Why Truth Is The Highest Value, Video - Notes

[Daniel Balan]

I've manually taken notes as I followed along @Leo Gura video, Why Truth Is The Highest Value. No AI or any transcript summarizing tool was used for these notes, just my manual work of taking the most important insights from the video.  A life transforming video. One of my favorite videos of all time! Here are the notes:

 

Why Truth Is The Highest Value

 

Wanting to discover truth is doing genuinely enquiry to discover the truth which is different from defending your current worldview or your belief system or what you already think is true

The people who are in the most need to do genuine, thorough enquiry about the truth are the people who think that they have already discovered the ultimate truth and that their worldview and belief system is perfect.

To care about the truth is to have a very curious and open mind to want to go in a truth seeking journey!

Not by defending preexisting positions and answers.

Only by engaging in life long pure philosophy will you be able to generate truthful sense making about reality and the world

Caring about truth is necessary for a proper life.

There must be a higher purpose to reality than human feelings.

 

Valuing truth is reflected in your whole attitude, your whole lifestyle, it's your value system, is what you think, it's what motivates you, what you prioritize in your life.

I'm not advocating for absolutism here, there is no only correct worldview, no only correct life style, it's all relative.

We are dealing with 2 sets of values, the ones that drive your daily life and the fantasies you tell yourself.

Truth is the highest value because reality is truth.

If you don't prioritise truth above else you are going to prioritize survival above all else meaning you are going to drown in self-deception, selfishness, corruption and devilry.

If you place anything but truth as your top value you are going to fall into self-deception.

Anything less than truth as the highest value must lead to corruption.

 

This episode is going to have a profound connection to the topic of corruption.

• Corruption is the not caring and not prioritizing of truth.
• Corruption is the non-prioritization of truth.
• To prioritize anything above truth, that's corruption.
• Truth cannot be found collectively. In any collective there is no truth to be found.

 

The only way to experience and live a successful life is to have your life led by a mind that is run by an engine of truth. The only way to experience a fine life is to have mind that is powered by an engine of truth. The engine that runs your life must be truth, otherwise if your engine is anything but truth the vehicle that runs your life will stray to corrupt and self-deceptive paths that will lead to suffering and pain. correct interpretation of reality can only be achieved by driving through life in a vehicle that has as its engine the valuing of truth. Without truth as your engine you risk having your wheels fall off your car as you drive through life.

 

All the things you value are valuable only to the extent they are true or real. Existence and realness are the highest value.

 

What happens if you substitute truth with money?

• Now you are free to lie to others and to yourself, you are free to bullshit, you are going to believe what you need to believe to make as much money as quickly as possible.
• In the most extreme examples you are going to start printing fake money on a printer in your house.

 

What happens if you place success ahead of truth?

• Donald Trump
• Elon Musk
• Billionaires
• What if you place sex as your top value?
• You are going to be me too'd and you are going to be a classic pick up guy scumbag.
• You will misunderstand women, and have bad views on them
• Conversely if you place truth above sex you will lose a lot of sex because you are going to tell women things they don't want to hear.
• Women will get with men that tell them the most fantasies and lies and bullshit, not the truth. Truth doesn't get you laid.

 

How to decide who to vote for? Ask yourself, which of these politicians or political parties are valuing truth the most and have their life and policies guided by the pursuit of truth the most? That's who you should vote for.

 

What happens if you prioritize power above truth?

• That's called a dictatorship, that's called a tyranny!
• Political corruption is people valuing power over truth!
• The more some politician goes above and beyond saying and doing anything that will get him closer to taking power, that's who you should never vote for.
• The Italian mob is what happens if you place family and friends over truth. In 3rd world countries once you become a mayor or a governor it is expected that you give your family and friends positions of power. That is the definition of corruption. Fuck your family! Truth is what matters the most.
• Placing your ethnic group above truth creates fascism, Nazism, nationalism, Zionism, genocide, war and crimes against humanity. Fuck nationalism. Nationalism is a racist fantasy

 

What happens when you put religion as your top value?

• Spiral dynamics stage blue puts religion as the top value.
• Anything you place above truth will get corrupted and become fake.
• Social justice and equality as the top value?
• Fake social justice if it is value more than the truth
• Truth is more important than human well-being.
• More important than mankind.

 

If you prioritize feelings and pleasure over truth?

• That's called becoming a drug addict
• There must be a higher purpose to reality than human feelings.

 

Truth is bigger than good feelings, because bad feelings are also true. God doesn't discriminate between good and bad feelings.

Discovering truth often leads to bad feelings.

Sometimes living in illusion also leads to good feelings

A thing can only have value if it exists.

Existence is the pre-condition of for the value of anything at all.

God is the prerequisite on which everything can exist.

Without truth, existence is not possible.

Truth is infinite value.

Your children are not the highest love, because there are a billion other children that need to be taken into account, and not just children, there are trillions of beings that are as important as your children.

No human bias is ultimately true

 

Examples how love fails as a value:

• If you love your children the most you are going to do some corrupt and evil shit for your children at the expense of every other child or being.
• If you love your tribe or nation you will do a lot of bad and evil things that will put in jeopardy the rest of mankind that is not part of your nation or ethnic group.
• If you love your partner, you will get over attached and dependent on that person. Also you won't be able to love that person through thick and thin unless you have a deep connection to truth.
• If you love mankind that will translate to enormous damage done to plants and animals and forests and ecosystems and to the planet.
• If you love Christ that will translate human worship into hating other forms of spirituality. And you will not realize what is god because god is well above your Christ ideals.
• The source of all corruption is not setting truth as your highest priority.
• God, truth, reality those are the same things
• By setting something else above truth is like saying I know better than God and I do whatever I want, even though this goes against God's unwritten laws of reality.

