You Can’t Cheat the Truth Forever

Truth is the pathway to trust

The Card Sharps by Caravaggio, 1595 (public domain - Google Art Project)

“He that will cheat you at play, will cheat you any way.” —Thomas Fuller, 1732

Some of the most important lessons life has to teach come to us at an early age. That way, they manage to stay with us for life.

The impact of truth and trust are imprinted upon our psyche through the indelible stamp of experience, doled out in unequal measures by a savage race.

Like Finn Taylor, who learned the hard way.

One of the great points of pride about young Finn Taylor’s life was that by the age of two, he was a landowner. When he was still a baby, his grandfather gave him the deed to a sizeable parcel of land called Ivy Island.

And from his youth, he reminded anyone who would listen that he was a landowner. It was drilled into his head at home, as his parents asked him to remember the family when he came of age and took possession of all of that property.

But he didn’t let it change him — he still gladly played with the neighborhood children, even though in his head he knew he would be a wealthy landowner one day. It didn't change him until he turned 10, that is.

For the summer of his 10th birthday, Finn’s father finally gave in to the boy’s pleading to see Ivy Island and took him there to see it with his own eyes. And Finn’s eyes and mind would never be the same after that.

You see, Ivy Island was nothing more than five acres of swamp with a clump of trees strangled with ivy. Finn’s grandfather played a practical joke on him — one of the most prolonged pranks of his life — and Finn had been the butt of the joke among the family during that entire time.

That humiliating joke taught Finn a valuable lesson about himself and about humans: he truly disliked being fooled, and people will fall for anything. Right then and there he vowed to never be deceived again.

But Finn would go on to pull the wool over the eyes of millions of people worldwide. For Finn — Phineas, to his family — knew that there was a sucker born every minute, and he used that to his advantage to fool millions of people around the world as one of the greatest showmen on earth. You of course know him as Phineas Taylor… P.T. Barnum.

Regardless of how many times we’re fooled, we try to convince ourselves that we can’t possibly be that easily. That only other people are willing dupes.

The fact is that every one of us has the capacity to be fooled; it’s the very human nature of hope: how we’ll gladly suspend belief if we think something might be true.

Or, as William James, the father of modern psychology wrote,

“No fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance.”

With advances in technology, we’re seeing more chances to do things — things that give us hope. Facebook long wanted to make the world more connected. Amazon fulfills our wildest dreams of product consumption at a moment’s notice. We barely need lift a finger to get answers from AI.

All are backed by bold but believable promises of things we want to be true. And we’re willing to turn a blind eye to the red flags that non-believers point out.

While cheats and swindlers may be a dime a dozen, true con men are elegant, outsized personalities, artists of persuasion and exploiters of trust.

“One man's confidence artist is another man’s spiritual leader.”  — Maria Konnikova, 2016

Think back to the wishful thinking of the modern-day P.T. Barnum, Elon Musk. In a conference call with investors in 2016, Musk promised that within a year, all Tesla vehicles would be equipped with hardware that would make fully autonomous driving possible.

Thanks to the hype around Tesla, Musk’s penchant for Twitterhea, and our desire to believe, 71 percent of people globally believed at the time that Level 5 fully autonomous vehicles were available in 2018. Tesla, the would-be leader in this space, produces vehicles at Level 2, which still require a driver to be alert and behind the wheel, ready to take over at any moment. Yet Musk would have us believe that Level 5 is imminent.

But we go on believing. Why? Because we want to be led to the truth, and we’re convinced that someone smarter than us has the answers.

Truth is a down payment on loyalty. And when that down payment is revoked, we see the conman for who he is. Unfortunately, we also see a side of ourselves that we’d rather ignore, and we feel used, betrayed, and revulsed.

In these moments, perhaps we need to turn to the sage words of another ancient philosopher, Obi Wan Kenobi:

“Who’s the more foolish, the fool or the fool who follows him?”

The truth is out there, but you need to be committed to finding it. As the prover goes, trust but verify.

There’s so much to learn,

P.S. Don’t miss the follow-up piece, with some key links to help you get to the truth, including an extraordinary commencement speech: