"The truth lies somewhere in the middle." No. It doesn't. In fact... [View All]

..."Truth lies in the middle" is an exceedingly common and very unfortunate meme.

It's interesting that it attaches itself so firmly in the minds of people discussing politics. It is the backbone, essentially of the Moderates....

Here, essentially, is how it works...

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Bob and Alice discover a cake together, sitting there pretty as can be, covered with cherries and niceness, sitting in the middle of the world.

Bob says: "I think I should have all of it."

Alice says: "huh? We discovered it together. We should share it!"

Bob says: "No! I want it more than you do, so its mine." (bear with me)

Alice says: "We should have half each."

Bob: "I intend to take this to arbitration."

Alice: "WHAT?"

Bob takes the matter to arbitration.

Moderate: "What's all this?"

Bob: "She wants half my cake."

Alice: "YOUR cake? We discovered it together!"

Bob: "Alice, you are naive. I see no reason for you to be so partisan and self-interested. Moderate away, Mr Moderate the McModerator!"

Moderate: "Hm. Hmm. Hmmm. Well, this does seem to be a very thorny problem, doesn't it? A more complex, twisty tale I've never come across before in my history as a moderate, and no mistake."

Alice: (wilts with exasperation...)

Moderate: "I have MADE MY JUDGEMENT. The truth always lies somewhere in the middle. Bob should have three quarters of the cake and Alice should have a quarter."

Alice: "WHAT?"

Bob: "So shrill!"

Alice: "SHRILL?"

Bob: "So emotional! Obviously irrational. Emotion is the opposite of reason, Mr Spock says so, it must be true."

Moderate: "Hmmmmm. Hmmmmm. Well, Bob, the truth lies somewhere in the middle, so actually Mr Spock only KIND of said so and emotion is only SORT OF the opposite of reason. Alice is being KINDA shrill." Etc.

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People who say: "The truth lies somewhere in the middle" aren't interested in the truth. They're REALLY only interested in the MIDDLE.

If someone says to you, "The truth lies in the middle," say this to them:

"You are more interested in the middle than the truth."

Feel free to copy and paste the above. Don't worry about creditting me.

It's a particularly insidious and silly meme. It's also almost impossible to dislodge once it's wormed its way into someone's head. You can say it about *anything*. "Hmmm, hmmm, I don't know, I mean there's this other view, so I think you 're being extreme." It's meaningless!

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Here's another way to look at it:

Someone pulls "truthy middleness" on you.

Bring out a piece of paper. Draw a line on it between the position you believe is true and the position you believe is false. Draw little asterisks at either end and them "true" and "false" in your colour, which might be... oooh, RED. Then draw little black asterisks at either end and another in the middle. Label the black ones at either end "false" and the one in the middle "true".

"So," you say, "You think the truth lies here?", pointing at their black asterisk in the middle.

"Yes."

"Good. And so we both agree that THIS," pointing at the red/black asterisk which both parties think is false, "is false, yes?"

"Yes."

"Good. Okay, then. We can get rid of that position completely, can't we? Neither of of is think it's true, so there's no point discussing it."

"... yes..."

Scrub out that far black/red asterisk, and all the line that leads up to it.

"Okay. Here we have a red asterisk saying true at my end with your black asterisk saying true at your end. I actually don't believe your original position of truth being in the middle was true, so I'll put a red "false" label there. Oh, look! Dichotomy!"

"... okay..."

"So, back to the beginning. But never mind! You think the truth lies somewhere in the middle, don't you? Fair enough. I'll scrub out your black "true" at your end and put a "black" false there instead. And we'll put a black "true" for you in the middle, between you and me. Sound fair enough?"

"... er..."

"But look! See, now both of us agree that THAT position, the one that is labelled false by both of us, is false. Se we can scrub it out." Scrub, scrub. "There. Oh, look! Dichotomy!"

"This is a trick."

"No, it's not a trick. This idea that the truth lies in the middle, THAT'S a trick, a nasty one, too. All I'm doing is trying to show you that it's a trick. It doesn't mean anything, see?"

At this point the opponent generally falls into two categories, the ones who smile nervously and simply reiterate: "I still think the truth lies in the middle," and the others, who will have figured out that you know more about that idea than they do. The former opponent is in fact far more common, but the latter may actually have learned something. Who can put a price on such a success??!!??!! The most difficult thing to explain to them is that the slipperiness of their middle black asterisk isn't something *you've* caused but is an INTEGRAL ASPECT of "the truth lies in the middle." Their see-sawing, pendulumish metaphor contains the seeds of its own demise.... because...

It isn't about anything.

This approach is particularly effective if you put figures of some sort on the line, the number of people it's acceptable to kill with tasers, for example, or to be killed in warfare, or falsely imprisoned, or something like that. It really grinds the point in.

This is useless against nut-jobs, of course, but then almost everything is.

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Now, one more thing.

Sometimes the truth GENUINELY lies somewhere in the middle.

Galileo argued that the Earth went round the Sun and the Church maintained that the Sun went round the Earth.

IN FACT, the laws of gravity dictate that they BOTH orbit ONE ANOTHER, essentially they move around a central point on an imaginary line between their respective centres. However, this point lies within the Sun itself. So, essentially, as long as we're not astronomers requiring to make very accurate predictions about things, we may as well treat the system as heliocentric (sun in the middle).

A cursory examination of reality reveals that this is in fact true for ALMOST ALL CASES where the truth lies in the middle. It is typically the case that for practical purposes one may as well treat homeostatic systems as monolithic.

There is, in fact, if you look VERY closely at the Bush administration, some give and take with them, but the effect of this tendency is so vanishingly small in comparison with their fundamentally didactic approach that for practical purposes we might as well ignore it.

This has been a baby_mouse RANT(TM).

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