t it be nice to avoid having to do so much “damage control” after the fact? Sure, we can never know everything, but wouldn’t it be better to do as much as we can to know the truth sooner rather than later? Even if we can and should learn from our mistakes, wouldn’t it be to our advantage to limit those by learning how to recognize and resist deception in the first place? If there were a way of increasing our chances of knowing the truth and rejecting the lie by learning certain skills and practices, wouldn’t it be worth our while to learn those?

but it’s also one that no human person can avoid playing. Placing our trust in either ourselves or others is inevitably dangerous, because doing so makes us vulnerable to deception or betrayal. At the same time, it’s impossible for us even to survive in the world for very long – let alone to thrive and flourish – without ever placing our trust in anyone or anything. Perhaps most of us can instinctively understand why we need trust in the realm of social relationships, but we also need trust in order to learn and know things rightly. Why is this the case? To understand that, we need to have a sense of what we mean by the word “trust.” What exactly are we doing when we say that we “trust” someone or something?
At the most essential level, trusting is an existential decision; it is an act of faith. Now, most of us probably associate “faith” with signing on to particular sets of religious or spiritual beliefs, but what is meant here is something far more general and universal. Simply put, “having faith” means making a decision to “act as if” something is real and true in the absence of unassailable rational proofs for its truth and reality. To many of us today who value reason and rationality so highly, “just having faith” seems a naïve and inferior way of navigating life. However, whether we realize it or not, proceeding on faith is something that all of us – even the staunchest atheists and agnostics – routinely do. More than that, it is something that we must do before we can even be rational or come to knowledge of the truth.
The reason for this sequence of faith preceding reason is that there are a whole host of things that we need to treat as real in order to be able to reason about them. We cannot prove or disprove their reality by ourselves a priori or “ahead of time,” before assenting to act as if they are real and true. Rationality itself is one of the first amongst these things; using reason to prove that reasoning is right and valid is a clear example of the (rational and logical) fallacy of “begging the question.”
So why do we choose to accept logic and rationality as real or true in the first place? Some of our motives are individual and others are social. We accept logical rules when we see them and they “seem right” or “make sense” to us personally; that is, we trust in our own perception of them as real and true. But then, we might also make what others tell us are logical errors, and then we trust those others to know the rules of logic better than we do and to teach us how better to understand and follow those rules. This isn’t merely the situation in the case of reasoning and logic in their most essential forms, but of all languages and discourses.
Seeking to know the truth therefore requires us to balance trust in ourselves as individuals (our perspectives, our perceptions, our own internal, instinctive, and experiential “sense” of things, our rule-based procedures and conclusions) and trust in others (their perspectives and perceptions, their instincts and experiences, their rules, rule-based procedures and conclusions.) When these get off-balance, things go terribly wrong. If we trust too little in both others and ourselves, we become paralyzed by doubt and uncertainty, conflicting ideas and the limitations of knowledge, and are unable to move forward. When we trust too much in ourselves as individuals and too little in others, we have two options. The first is that to become captives of our own private delusions, often paranoid and suspicious, and alienated from the cooperation with and positive contributions of others that we need in order to know the truth and flourish as social beings. The second occurs if we try and enforce our private versions of reality upon others in order to get these benefits of cooperation and social contribution. In that case, we stand in grave danger of becoming domineering and despotic. On the other hand, if we trust too much in others and too little in ourselves, then we again have two avenues. One is that we become haphazard and disintegrated, if we trust in whomever we happen to be listening to at the time, working at cross-purposes to our own efforts from one moment to the next. However, if we trust in one particular person or group more consistently, then we become habituated to credulity, groupthink, and mass formation: in other words, apt and willing subjects of a despot or a totalitarian state.
To protect ourselves and others from the vulnerability to delusion and deception that trust naturally makes possible – and the damage and destruction that follow naturally from such deception – we cannot simply refuse to trust altogether. That is practically impossible, and just as deleterious our goals and well-being, both as individuals and part of larger groups and societies. Rather, what we need is a way of learning and practicing discernment: the meta-skill that enables us to discover and attain a positive and beneficial balance between our trust of others and ourselves.

not merely to live a life, but to live a good life. Questions about what constitutes ‘the good life’ or human flourishing have occupied philosophers around the world for millennia. What is it that makes human life – whether the life of an individual, a society, or the species as a whole – good? What particular conditions and factors conduce to our flourishing, and which ones prevent it? Which of these are within and which beyond human control?
Answering these questions requires us to have a robust anthropology: an understanding of what humans are and what we are like. Developing such an understanding turns humans towards three main areas of knowledge. The first is what we might broadly term the ‘hard’ sciences – modes of ascertaining and identifying the physical and biological drives and conditions of human life. From these disciplines we learn what it takes materially for humans to survive, both as individuals and as a species.
Because humans are social animals, our lives are sustained and made good not only by our individual interactions with material things in the world (air, water, food, materials for making tools or building shelters), but also through our interactions with other human persons on a consistent and ongoing basis. Since the earliest days of our species, humans have come together and organized themselves in groups to pursue ends of surviving and thriving. The ways in which human people do and have done this, and which of those ways are more or less effective in allowing us collectively to envision ‘flourishing’ and to achieve shared goals, have been shaped partly by biological drives and environmental conditions but also by experience and memory. The study of all of these takes us from the realm of the hard sciences and into the sphere of the social sciences – history, sociology, psychology, and the like.
What we learn from a study of these disciplines is that the factors that shape our organization of our individual and collective lives towards the goal of flourishing are many and varied, and the interplay amongst them is highly complex. How do we know, for example, when and what things we should pursue independently or competitively and when and what things we should share or cooperate in pursuing? Is our material satisfaction and survival always to be our top priority, or are there cases in which ‘living a good life’ might involve sacrifice or selflessness? What are the principles and criteria by which we can make such judgments, or what ‘big picture’ view of human flourishing and purpose can and should tell us how to prioritize our different aims and drives when they come into conflict, either within an individual persons or among groups?
These questions belong to the realm of philosophies, religious theologies, theories of ethics, and political and social ideologies. And this is where all of us might get a bit nervous. While scientific study gives us data and information, what we might broadly term ‘philosophical’ systems tell us what data should matter, what disciplines and methodologies we should trust to give us information and which we should suspect, how we should prioritize and use data, and why or to what ends? The trouble is that different people and groups will adhere to different philosophical systems and, accordingly, be operating with different priorities and ‘big picture’ understandings of human flourishing. How, then, can we come together to discuss our differing views and see where we have common ground? How and to what extent can we develop shared understandings of human flourishing that allow us to cooperate on creating policies that aim towards this end? Or, if we cannot agree on the particularities of the goal, can we at least manage to work together to institute mutually agreeable policies that leave sufficient room for different modes of envisioning and pursuing flourishing? Critical to such endeavours are the commitment to pursuing truth and the cultivation of practices of trust and trustworthiness.