 

People in the government lie all the time and they get away with it.

Every intelligence agency is a source of profound corruption on the world.

 

Notice how people who don't value truth become! Their minds are deluded. They lie to themselves, they cheat, they steal, they kill, they do violence, they hurt others. They live like animals. They're addicts, they're fools, they have a criminal record, they've spent time in prison. All their relationships are broken and toxic. They're depressed, they have anxiety, mental illness, spread misery to the world, they hurt the people close to them.

If you go with a hidden camera to analyse someone who puts family as their top priority, you will see how much they work their children and do violence to them when the rubber meets the road.

 

People who don't take truth seriously, they are incapable of love.

 

People who don't prioritise truth, they spread delusion and propaganda. They spread toxic and hurtful politics, create war, they are unreliable and trustworthy, and unstable, they are insecure. Because truth creates security and untruth creates insecurity.

 

Getting your worldview from twitter or political Youtubers is like having your food ordered from the toilet.

Genuine truth seeking means a true and genuine desire to understand reality.

Not acting like you already know. Not acting like your beliefs are right and your worldview is the truth.

It is about going on that journey.

Integrity is placing truth above anything else.

Corruption is the pacing of personal material gain over truth.

This people who run this charities, they are still assholes to their wife and children when they come home. Where do they got those money ? They stole it. Their charity is fake.

 

 

You lie to get a job, you fake your resume, you bullshit as a political actor because you need to fool people to vote for you, you bullshit to get a sale, you bullshit to run your corporation. You want to be lazy and not work. But truth means work.

All lying is done because you want pleasure or you want to avoid some pain.

Satan is the master of untruth. All evil begins with untruth.

Caring about truth is self-correcting. If you care about truth the epistemic errors that you have will auto correct over time. Otherwise your worldview will become more corrupt.

You have to be really careful and honest. You might think you care about truth when in fact you are caring to reinforce your pre-existing beliefs and survival.

The psychology of being wrong. Rewatch that episode.

The critical aspect of serious development is to realize how wrong you are.

Caring about truth is what seriously allows you to be wrong.

Unless you are deeply questioning your worldview, you are not having truth as your north star.

 

Valuing truth means deeply caring about epistemology and studying it. It means epistemic responsibility. Investing time and energy into truth seeking. It means paying the cost. Sacrificing survival for truth. Until you sacrifice money, power, sex, fame, success and luxury. If you don't sacrifice the aforementioned, you are not a serious truth seeker and your philosophy is false.

Valuing truth means doing hard work.

You can't value truth and be lazy at the same time. Nor can you value truth and leech off other people.

Truth seeking is a proactive affair not passive. Don't wait for Leo to spoon feed you truth. Find the truth for yourself. If you really cared about truth, you could derive the entire actualized.org body of work just by sitting on the couch and thoroughly contemplating about it.

Valuing truth means extreme open mindedness. Through close mindedness you can't expand your understanding of reality.

Valuing truth means to explore difficult truths.

Valuing truth means acknowledging about you not knowing.

Stop speaking things you don't know.

Truth also means not selling out. Not putting yourself in careers and jobs that would make you compromise truth.

 

A list of traps on this topic:

• Confusing truth seeking with pushing truth onto others.
• Expecting others to value truth seeking as much as you do.
• Don't bash people with the truth.
• Moralising and become a truth crusader
• Turning truth into a weapon to advance yourself
• Being too honest. When in doubt, shut your mouth. Don't talk bullshit.
• Talking about truth, but not walking the talk. Question your beliefs and lifestyle all the time.
• Turning truth seeking into an identity
• To regard what you want to be true, as truth. Or what you already believe to be true, as truth. You've got to be very good at introspecting. Truth seeking is actually inhibited by what you want to be true. It doesn't matter what you want, it matters what is actually true.
• Make a list of all the things you want to be true. Make a list, identify those. And then drop them.
• Go watch the episode developing Introspection, it deeply connects with this episode.
• Do not become perfectionistic about truth and corruption.

 

Practical tips for you:

• Carefully observe as a practice how no one around you cares about truth.
• Contemplate deeply why you prioritize other things over truth.
• Observe and become conscious of the consequences of not caring about truth. Where does that lead to?
• Notice the difference between the gain happiness and avoid suffering spiritual pursuit vs truth. True spirituality is about knowing how reality functions and what god is.

 

Without truth your default will be group think and conformity. Which leads to madness of crowds.

• Truth forces pursuit of insight versus belief and fantasy and ideology.
• Truth forces you to be accountable to counter confirmation bias and cherry picking.
• Truth makes you fair and just.
• Truth forces you to clear and clean your own lenses, glasses and microscope and telescope from which you view the world.
• Calibrate your instruments before you do your science, otherwise your science will be wrong.
• Truth doesn't market and sell well. This is why you should pursue it.
• The avoidance of truth creates evil.
• Surrender to truth.
• Truth is the solution to all problems.
• Worship truth.
• How to become pure? By loving truth more than anything else.
• Your values really matter.
• Your values determine your destiny.

Edited Thursday at 08:22 PM by Daniel Balan

[LordFall]

My feedback on your notes without having read them is they're too long and you need to start with the main takeaways on top as a TL;DR

On the actual video, really liked it. I'm only halfway done so far but I liked the principle that anything not based on truth will instantly start to corrupt even if it makes sense originally.