Objective Truth vs Subjective Truth

Now, more than ever, in a political climate filled with so much division, it is crucial to have the ability to discern what is subjective and what is objective. Bill Stierle and Tom discuss the difference between subjective truth versus objective truth and offer examples in multiple contexts such as business and politics. As people consume more information from various sources, the lines get blurry, and belief often takes precedence over facts. That’s why it’s important to draw the line as you build your own perspective, political or otherwise.

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We're going to discuss objective truth versus subjective truth. I'm looking forward to this discussion because we have many examples that have nothing to do with politics although there are some that come into it but this is something that many of us experience every day in our lives or in our business.

One of the challenges is that how do we do integrity in regards to a thing called accepted social norms. How do you hold somebody accountable for that? The answer is you can't because it's outside something that's either criminal or it's civil. There are these different laws. It's a little challenging because human beings struggle with truth. We struggle with perception and perspective. All you got to do is believe something and it becomes your truth, which can be problematic because as soon as you believe something, it may not be the truth. You may want to, as a human being, hold onto that truth because somebody told you it was true. You've never wanted to fact-check it and never wanted to make an adjustment to it. This is a good topic. There are many instances in businesses where we can get stuck as well as in politics. They get stuck between what something is objective, more fact-oriented or subjective that might be more feeling-oriented. I feel like this is a wrong thing to do versus, "There's a law about this." You've had several different experiences in business like that.

I have and it's an interesting thing for me to think about. I'm happy to share with our readers. I’ll try to keep it relatively easy to understand. In some ways, it restores your faith in the fact that there are certain things that are objective truths that you can count on, especially if we look at things we want in our country and politics. There's been an assault on truth. Can we get to the truth? Is there absolute right or wrong? Not in everything but in some ways there is some certainty. I'm a business owner and we provide services for customers. They pay various different ways, a lot of times, by credit card. Sometimes, you have a customer who, despite your best efforts, feels like they don't feel good about the situation. Even though in that situation I will offer a compromise and a partial refund.

I had somebody who, despite the fact that we provided about 3 or 4 times the amount of service in what they paid for to try to make them happy. At the end of the day they were stuck and they wanted something that was not in alignment with what they paid for. They had the belief in their mind that they should get something more than what they paid for. That gets to be a difficult situation. I’m trying to have an amicable way to end it, I offer, "We don't agree on this but in the interest of putting this behind us and not having a fight over this, I'll offer you a partial refund of X." This happened. It reminded me of this. This customer refused that. They flat out said, "I demand a complete and full refund," which was not in alignment or proportionality with the service that was provided in good faith.

On your side, it’s fairness too and best efforts. A belief creates an entitlement. The word entitlement is a very difficult word in politics because you're entitled to do something. Tom, you pay insurance. That is money that you're saying to this company, "You're setting the numbers and I'm in agreement that I'm paying you this money. Therefore, if anything comes wrong, something is going to come back." In the world of politics, as soon as we get into Medicare, Medicaid and things like that, that's insurance. People are paying money in and then they're looking for services to come back out. There are some limitations to the number of services like you can't get your plastic surgery or certain things inside that space because it's not in alignment with what is fairness with that insurance policy. It's not an entitlement because it's something that you're exchanging money for a service even though a label and a belief can be put in that way. That's why the subject called objective truth and subjective truth is important because depending on how you cast a word, a phrase, a term, you can shift something that used to be in this objective space over to the subjective place. Everybody goes like, "That's a bad thing." You're going like, "How did it become a bad thing?" There are other examples that it's not that. The fact doesn't matter anymore because the subjective interpretation has taken over as fact.

That is important to understand. Troubling in some ways but it should be reassuring to people that somewhere there is an arbiter of the facts and there are rules you can rely on. In this case, going back to my example as a merchant, the customer had a belief that they were going to get something that wasn't in alignment with what they purchased. We did our best to provide that service in full and in fact did more efforts. To us, we spent way more time than what they paid for but they demand a full refund. What do they do at that point when they don't accept my partial refund? They can go to their credit card company and claim that what they purchased they didn't get and try to do what's called a chargeback or reverse the charges. Within a certain amount of time, the credit card company is there to look after the purchaser and make sure that there's no fraud and stuff like that.

