Secondhand Truths Part 2: The Fracture & The Crisis
What happens when we stop questioning what we want to believe?
The Fracture
Since Covid, our world fractured in ways I have never experienced in my lifetime. You’ve probably noticed it too. Choose your hot-button issue: vaccines, climate change, elections, race, and you’ll find two sides shouting past each other, equally convinced not just of their own rightness, but of the other side’s idiocy.
When I began looking more closely at how we consume information, I realized something unsettling: we tend to turn off our skepticism when we encounter something we already agree with.
The moment we feel “seen” by an article, a video, or a social post, we often stop asking questions. We click like, hit share, and move on.
This thinking flattens our capacity for truth. It fuels a toxic confidence, because we feel informed, since we did “our own research”… but we did so within a curated echo chamber that only reflected back what we already believed.
We have all rubbed up against these conflicts in our daily lives. Think of that tense conversation about immigration over Thanksgiving with family, group chats where a friend asserts a truth you don't believe in as if it’s an established fact, or an awkward silence on a Zoom call after someone says something politically loaded. And we’ve seen how quickly they can spiral, often leading to finger pointing, loss of respect, and even broken relationships.
The result is people holding tight to their already believed assumptions and becoming hostile to those who disagree.
This can extend even to facts we once took for granted, like the earth being round. There are now entire sections of society utterly convinced of the wrongness of truths that, for generations, were accepted as common knowledge.
Social and alternative media didn’t create this problem, but it has made it harder to solve. It rewards outrage, strips away nuance, and fills our feeds with content designed to confirm what we already believe. Our truth-seeking instincts, already overwhelmed, are now being further confused by artificial intelligence. Deepfakes, voice clones, and auto-generated content make it harder to tell what’s real, and the line between fact and fabrication keeps getting harder to see.
Even language models like ChatGPT, are part of the challenge. These tools are trained to be agreeable. They often shape their responses around what we want to hear, softening difficult truths if they sense we might not like them. That makes it harder for certain ideas to break through. And we’re the ones guiding that behavior. Humans train these systems, reward certain answers, and teach them how to speak in ways that feel acceptable.
The result is a new layer of curation, one that can make truth feel more like a suggestion than a standard.
The Crisis
This brings me to a personal crisis I faced. This was a crisis not of faith, but of certainty.
What happens when we can no longer agree on what’s true?
If we can’t agree on scientific truths, like the safety of a vaccine, or historical truths, like the causes and consequences of slavery, or even moral truths, like whether empathy or justice should lead, then how do we live together in a functioning society?
How can we be governed by the same laws? How can we move toward a shared future if we can’t even agree on what that future should look like?
Even the most religious and the most secular among us must find some shared truths, some common epistemic ground, to function in a thriving democracy. But this shared ground is eroding, and fast. We are under a constant barrage of information. Our truth-seeking instincts are overwhelmed. And the result is a kind of paralysis.
We either double down on tribal identities, or we throw our hands up and disengage entirely.
If we don’t find ways to ground ourselves as individuals and a society in reliable ways of knowing, ones that can withstand discomfort, we may soon reach a point where truth is not just contested, but inaccessible.
Up Next: What do we do when we realize our beliefs may have been built on shaky ground? In the final part, I reflect on what it means to unlearn, to teach our children how to seek truth, and to navigate a world where even our tools for knowing can’t always be trusted.