The phrase sounds reasonable when you first hear it. “Everyone has their own truth” carries an air of tolerance and maturity, as though it signals an escape from dogma rather than a retreat from thinking. It often appeals most strongly to people who have spent years inside complex systems, where rigid certainty has a habit of slowing things down unnecessarily or breaking things.
After enough exposure to competing incentives, partial information, and institutional blind spots, skepticism begins to feel earned, certainty starts to look naive, and tolerance begins to resemble wisdom. In that context, the idea that truth is relative can sound like an upgrade rather than a concession.
The problem is that when this idea is broken down and followed carefully, it doesn’t actually do the work people think it does. It solves one discomfort by introducing a much larger one, usually without announcing the trade.
What “Truth Is Relative” Actually Means
When someone says that truth is relative, it sounds as though they are saying no single person sees the whole picture. That claim is of course true, reasonable, and largely uncontroversial. Human knowledge is limited, perspective matters, and context shapes interpretation.
But that is not what the phrase ends up doing in practice.
If truth is genuinely relative, then saying “X is true” no longer means that X matches reality. It stops functioning as a claim about how things are and starts functioning as a claim about mere preference. In ordinary use, it unconsciously slides toward meaning something like “this fits how I see the world” or “this works for me right now” or “this is what I like.”
The word stays the same, but the role it plays changes.
This shift rarely gets stated outright, which is why it passes unnoticed. Conversations continue as before, decisions still get made, and people still speak about values and principles. On the surface, very little seems to change. Underneath, something essential has just been removed.
What disappears is the idea that truth can correct you.
When Preference Replaces Accuracy
Once truth becomes personal, accuracy loses its authority. There is no longer anything outside one’s own interpretation that can insist on push back or revision. Reality stops acting as a reference point and starts functioning as raw material for rationalization.
This matters because preference is easy to defend. It flexes under pressure. It bends to protect identity, reputation, and self-image.
Accuracy, by contrast, resists. It introduces friction. It narrows options. It forces recognition of limits.
When preference replaces accuracy, judgment becomes unmoored in subtle ways. Disagreement no longer points toward resolution. Evidence no longer carries decisive weight. Facts can always be reframed as one perspective among many, which means they never have to outrank the narrative already in place.
Nothing dramatic happens at first. But that is part of the danger. The system continues to function, and confidence remains intact. Over time, though, the capacity for self-correction weakens.
Why This Fails Under Pressure
This approach can appear to work when the stakes are low. When decisions are reversible and consequences arrive quickly, errors tend to reveal themselves without much damage. In those conditions, interpretation doesn’t need to be especially accurate yet because correction remains cheap.
The difficulty begins when those conditions no longer hold.
Some decisions cannot be undone. Some consequences arrive years later, filtered through layers of structure and responsibility. In those situations, reality’s role as a stress test becomes essential. Without it, early distortions remain unchallenged long enough to harden.
Under pressure, interpretation bends in predictable ways. Ego seeks protection. Identity seeks coherence, and reputation demands consistency. When consequences lag behind decisions, stories fill the gap.
None of this requires dishonesty. It emerges naturally from human cognition operating without sufficient resistance.
This is how intelligent people end up confidently wrong. The failure doesn’t come from poor reasoning. It comes from reasoning that never has to confront a firm boundary.
Scale Changes Everything
What can remain manageable at an individual level becomes dangerous at scale. In large systems, mistakes don’t correct themselves quickly. Feedback weakens as it travels upward. Counter-evidence is filtered, often with good intentions. Consequences drift further away from the decisions that produced them.
When truth is treated as negotiable in that environment, the effects compound. Assumptions last longer than they should. Explanations that were once provisional begin to guide future action. Over time, rationalizations turn into strategy.
Blind spots expand without drawing attention to themselves. From the inside, everything appears consistent. From the outside, though, misalignment grows more obvious, though rarely authoritative enough to interrupt the momentum. By the time the error becomes visible, it has usually become structural and embedded into the system.
At that point, correction feels disruptive rather than clarifying. Too much has already been built on top of an assumption that was never properly stress tested or fact-checked.
The Comfort of Relativism
Part of what makes relativism attractive is that it reduces immediate discomfort. If truth is flexible, painful recognition can be postponed. Being wrong doesn’t have to be acknowledged too quickly. A misjudgment can be reframed. A trade-off that favored short-term stability over long-term cost can be justified as necessary.
These moves feel humane in the moment: They lower tension. They preserve harmony. They allow decisions to proceed without confrontation.
The true cost only appears later.
Pain that is postponed doesn’t remain static. It accumulates. More decisions get made on top of earlier ones. More people become invested in the story that holds everything together. When reality finally asserts itself, it does so with greater force and far fewer options.
Early correction limits exposure. Late correction leads to a painful reckoning.
Liberal over-tolerance of relativism undermines the ability to counter fake news.
The True Cost: Loss of Calibration
The problem here is not disagreement. Disagreement is often useful. The deeper cost is loss of calibration. It is the weakening of the ability to tell whether confidence still tracks reality.
When nothing is allowed to count as definitively true, self-correction becomes harder to trigger. Errors register as differences in perspective rather than mismatches with reality. Over time, epistemic humility fades, replaced by style, spin, and coherence.
Confidence separates from accuracy.
Intelligence doesn’t disappear in this process. Analytical ability remains intact and can often become more refined. That refinement makes it easier to rationalize an existing position and harder to notice when it no longer tracks the truth.
Orientation is lost here. Judgment continues, but without a reliable reference point. From the inside, everything feels justified. From the outside, drift becomes evident. But because there are no alarms built into this process, the loss often goes unnoticed until the cost becomes unavoidable.
The Question That Restores Orientation
There is a simple question that reopens the channel, though it rarely feels comfortable.
“What is actually the case here?”
This question does not ask what feels aligned or what preserves the narrative.
It asks for description before interpretation. It introduces constraint, which narrows options and limits narrative flexibility.
That narrowing is precisely why the question is so important. Constraint allows for correction. Friction restores orientation. Without it, thinking drifts too far away from reality.
This question doesn’t promise comfort. It promises reliability. It allows reality to resume its role as a corrective force rather than a resource to be shaped.
Where Values Belong
Once truth is taken seriously again, a second question follows naturally. If this is true, then what should be done?
This is where values enter, and their role is often misunderstood.
Moral reasoning doesn’t replace truth. It presupposes it. Facts describe what is. Values guide what ought to be done in light of those facts.
Confusing these two levels produces predictable errors. When values determine facts, perception becomes selective. When facts are treated as if they already contain moral conclusions, judgment becomes rigid and blind.
Values function here as decision infrastructure. Values can define what counts as a cost, what risks are acceptable, and which lines shouldn’t be crossed once the situation is clearly understood. Without truth, values drift into mere post hoc rationalization. But with truth, they can guide action without distorting your perception.
A Closing Thought
A meaningful and fulfilling life starts with truth. Without truth, values may not disappear, but they do lose their grounding and begin to justify whatever direction momentum has already taken you.
Before asking what matters most, it’s worth slowing down and asking a more fundamental question: “What is actually the case here, even if the answer makes the next step harder?”
That question doesn’t solve everything; it does something more basic. It restores orientation, which is where accurate judgment must begin.
If this message resonates, listen to the full episode on the Beyond Success Podcast:
🎧 Episode 72 – “No, Everyone Doesn’t Have Their Own Truth”
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