Truth or Dare

I find it funny the way sometimes playing around with words can lead to new insights about the world we live in.

This morning I was playing around with binary concepts — like “Yes” or “No”, “True” or “False”, and then I was reminded of a game we used to play as kids called “Truth or Dare”. The enticing element of this game is that each player is somewhat free to choose between alternatives — they can either tell the truth or perform whatever the other player(s) dare them to do. Surprisingly, as a child it never occurred to me that I was indeed also free to choose to follow these rules or not.

It is also at least a little bit remarkable that as little children we would have never dared each other to do something that might have been life-threatening. I guess this is because the turn-taking involved in the game only allowed us to dare each other to do things that could be done in a few seconds or at most a minute.

I cannot remember any individual instance, but now I am somewhat amazed that it would have never occurred to me to make up a story as an answer to a request for truth with a complete fabrication. Of course if anyone had ever dared me to jump off a cliff, then I would have walked away without thinking twice. Did this game implicitly also teach us that to not tell the truth would have been just as defensible as a response?

Most cases of lying today are not such simple “true” or “false” questions. Instead, we are told stories that are clearly marked as “dreams” … and the lines between fact and fiction are blurred only gradually, such that when finally someone is depicted as flying through the sky, it almost seems like a true natural phenomenon. Such fictions have become so widespread in everyday life, that no one seems to question their validity at all anymore.

No one ever points out that these fictions are in fact fictional, because that would simply spoil all of the fun.

“Fun and games” is, after all, the whole reason we are here — isn’t it?

Instead of answering that, let me suggest an alternative approach. Maybe today we ought to learn from the insights of both Kant and Socrates — and dare to not know.