Modern Culture and the Need to Be Right
For those who wish to listen, this article has been so graciously read by Nathan Hackman
Published March 9, 2025
“People aren’t interested in the truth as much as they are being right.”
We’ve all seen this observation (expressed in some manner or other) increasingly these days because it’s particularly apropos to the dynamics of the social media age and the precarious relationship many of us have established with truth and what constitutes it.
To some natural extent, this observation is accurate for all of us. We all want to be right. And for it, we all want what we relate to as truth … to be true, indeed. There’s really nothing inherently wrong with that, either.
What determines how we get to being “right,” however, rests in what distinguishes those of us who seek out the harvest of actual truth from those of us who want to defend the confines of the certainties we have already established to be true.
To the extent the former wants to be right, they understand there is a demand to go and search for a basis of truth upon which to build their claim that they are hovering around “rightness.” And in this process, they construct a basis like that of a pyramid … deep and wide. Thus, they go to greater breadth and depth to consult a broad presentation of facts. They read widely for information and perspective, listening to a variety of interpretations in an effort to do their best to discern what should contribute to their basis from an ever deepening and widening field of inquiry. They give attention to the credentials and experience of the voices they take in, understanding that this really should add weight to certain perspectives.
When they find themselves involved with what emerges as less true than originally believed, they move on from it because although they really want to be right (which we all do), they recognize that can only happen by finding something for their basis that is more closely aligned with truth. As they build upward, the scope narrows from the base on all sides, and while it may never be capped off in a sharp arrow of absolute truth, they are able to trust its orientation toward that end more and more reliably, because the structure does not bend and sway while it focuses in at height.
For the latter folk, a dueling segment of our society not as narrow as I want to believe it is, they understand truth to be something they already possess. Why are they in truth? Because they are right, period. Yes, it’s begging the question, but it matters not because “it is what it is.” Consulting sources (often just a source) from a singular perspective, they journey only so far as to get the affirmation required to confirm what they always knew. They are right, and the other guy isn’t. There is no field of inquiry. There is just the narrow shaft of a proposition—like a fence post—as wide at the top as it is at the base. There is little (sometimes no) credence given to credentials and experience. No one is a “qualified expert” who does not blow affirmations upon what is already presumed.
With a strangely Gnostic-like sense about their own ability to discern, the unknown “digital creator” of Facebook with a YouTube channel who speaks to their “truth” somehow leads them to enlightenment over the rest and to “know what’s really going on.” Without investing any effort to verify either claims or claimants, this segment comes to understand the other guy’s wrongness by way of how the other guy is portrayed. Not by listening to the other guy themselves, but simply trusting how the other guy is explained to them by the voices that affirm the already settled certainty that their segment possesses. Whether the other guys are wrong in reality or just propositionally matters not because this segment’s narrative is the ONLY reality. As they build upward, the top of their view remains as slender as the base. It can be bent and swayed any number of degrees off-center, merely by pushing this way or that. Thus, without them even realizing, this portion of the population can be steered however the right influencer desires, so long as they are already assumed to be right themselves.
The craziest part is that these days, folks that fit squarely in the second category will boast how they are firmly in the first. After lying to others for so long about how they engage sources beyond their echo chamber, they start to believe that it was actually the case. And maybe, at first, it was … in some distant and/or limited sense. Still, as time moved on and social stridency pushed the pendulum out toward what they deemed to be “extremes” not worthy of a voice, they circled the wagons and settled in.
Lest any of us get too critical here, this is a natural tendency, too. We all gravitate to places we deem safer when our defense mechanisms are triggered. The extent to which we do, nevertheless, is the perilous balance. And for a seeker of truth, a willingness to navigate the menacing voices of poor factual basis and misinformation, or spaces of doubt and question, is essential to the prize of truth.
The alternative is to remain huddled, which is precisely what the second segment of society does. They plant their flags and build their fortresses. They get comfortable not being any longer on the pilgrimage, hunting for the knowledge by which understanding is had. Too many perceived threats and slippery slopes lay waiting beyond the wall, jeopardizing the safe sense of rightness they now believe they had once hard earned. Yes, hard-earned in the intrepid, yet imaginary, expedition for truth they have convinced themselves into believing they once made.
Strangely, there is an unnerving feeling in their core that acknowledges how being cordoned off from new, alternative, and emerging facts or perspectives suffocates the potential for understanding. So, they just claim understanding for themselves and learn to seek out sources that affirm it’s all justified.
If opposition from a divergent opinion is somehow able to creep into the circle (as is often the case in less controllable arenas, like those offered by social media), the response is to attack either that voice or the form of it. With an inability to constructively dialogue around a comment or reply that challenges an assumption, the strategy turns to diverting the audience’s attention from it, onto accusations that it has breached the always-shifting, ad hoc rules of social etiquette. It is a strategy that effectively reduces counterpoints to “trolling,” or offensive language, or the attempt to “blow up our thread.”
This in no way suggests that such poor form elements do not exist. They do. But recent trends demonstrate that because they do, they can be utilized effectively to impeach the public correction of double standards, the presentation of overlooked or ignored factual evidence, and/or fuller perspectives on a hot topic due to a present inability to respond knowledgably.
One segment of society has built its fortress on this side of the valley, while those other guys have done the same on the opposing rise. Never mind that the truth usually inhabits the space between. In their way of stifled thinking, each segment takes solace in the surety from within that they reside on the slopes of rightness.
This social dynamic is the reality of the intellectual crisis we now face. What could pose more of a threat to any society than the impending horizon of sheer ignorance that has manifested within the fortress mentality toward truth and the entitlement of rightness clutched by those who merely claim understanding without cultivating it?
The relationship with knowledge in this segment of society is so insular at this point that it’s best described as incestuous. Because the “truth” that has been an inbred conception of these dueling fortresses of reverberating self-affirmation is such a horribly malformed and contorted offspring that it represents a complete and comprehensive loss of contact with what is reality.
It is the destruction of a cultural mind that is mutually assured.
That is … except for the counterculture of those who steadfastly remain on the pilgrimage.
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