Good Dads and Truthiness

From Andy: Just seen a great new film, The World’s Greatest Dad starring Robin Williams. I will not spoil your treat by giving away the plot, but just to say there is a twist half way through which turns the world upside down of the lead character played by Robin Willliams. (There is also a comic moment of great genius - you know these when the well behaved cinema audience responds with totally raucous laughter.)
The film’s other remarkable quality was its parody of how we choose to create our own reality of events, or own interpretation – and re-interpretation in the case of the film, of what we believe to be true – our ‘truthiness’.
Truthiness is an important concept for anyone being creative, generating creative ideas, and also in brand communications in getting your ideas accepted.
Sometimes you can get insight from someone outside the field of study, a non-expert in the domain.
A major philosophical concept, well at least a label, was not created by a philosopher - but by a comedian. During an episode of the political satire show The Colbert Report comedian Stephen Colbert coined the word ‘truthiness’. It means in essence: ‘the quality of stating concepts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than the facts.’
Our reality is that we all see the world through ‘truthiness glasses’. Perceptions, are just as valid as facts in our mental landscapes,
People erect barriers in their mental landscape preventing the recognition of ‘the truth’ of any new information with which they might feel uncomfortable.
They did not want the dissonance, the anxiety to upset their existing world view, which acts as a magnet for any negative information about things you dislike, and precludes contradictory data; otherwise your definition of truth would need to be re-evaluated.
So, it does not matter if a fact exists or not, in terms of being validated by data. You can have your own facts.
On the one hand truthiness is what some people want to exist.
On the other hand it is what some people don’t want to exist.
And that’s the truthiness of it. My truthiness is that The World’s Greatest Dad is a great film.