🐌 truthfulness > factfulness
a fact is something that is
a truth is something that means
an example: the first thought in response to something, like a slight, might be a fact, it may be the first thing that occurred. it is but it lacks meaning. for a thought to be given meaning it has to be used, conveyed, projected out into the real world. thoughts are powered by a more deterministic mechanism than words and actions, but to succeed in performing the illusion of agency - you construct a self as you make decisions about what you do and are. you don't exist in a present moment, but are a series of decisions extruded through time, defined by what is chosen to be true, rather than fact.
to this end, a fact alone is pointless. a fact is absent meaning. a series of thoughts may have, factually, run through a head, but the important one is the one chosen. that is the fact given meaning. that's the truth.
you can't reliably use fact to convey meaning. people add meaning to fact, often adding their own substance to create their own meaning. if you want to convey a truth, your obligation is not to convey raw fact, but to have the listener arrive at the meaning you wanted to convey. without this, one can be factual but untruthful. the words inbetween are insubstantial, the definition of these words is irrelevant to the meaning they should convey. this should be made clear, because to not do so would lead others to the wrong meaning, but it should also be done.
it is easy, in fact common, to lie with fact, especially unintentionally. in the pursuit of authenticity, the first thought has been given social cachet - preparedness, thoughtfulness and script appears unreal. streamers are more real (more factful) but not more truthful. the pursuit of total authenticity drives you towards base impulse, uncritically following drives towards success or disaster, eventually barely sapient.
some have accidentally arrived at these conclusions backwards, fixating on factfulness, but pursuing an unshared truth. they say something that is real, they convey a meaning that allows them to bypass a conflict, but the truth they built in someone else's percpetion doesn't match their own. often they'll collapse when these contradictions with others become insurmountable, as their opposing realities collide, tangle and disintegrate.
facts shield people from each other to form a shared relationship with an objective entity. it's less horrible than the above scenario, but it's atomising.
truth is connective.