Here's where it gets into objective truth. There are only certain reasons that a credit card holder can say our justification for why they're reversing the charges. It's not like, "With the service that was provided, they didn't do a good job." That's not one that's available. It's not like, "I'm not happy with the result." It's either it was a fraudulent purchase that they didn't ever make in the first place. That's a pretty high bar to me. It's easy to prove that's true or false or the item or service wasn't delivered but this is where it's important. This one is what applied in our case. As long as we can show as a company, we provided service. We're deliverables. The volume and the value of those things are at least in the neighborhood of what was paid for.

The customer was a participant in that exchange with emails and things like that. They showed up, exchange and working with your company in order to reach the end goal that you were hired to do.

We provide this evidence to Visa, MasterCard and American Express. The credit card company is the arbiter of truth and facts in this situation. We provide that evidence not only deliverables but we provide a transcript of Zoom calls, which we have Zoom calls with clients and they're all recorded for everybody's benefit. You say, "This customer participated so if they claim that they'd never intended to make the purchase, that's pretty clear evidence. If they didn't intend to make the purchase, why are they having a conversation with us and engaging in the process?" The Visa and MasterCard, all they look at are, "Did you do work? Did you deliver it? Did they participate? Was the purchase properly made?" There's none of this. "I purchased but they didn't deliver everything they said they would." As a company, you want to be in integrity in trying to provide what you promised you're going to provide but what this objective truth ends up the customer can form in their own mind that they should have gotten something beyond the scope of work and what they paid for.

Honestly, in this case, I felt like we did go above and beyond trying to satisfy them at the end of the day. That's why I offered a partial refund. The credit card company comes back and says, "They intended to make the purchase. You provided service." It's provided service, period, not didn't provide service up to this level that the customer was happy. It's like, "Did you do it or did you not?" It's very black and white thinking on the part of the credit card company. That's where it gets to objective. That, to me, was a good example of this whole issue we're discussing about objective truth versus subjective truth. There are multiple perspectives to look at this from. Mine, as a business owner, has only one perspective. I'm sure as a consumer, you might think, "I paid for this but they should have provided that."

This is where it gets unsettling, the objective truth versus the subjective truth. The thing is that once the services are delivered, the value of the services delivered is decreased. We've talked about this thing before. There's an example in the past that we've used called the Call Girl Principle where the money is paid upfront before the intimacy. Sex Act is a thing because the value decreases after. It wasn't that good. You don't get a refund because it wasn't that good. This is what the value was before. One of the hardest things that we're dealing with within our society is that we're making a purchasing of truth in a certain way. We're then immediately devaluing the truth because it's from a different party, remedially devaluing truth because it's not getting the idea in our mind about what the deliverable is. Even though we're saying, “We don't do this thing. We do this other thing. If you want that other thing, you've got to go to someplace else but we do this part of it well. We don't do this other thing.”

They pay you the money for doing this thing and they go, "What about the other thing?" You say, "I told you I don't do the other thing. I'm not responsible for X, Y and Z. That is a different company that had different services. We don't do that part." "I thought you did. Therefore, I want my money back." "You've only bought this part and you need this part before you get that other part anyway." Regrettably, in a very disheartening and sad place is that the subjective part of it is there's flexibility in thinking that is the subject part of it whereas the logic is going to override the interpersonal thing when it comes down to certain business or political practices. What we're struggling with is the subjective viewpoint. "There were 73 million. Therefore, we need to fight." It's like, "That's not the way it works. 81 million is bigger than 73 million." "Yes but that wasn't the right number." “Votes aren't subjective." "They are. All we've got to do is change the messaging and now they're subjective. We need somebody else to count the votes."

You see that the rabbit hole is sitting right there for us to go down. A person that could be reading this can go like, "No but our leaders said there were. Did that go into the fact part of it in the court of law?" "I don't want to look at that that there wasn't any evidence to prove it. I want to keep it alive in the subjective world rather than trying to kill it in the objective world." This is the trouble and the need for truth. The casualty becomes trust. "I don't trust you as a person, the elections, the capitalism, the housing market, the IT, Wall Street, Main Street." Tom, we've got to do some work to restore truth and trust between people. This is where this is. We've got to strengthen this narrative around truth and create laws that we stick to and hold to because there's a reason why they're there.

