The All-Too-Easily Forgotten Value of Metaphorical Truth (Patreon)

So, without going into too much detail, I have many close friends who, unlike me, grew up in religious families. And not just slightly religious — hardcore, young Earth creationist-level enriched BS.

And one thing I notice about them, even the incredibly highly educated ones, is their chronic inability to understand metaphor. Since they were taught that their holy books are literally true, they have only ever dealt with facts.

When they leave their oppressive family religion, as many of my friends have, they still only deal in facts, just more scientifically accurate facts. So they go from being dogmatic religionists to dogmatic secularists. And the latter group are only slightly more tolerable than the former.

Let me clear. I love my friends. At the same time, occasionally, it can be dastardly difficult to talk to or deal with some of them, because their thought processes are so brutally binary. Like, now I know how bisexual people must feel, surrounded by glowering gays and cynical straights, both angrily rebuking them, forcing them to “pick a side”.

Fortunately, most of us live in the real world and the real world is in full color. There is some white, and some black, but mostly every other color. There are more shades of blue in the room I’m sitting in than we even have names for.

It’s important that we don’t believe harmful BS, but it’s also important that we don’t cut ourselves off from creative imagination and inspiration. Yoda does not exist; he is a cloth puppet voiced by Frank Oz. But that doesn’t make every single world he has ever said any less deep, any less wise, any less beautiful, any less meaningful, any less valuable, any less actionable, any less moving, any less true.

Self-confidence may not move every mountain, but it’ll move far more mountains than the zero that wallowing in despair and cynicism will. Cognitive biases are not ipso facto a bad thing. Cognitive bias is like aiming a projectile in a crosswind: you actually want to have some overcompensation, but it needs to be in the right direction. There’s no use in aiming straight if aiming that way will literally prevent you from hitting the target; there is no use in having neutral, bias-free thinking if prevailing conditions are such that it actually harms you.

Don’t be so concerned with fact trees that you miss entire truth forests. The point isn’t to be gullible, it’s to be ruthlessly concerned with what is useful.