Consensus and truth
By: Thalapathy Krishnamurthy
Tags: Truth, Consensus

What we are trying to achieve with our social media tools is ‘consensus’ at the cost of ‘truth’. Whether we are in a friends and family group in Whatsapp or a group in Slack at office or in discussion forums like HN or , beyond trying to establish ‘what we want us to be seen by others as’ even though we may not be that in most cases, sharing Web grabs that try to represent who we think we are.

Even before social media or the Web, humans have lived in groups and groups within groups. Even though there are differing opinions on every topic, we all try to see how best we can converge. There is an innate desire to come together and come to an agreement.

Managers at companies try to do this all the time. Dissonance is seen as a hindrance to productive work or progress. So they huddle in a conference room as soon as they sense dissonance among team members and try to bring some consensus to move forward.

Yes, we like to move forward and not hang on to something when we are in groups. As individuals it is a different matter. We can be hanging onto something without the push or need to move forward for a very long time.

You may be wondering about this life and why we exist until you die. You may find various answers to it and yet you are not in a hurry to come to a conclusion and move forward.

Truth is open ended. For convenience and the need to move forward, we have short-term truths where we all agree on something. Like Gravity is a force or a space-time curvature or is it like everything is simply in a free fall and they are temporarily finding themselves circling one another.

All our life we are forced to agree with others. If you are a pursuer of truth you will end up in conflicts with everyone on everything. So, we have politics, religion, diplomacy etc. to bring down our ever questioning minds to the ground and carry on with our lives. Almost like people pushing you ahead while you are waiting in a queue to die. ‘keep moving’ , ‘agree and keep moving’ are the words that come to my mind.

Social media has exacerbated this phenomenon. Everyone tries hard to fight for their opinion only to find a short-term truth to latch on. Is Trump good or bad ? Is Covid dangerous or a joke ? Everyone has their opinion and then there are multiple truths that emerge and everyone finds their pockets to join and carry on.

Consensus kills a lot of possibilities at once like a Schrodinger’s cat. All our lives we have to agree with a lot of people on various things whether we like it or not. Over time, this erodes the need to find who we really are. We may be a collage of various group thoughts getting ready to be exploited by corporates or politicians or your neighbor.

Consensus breeds mediocrity. The conclusions we arrive at by agreement is always a temporary solace to ‘carry on’. While this may help us run our lives (literally), to achieve deeper truth on anything you need to be individualistic without getting drowned by noise.

It takes courage to be an individual in pursuit of truth. Even if you agree, you know it is temporary for ‘moving on’ and you are all eyes and ears fixated on truth.