There is a reason why they're there but unfortunately, often, laws are not enforced equally. The same attention isn't given. You have the whole three strikes and you're out law regarding certain types of offenses that are pretty low level. Three strikes and you go to jail. We're filling up prisons and feeding that private prison industry but then when it gets to white-collar crime, all of the many people contributed to the 2008 financial crisis. In corporate crime, there was one person prosecuted out of all that. It was not in any way the most egregious crime that was committed here. A ton of people got away with an awful lot. The American taxpayer ends up footing the bill to bail out these big companies. Another interesting one where there's a law was the Hatch Act.

That's another one in the political setting that's very simple. You don't use public property and public time to do political stuff. Mix those two things. If you want to do it on your own time then you leave the public property. Go out and leave The White House or wherever. You go out, do your event and then you come back but independently.

You're not supposed to lean on the support of the Federal Government or your official position to do political campaigning and use anything of your office to do that. For instance, The White House is the obvious prop of authority on other things that you're not supposed to do. I remember back in the Bill Clinton administration, Al Gore was, in his capacity as vice president at one point, making some phone calls to request donations from political contributors and did it from his office as the vice president. That would be kicked out, blown up as a huge issue in the media. There was no agency or authority that was the known solution to that to be the police officer to pull Al Gore over and give him a ticket. It was very ambiguous as to what was supposed to happen. There was this law but there was no real mechanism to enforce it.

In TV Speak, they have the TV show Law and Order. There was the law but there was no one to keep the order of things. It's like, "We did this thing but there's no one going to enforce it. There's no one come to. There's no one empowered to arrest a person by breaking one of these political things that we have guardrails." What has happened through time is there has been a stretching of those things that we say, "This is something that we agreed upon." The person goes, "I know you have agreed upon but I don't want to talk about that. The president gets to do what he wants. It's not that big of a deal. It will blow over in the next news cycle, just wait." They never say that sentence. They say, "It wasn't that big a deal." They don't say, "We're going to wait for the news cycle to move so this will go away and those consequences that go with it."

The Hatch Act is a great example of passing a law that tries to establish some guidelines or a guardrail that is trying to govern how our elected officials should act. It sets some boundaries for them but without setting up the consequences. Oftentimes, laws like this don't necessarily establish the consequence. The law has no meaning because this Hatch Act gets discussed in the abstract a lot. "You violated the Hatch Act." Al Gore coined the phrase, "No legal controlling authority to police and enforce it. It becomes this discussion and then it easily descends into different perspectives of truth. It becomes this debate of, “Did he violate the Hatch Act? Did he not violate the Hatch Act? Yes or no?" Fast forward to 2019 when Former President Donald Trump holds a campaign rally on the lawn with The White House as a backdrop, which was a more overt violation of the Hatch Act. At that point, with the sitting Republican President, the Republican is in control of the Senate and no formal process in the Hatch Act to enforce it. What was going to happen? Who's going to enforce it? Former President Donald Trump more blatantly violated it. He's like, "I don't care. I don't think the Hatch Act is important. I don't think it means what you all think it means."

"This is what I want. This is where I want it. This is the one I'm going to do. Go ahead. Make me stop doing what I'm going to do. You can't make me stop what I'm doing." There's this dance between an overt expression and a covert expression. The covert expression is it's going underneath. They're going to do something under the table. If they get caught, they get caught but there's got to be an enforcing body and a way to bring some kind of consequence. Overt thing is it becomes the, "Make me do it. What you're doing is so wrong." It's fundamentally. The money has caused polarization. The fixed belief narrative has caused polarization. Communication is not slowing down as you may have noticed. It's speeding up a bit. It's almost like, "I better pay attention to every spare minute. I better be on some YouTube video that's going to reinforce my beliefs. If I have enough courage, see what the other belief is that's being promoted so I know what to say in reference to that. As a human being, I've got to make my choice and make my best guess about how am I going to fight for an advocate and purchase my own truth to make my world work."

That's where you and I are sitting. That's almost the reason why we started this thing years ago talking about how do we language truth. We can't just keep creating rules for the people that have fewer means and not enforce rules for the people who have enough money to buy their way around the rule. We can't keep doing that over the weekend. That's what winds up happening in the weekend and allows somebody of affluence to slide where somebody that doesn't have the means to protect themselves go to jail instead of walking. We need to take some new steps that balance transparency and secrecy. That balanced a diminished reality and loyalty. We've got to get our reality to match so that our loyalty is not myopic or single-focused because that's what we got. There are things that are being said that are not true. We've got to make sure our loyalty does not cloud the truth of what the person is saying or doing. Not be so quick to jump on a new belief that doesn't serve us. It will be interesting to see what the next piece is going to happen with laws and the news media. How are they going to continue to cover this relationship between objective and subjective truth?

