Scrabble #6 TRUTH (2) – 1992 – 2024 ©
I don’t think I’m alone in believing that the world would be a better place if we were singing more closely from the same hymn sheet and had more similar values, religious, political and moral tendencies – much of the world’s problems seem to come from disparate views on right, wrong, reality and truth. However the forced or indoctrinated imposition of values is a scary world of dictators, zealots, and sheep. I don’t actually believe we should be trying as such to converge our values, I believe that we should be scrutinising them, and where we find incoherence we should scrutinise them harder, until the contradictions are resolved or the values are rejected; and if we have done this work well then our values should be converging rather than diverging.
I also believe that our own internal worlds of mental health, wisdom and connection flow in the same way – in that contradictions within our values, beliefs, morals, politics etc benefit from being scrutinised and contradictions resolved, enabling greater enlightenment and peacefulness.
To me truth is a very slippery thing and I am not entirely sure that anything can be proven as absolutely true – possibly not even my own existence, however you can prove by using logical reasoning (dialectic) what is not true by looking for contradictions to a theory or hypothesis, and by proving what is false one can move in the opposite direction – towards truth. But, proving to oneself that one has inconsistencies and contradictions with one’s own set of values is not much fun as it will cause cognitive dissonance i.e. mental pain and anguish as one struggles to reconcile the contradictions, and one is forced to either change one’s values or give up looking and wear blinkers to hide from the pain.
What this artwork is about is that process of trying to understand what truth is, the importance of it, how to recognise it and the journey towards it. It is the most central and overlapping work in this series of ‘Board Games’ that connects them all together. Truth is the fundamental glue of much of our lives, be it cultural, scientific, philosophical, moral, religious or political – it is not something to be an apathetic blinkered sheep about.
You won’t find certain truth by looking for it, but you might get closer to it by having the strength to embrace what is not, and then turn away.