To Be Truthful Is To Be Human

The first cell with a nucleus originated around 2100 million of years ago. This phenomenon marked the beginning of Evolution process. From Eukaryotes to vertebrate, to mammals and finally to Humans, we developed and not just developed but we also adapted, acclimatized, survived and made it till here. But what about others who were not fated to be humans…yes the animas! What happened to them? How they developed and finally what made them different from us?

Therefore the important question which should be asked appropriately now is that “What differentiate us from animals?” Is it the sophistication that as humans have, or something else?

To get this we looked into animal cognition and according to Hume’s views “It is hard to assess what happens in animal minds, since we cannot directly perceive their thoughts. We must base inferences concerning animal cognitive capacities on perceptions of animal behavior, whereas, with respect to humans, we can also lean on introspection.”

Kant’s views said that “Human mind consist of three faculties – sensibility (faculty of representation), understanding (faculty of conceptual understanding), and reason (faculty of interference). Animals have just the sensibility.

These abilities of human to represent, understanding and reason combined together leads to the ability of distinguishing between truth and lie.

But to understand what “truth” (a relative concept) is one should understand the logic, biology, chemistry and philosophy behind the opposite of it, which is lie.

In the course of evolution when humans developed from early cave man to present, we underwent many transformations and changes. These changes helped our race to survive. Among those many changes that we learnt in the course of time one was to “lie.”

To put things in perspective let us take an example. Statistics suggest that lying tendency of humans is not something that they develop after certain age but this tendency is seen in us from an early age of 3 months. A baby begins to cry when he wants something from his mother but as soon he gets that thing he stops crying. This action of baby is not the true crying but it’s a lie for which emotional mother falls. Now as we grow old the frequency and scale of lying exponentially increases. Lies creeps into every facets of our daily life. Kid lies to the mother, husband lies to the wife, teacher lies to the students, leaders lies to their followers and this is how we as human are growing.

The other side of the story is still left to be told, as few among us can still listen to the heart and take decisions keeping conscious alive. The word in which they believe is “truth”. Truth and they prefer to walk hand in hand. They stick to the standards and follow what is truth and only truth. Harder to find and mostly are the ones who have faced many hardships in life. After all “if you cannot give bitter pill sugar coat it” but unfortunately these people are bad at this also. For them truth stands as it should.

The third category include the ones which are somewhere in middle of the above two extremes. They do not lie but they say “half truth”. Let me give an example here – imagine a doctor who works in a geriatric hospital. When asked by the worried family members about the heath of their loved ones, they never tell them a compete truth or I must say that “bitter tablet is sugar coated” by them.

Which were the ones which made it in “survival of the fittest” race from the above categories? The answer is all. We as humans survived this race using all techniques that nature taught us. We learned them mastered them and even improvised them.

Correctly said “to be truthful is to be human” but again “human are not always truthful”.

“I guess sometimes you have to lie to find the truth.” 

― Scott Westerfeld