Truth is never a label; it is not something we match. Truth is something we make with all our senses in a conscious process of remaking the world as the world remakes us physically, psychically, and socially.

A half-truth is an awful lot of truth! Most people never get that much.

“The scientist lives in a world of matching, and his idea of proof or verification is just the matching evidence against evidence. When somebody doesn’t match but makes a new breakthrough, this is just as disturbing to the scientist as to the educator. It upsets the whole apple cart.

Visual man considers truth as simple matching of his thought against “reality”. The audile-tactile Jap or primitive man thinks of truth as involvement in the real, i.e., as making. Aristotle’s concept of mimesis is close to the old primitive idea of involvement. However, Aristotle saw that mimesis or repetition had the paradoxical effect of catharsis or release from involvement. If you wish to detent yourself from the particular conditions of one culture you have to construct an anti-environment. Art is such an environment and is intended for conscious contemplation. Technology is also art and creates new environments that have the exact opposite effects of art. These environments saturate and subdue consciousness. See Edward T. Hall’s The Silent Language and The Hidden Dimension.

The format and tone of some press styles may make the very concept of truth irrelevant. The most urgent and reliable facts presented in this way are a travesty of any reality.

Truth is not matching. It is neither a label nor a “mental reflection.” It is something we make in the encounter with a world that is making us. We “make sense”
not in cognition but in recognition or re-play.

This is the theme of The Gutenberg Galaxy where it is explained that the visually oriented person stresses matching over making in all experience. It is this matching that is often mistaken for truth in general.

[In a newspaper] most trivial matters are given considerable additional intensity by being translated into prose at all. That is why no account of anything can be "truthful" in a newspaper.

In history and letters [since the time of Machiavelli], a lie about man was made the basis of secular prediction and control… And today man is being taken up as the instrument of the totalitarian transformation of man and society. The truth which is our freedom can, neglected by us, become the means of an enslavement of mind and spirit surpassing any tyranny of which history makes mention.

When "truth" is reduced to mere matching of inner and outer, any statement can be questioned: "Dictionaries drive words out of their senses," as a wag noted.

It is observable that the more illusion and falsehood needed to maintain any given state of affairs, the more tyranny is needed to maintain the illusion and falsehood.

For "testing the truth" is not merely matching by congruence or classification; it is making sense out of the totality of experience — a process of pattern re-cognition that requires not only concepts but active perception by all the senses. Today, as "hardware" is transmuted into pure information by the process of "etherealization," the "inner" and the "outer" merge — thinking becomes doing.