I don't know how they're going to cover it. I'm interested in that as well. It's also important for people to have a better understanding of the difference between objective and subjective truth. It helps each of us individually deal with the things that we face or we're reading about in the media to understand differences. It helps people navigate this world we're living in and all the information that is being thrown at them.

There is a way forward. It looks bleak at this moment on our show. It's like, "How do you deal with this? It's too complex." Most people have withdrawn. They aren't even reading the end of this show. It's like, "This is too hard of a conversation." What makes it valuable is that there is a third way. When we give an empathetic response to both, a black and white thinking perspective as well as a consideration that somebody else's beliefs cause them to take an action that was outside the rule of law then we can have some compassion. For example, if I'm watching somebody that got so energized about their loyalty, they went and marched on January 6, 2021, I need to have some compassion and empathy to realize that person has been influenced by people to get them to do something that was outside the rule of law. Trusting the rule of law, trusting the courts and not thinking it's all topsy-turvy, it isn't. There are many people of integrity that hold the fork down. There are many people that stand there and go, "This is the line I stand for because this is what the law stands for."

We've got some work to do because we keep softening things with collective belief. Seventy-three million people voted for former President Donald Trump. That's the fact that I'm willing to live with. There's the fact that I'm willing to live with Joe Biden got 81 million votes. I'm not willing to live with the phrase massive fraud. It isn't my need for truth or integrity. I can be compassionate to it. I can say, "You've been messaged. People have talked to you. You have a belief that there was a massive fraud. Is that right?" "Yes," the person says. Those are people of leadership and you're loyal to that leadership. They are telling you that there was massive fraud. They're saying that to keep your loyalty. The path of empathy at least allows us to have a discussion about the good reason why I'm on team X versus team Y. They're still human beings, even though I might be in a disagreement with it. I need to be compassionate with the disagreement and then it will go better.

If we have more compassion and empathy, their minds won't boil over to the point where they're willing to be violent and commit acts like the insurrection or the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Unfortunately, Former President Donald Trump was the one who was not only giving them empathy but he's also adding fuel to the fire that got them angry to take action to try to stop the certification of votes.

I'm going to be there with you. It's enough to motivate a loyal person voter to believe that I'm going to be there with you. He wasn't.

Somehow, he's going to protect them from the laws that they're going to break. There's so much that's troubling about all that.

The limbic brain does not sort that stuff out very well. It doesn't say, "You may want to logically think that breaking into this building, even though the president told you may not be your best idea or your best thing." "I can appreciate that. Brain, I can appreciate that you're fired up about this but this is not the way this community or the United States works. It doesn't work quite this way." You're doing something in a way that's opposite of the agreed-upon norms of certification of elections and this stuff. That's what you're against. Tom, to let our readers know, the biggest thing in mediation and communication reducing has to do with stepping into a place where you can listen to both sides, be empathetic and compassionate to the various different beliefs that people have and still not escalate the conflict. That's a good part of my work. Keep it from escalating so that you can have a discussion that you may end up disagreeing with the belief about the way the world is but at the same time, you're acknowledging that I do have a standard. I do have a willingness to allow other human being to voice their beliefs without violence and force.

I would say to have a more healthy discourse and engagement or discussion with somebody that doesn't just evolve into name-calling, blaming, shaming and all these things that are so unproductive.

They're not collaborative or cooperative. That's one of the things that give the United States the strength, collaboration, cooperation. If you don't lean in on those things, instead, you're going to lean in on individualism, identity politics or loyalty for party over nation. It will not go well for us. It becomes which side can get one more vote and then the other side gets fire to the town. That's not our strongest strategy. People are using their words to start the fire. That's not the strongest way that a collaborative, cooperative nation or an active democracy works.

Bill, thank you so much. I appreciate this discussion. It's very helpful to me. I hope it was helpful to our readers as well about objective versus subjective truth.

Tom, thanks a lot. See you next time. We're going to discuss objective truth versus subjective truth. I'm looking forward to this discussion because we have many examples that have nothing to do with politics although there are some that come into it but this is something that many of us experience every day in our lives or in our business.