The truth is a thing so seldom required of us that it becomes increasingly difficult to tell. People want to hear what they want to hear. Often they want to reconfirm the lies they have already told themselves. Sadly, people see themselves in your eyes. From the moment your mother says tell the truth, and you do and then she grounds you or your father spanks you, and they continue to insist you tell the truth, you realize, if you have any worldly wisdom about you, that what is required is not honesty or, for that matter, integrity, but merely agreement. I say this is so, you say it is so and all shall go well with you or, at any rate, better than it will if you don't play right.

Now wonder we hardly know what truth is. Rather than go on like some who would convince us that their particular ideas are absolute, I will say that truth is mainly concerned with our honest, or true perception of things around us and in us. By this definition there is no final word and no ultimate truth in this world. Many of us are so out of touch with who we are, though, that to them this last paragraph will mean absolutely nothing. This is what the philosophers call "living in bad faith".