Disclaimer: This rant is intended as a work of satire.
Wow. In January 2006, the American Dialect Society announced that it's Word Of The Year for 2005 is truthiness.
Truthiness is a term that has been popularized by satirist Stephen Colbert on Comedy Central's show The Colbert Report.
What, exactly, is "truthiness"??
truthiness refers to the quality of stating concepts or facts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true. As Stephen Colbert put it, 'I don't trust books. They're all fact, no heart.'"
the quality by which a person claims to know something intuitively, instinctively, or "from the gut" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or actual facts.
It seems to me that truthiness is the very heart and soul of the WTS and of 6 million JWs around the world who follow the WTS. They call it The Truth™, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary with regard to doctrine, historical foundations, and even secular scholarship that resoundingly refutes the audacious claim of being The Truth™.
So what is it that makes JWs cling to the WTS belief system, despite all this contrary evidence? It must be the truthiness of the message. The fact that they want to believe that it is true, and the fact that there are 6 million others who also believe and want it to be true, is such a compelling argument, is it not? The emotional investment - the years spent and personal sacrifices made - in the truthiness of The Truth™ is, for many JWs, so overwhelming, that to accept reality as a viable alternative would cause crippling emotional devastation.
Is it such a bad thing to want to believe in something so badly, despite facts to the contrary, that you are willing to shun your children, parents, grandparents, siblings or friends, forsake looking after your retirement and pension, turn down opportunities for personal advancement, in order to waste your life on something useless like a money-grubbing cult? Isn't a cult the very epitome of capitalism, by acquiring wealth at a maximum rate of return for the least investment possible? When you have people actually believing in the truthiness of the con, they don't even feel like they're being conned. If they're willing to buy and sell truthiness as a commodity, while the rest of us deal with the harsh reality of the non-cult universe, who are we to argue with them? Doesn't that leave us in a vastly superior position, since we are willing to shake off the mental anaethetization of truthiness and deal with life as it needs to be dealt with?
Maybe for some people, the mental anaesthetization of truthiness really does set them free, the same way drugs and alcohol sets other people free from their personal woes and anxieties.