In a World of Ready-Made Fiction, Truth Requires Work
During a summer BBQ weekend, a progressive peace activist friend and I were having a very casual conversation when she expressed doubts about whether humans had really landed on the moon. Her argument was simple: We only went once, and that makes it suspicious.
I was too relaxed at the time to respond seriously, so I let the conversation go. But the remark stayed with me. How could someone intelligent, engaged, and accustomed to questioning the world become confused about something that could so easily be checked?
Because we didn’t go to the moon only once. Humans landed on the moon sixtimes—Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17—between 1969 and 1972. Twelve astronauts walked on its surface.
That simple fact made me think about something more important than the moon landing itself: the difference between doubting and questioning.
Doubt says: I don’t believe it. Questioning says: How can I find out? The difference is whether disbelief closes the inquiry—or opens it.
A few days later, I listened to a talk by Yuval Noah Harari about truth and fiction. He argued that fiction has certain structural advantages over truth. Truth is costly: it requires investigation and verification. It is often complicated, and it can be painful. Fiction, by contrast, can be cheap, simple, appealing, and flattering. For this reason, fiction can easily prevail unless societies deliberately develop institutions and practices—science, journalism, education and, imperfect as it may be, the justice system—that protect the search for truth.
This brought me back to the conversation about the moon. What stayed with me was not whether my friend was right or wrong, but how certain she seemed—and how little room that certainty left for questions.
Once we begin asking questions, something changes. We move beyond belief or disbelief and begin to investigate. That willingness to ask, examine, and test is a foundation of both journalism and science.
Truth Is More Than Information
Truth is commonly defined as being in accordance with fact or reality. In everyday language, something is true when it corresponds to what actually happened or exists. But information itself is not necessarily truth.
Harari uses an interesting example: the image of Jesus. For centuries, images representing Jesus have appeared in churches, cathedrals, paintings, books, films, television programs and now across digital media. Yet we have no reliable portrait of what Jesus actually looked like. These images are artistic and cultural representations, not historical portraits.
And this raises a larger question: How much of what we recognize as reality is actually inherited representation?
We live surrounded by stories—religious stories, national stories, political stories, economic stories and personal stories. Stories are not necessarily bad. Humanity could probably not function without them. The problem begins when we stop distinguishing between a story and a fact.
Human Hallucinations
This becomes particularly striking in the age of artificial intelligence. We are alarmed when AI “hallucinates”—when a machine confidently produces information that is simply not true. Yet we often tolerate something similar in ourselves: repeating claims we have never checked, treating interpretations as facts, and accepting stories because they fit what we already believe.
The problem is not only that someone may deceive us. It is that a story can satisfy us so completely that we stop asking questions. We demand evidence for claims we dislike while requiring very little for those we want to believe.
And we live in an information environment that makes this easy. Facts, opinions, advertisements, rumors and inventions appear beside one another, competing for our attention. A convincing image, a familiar voice or a confident assertion can give a claim the appearance of truth without establishing it.
We have extraordinary tools for finding things out. But having access to information is not the same as investigating it. Traditional authorities—newspapers, teachers, scientists and community leaders—no longer serve as trusted reference points in the way they once did. Alongside “Who should I believe?” we increasingly need to ask: “How do I know?”
Truth Requires Work
That question turns us from recipients of a story into participants in an inquiry.
Parents understand this in everyday life. When something happens between children, the first account is rarely complete. A parent asks: What happened? What happened before that? Who was there? What did you say? What did the other person do?
Each question can reveal something missing from the original account. What first seemed obvious may become more complicated—but also clearer.
The same willingness to investigate matters in journalism, science, justice and our own lives. What supports this claim? Where did the information come from? Can it be checked? What might be missing?
But the hardest questions are often the ones we direct toward ourselves. Am I accepting this because the evidence supports it, or because it confirms what I already think? What evidence would make me reconsider?
Asking these questions does not guarantee that we will reach the truth. It gives us a way to examine our understanding and correct it. Something we accept today may need to change when new evidence appears.
Correcting ourselves is not a failure of truth. It is the search for truth working properly.
The Truth Is Not Free
This brings me back to Harari’s observation. A ready-made story can ask very little of us. It arrives packaged and appealing, offering an explanation we can accept without further effort. Finding out whether it is true requires something from us: time, attention and sometimes the courage to abandon what we wanted to believe.
The conversation about the moon stayed with me because the missing fact was so easy to find. The harder thing—for my friend, for me, for any of us—is keeping a question open when we feel we already have the answer.
The truth is not free. We have to invest ourselves in finding it.
Perhaps this ongoing search—our capacity to question, learn and change our understanding—is more than an intellectual exercise. It is part of what makes us human.
