But is it true?

It's a shame about your feelings, but what are the facts?

• Emotion is often used as misdirection when the facts are inconvenient

• Facts don’t care about feelings, and feelings don’t care about facts

• We cannot determine truth using emotion

• Truth determines whether our emotions are valid

• Emotionless truth is cold but truthless emotion is destructive

---

More hair and fewer pounds ago, I worked for an outspoken Democrat. We didn’t agree on much but we got along well, which made for some great discussions that, outside of getting paid, were easily the best part of the job.

During one of these discussions, I shared with him my belief that liberalism, wherever it is found, is always rooted in ignorance, malice, or both¹. I knew he wouldn’t agree, of course, but while I wasn’t sure if he would take issue with the ignorance and/or the malice, I didn’t expect him to evade the issue altogether. But he did. All I got by way of response was: “That offends me.”

He didn’t challenge the veracity of what I’d said; he didn’t even ask how I’d reached my conclusion. Instead, he just told me how it made him feel.

I was flabbergasted. Here was a man nearly three times my age who, when presented with an ideological hypothesis, couldn’t respond with anything more than what amounted to a sad-face emoji. This struck me as a complete non sequitur. What did his feelings have to do with anything? I wanted to ask, “But is it true?” But being so disoriented by his response, and it having been the first time I’d (apparently) offended him, I pivoted to another issue.

But is it true?

“Is it true” is always the first question we should ask and the first answer we should demand. The subsequent conversation could splinter out in a thousand different directions, but none of them are worth pursuing until we’ve first established the facts. How we feel is not wholly unimportant, but it is an infinitely distant concern when compared to the truth.

This is what conservative commentator, Ben Shapiro, meant when he coined the phrase “facts don’t care about your feelings.” But, as I observed with my former boss, feelings often don’t care about facts, either.

Feelings don’t care about facts

Such was the case a few days ago when Ohio Representative, Max Miller, took to Twitter to excoriate a Christian for publicly declaring a basic tenet of her faith. She had tweeted:

There’s no hope for any of us outside of having faith in Jesus Christ alone.

Miller replied:

This is one of the most bigoted tweets I have ever seen.

Delete it, Lizzie.

Religious freedom in the United States applies to every religion.

You have gone too far.

Now, there are a lot of problems with Miller’s response. A lot. But for the purpose of this article, it’s sufficient to point out that instead of addressing the statement’s veracity, he chose to attack its author. To paraphrase CS Lewis²: he told her why she was wrong (she was a bigot) without having first established that she was wrong.

But the question remains: is it true? Is Jesus Christ humanity’s only hope? If not, Miller should have brought evidence to the contrary. But if so, anger was a completely irrational response. Getting upset with this woman for sharing the one way to God would be the logical equivalent of getting upset with your GPS for telling you there’s only one route to your destination.

Similarly, a video was released over the weekend in which Ron DeSantis said the following:

Ultimately, a movement can’t be about the personality of one individual; the movement has got to be about: “what are you trying to achieve on behalf of the American people?” And that’s got to be based in principle.

Because if you’re not rooted in principle — if all we are is listless vessels that [are] just supposed to follow, you know, whatever happens to come down the pipeline through Truth Social every morning — that’s not going to be a durable movement.

This caused a firestorm amongst those in the MAGA faction of the political Right. Just as they branded themselves “deplorables” following Hillary Clinton’s slanderous “basket of deplorables” remark, Trump loyalists are now proudly branding themselves “listless vessels,” apparently unaware that doing so only helps to prove DeSantis’ point. And while they wear this label with pride, they are simultaneously enraged, declaring this statement to be the death nell of DeSantis’ candidacy and proof that he is a member of the RINOs, Swamp, Deep State, GOP establishment, or some other term synonymous with “traitor.”

But the question remains: is it true? Is there a group of people on the Right that has chosen to follow personality rather than principle; that uncritically parrots Trump’s every talking point? Of course. This doesn’t mean that every Trump supporter is such a person, nor is that what DeSantis was alleging; but there is, unquestionably, a large number of people who are effectively drones for Donald Trump. They may not like having it pointed out, but that has no bearing on the fact that it’s true.

And here’s the thing: they shouldn’t like it — they should feel bad; shame is an appropriate response to having our bad behavior exposed. Feeling bad doesn’t always mean that we have been wronged; it may very well indicate that we are in the wrong.

We can’t divine truth from emotion

But the only way to know for sure is to first establish the truth, and we cannot do so by reasoning backward from emotion. Our feelings cannot, to use earlier examples, tell us if liberalism is rooted in malice just as they cannot tell us whether there are people who worship Donald Trump. The only truths they reveal are truths about us as individuals. Max Miller’s anger over the claim that Jesus is humanity’s only hope tells us something about Max Miller but nothing whatsoever about Jesus or the hope(s) for humanity.

Truth determines the validity of emotion

Feelings do matter, but they only matter in light of truth because truth determines their validity. But for all of truth’s strengths, emotion has the strategic advantage of being part of human nature. We don’t have to work at feeling something; we do it naturally. Feelings are largely reflexive, and thus effortless, instantaneous, and unavoidable. Facts, however, are none of those things. As a rule, we don’t come into a situation already knowing the facts, and ascertaining them requires both time and effort.

This is why hot takes are as unreliable as they are prevalent. They reflect an emotional reaction largely devoid of truth, and as such are generally useful only for destructive purposes. So while truth devoid of emotion is often regarded as cold, emotion devoid of truth is quite fiery, if mostly peaceful. This is why our first question about any claim must be: is it true. Without the answer to that question, further discussion is at best pointless and at worst harmful.

1. This was my conclusion at the time. In the initial version of this article, I parenthetically stated that I still held to this belief, which isn’t true. I included that statement without giving it any thought; a move I now regret.

2. This is a logical fallacy that Lewis called “Bulverism,” and to which he dedicated a chapter in his book “God in the Dock.” You can (at least for the moment) listen to a recording of his essay on the subject on YouTube.