Why Facts Are So Much More Important Than Feelings
There was a time, not so long ago, when a person’s opinion on any given subject emerged from a blend of personal experience, deductive reasoning, emotional response and verifiable facts. Opinions were shaped by real encounters, real consequences and real patterns that people had lived through firsthand. Somewhere along the way, however, that balance shifted. For many people today, the idea of an opinion has morphed into something rooted almost entirely in emotion.
The question is no longer “What is true?” but instead “How does this make me feel?” If something sparks anger, it must be hated. If something sparks joy, it must be loved. And if it challenges a belief or identity, it must be rejected outright. The problem with emotion based opinions is that they are grounded in feelings rather than facts, and feelings can shift in an instant. They can be influenced by mood, by stress, by wording, by a headline or by the herd mentality of social media. While feelings are an important part of being human, they become dangerous substitutes for reality when they are used as the sole foundation for a world view.
Today, countless Americans form their understanding of the world not through lived experience but through the filtered lens of television anchors, curated online feeds and political commentators who are paid to keep people outraged. Their impressions of entire nations, political systems and groups of people are shaped from the comfort of their living room couch. Meanwhile, individuals who migrated legally to the United States from socialist or authoritarian countries often try to warn us about the very mistakes they themselves watched unfold. They lived through the propaganda, the suppression, the economic collapse and the false promises.
Yet, in our infinite confidence, we brush them off as if their lived reality is somehow less meaningful than our imagined one. When a person who escaped socialism says the words “You do not understand,” perhaps it is time to consider the possibility that we truly do not understand at all. Perhaps there are aspects of the world we cannot see because our information stream is carefully shaped, filtered and edited before it reaches us. When a world view is created by movies, dramatic headlines and deliberately slanted reporting, the result will never be an intellectual powerhouse. The result will be a programmed activist who is convinced of a reality they have never actually experienced. We are watching this unfold in real time. It is happening right now.
You would think people would be smarter than this. Yet more and more individuals seem willing to ignore warnings from those with firsthand experience. If someone told them that a certain fruit was poisonous and would kill them, some would eat it out of pure stubbornness just to prove the warning wrong. This is the predictable result of a growing culture built around the idea that no one can tell us anything. It is the “you cannot tell me what to do” mentality dressed up as independence and self empowerment. People have twisted serious warnings into perceived commands that they feel obligated to rebel against. To be blunt, if a person is too foolish to listen to someone who has actually lived through a dangerous situation, then that individual is choosing to put themselves at risk. They should own the consequences, whether good or bad. But we all know that in most circumstances, instead of owning any aspect of an issue, the offending party points to fault with everything and everyone else but them. There is truth in the old saying that stupid people do not know they are stupid. They often mistake impulsiveness for bravery and ignorance for enlightenment.
America now stands at a crossroads. Things will either get dramatically better or dramatically worse, and the direction depends entirely on the willingness of everyday citizens to step away from emotional reactions and return to a pursuit of truth. Ignorance may feel comfortable in the moment, but it is a destructive comfort that allows lies to flourish. It is time to reject the bliss of not knowing and instead make a committed effort to seek out facts. And let us be clear about something that desperately needs clarity. Truth is truth. It does not change because someone does not like it. The modern trend of saying “my truth” is misguided and rooted entirely in personal perception rather than established fact. In this context the word truth is simply a replacement for words like opinion, perspective and point of view. Calling an opinion truth is dishonest and disrespectful to the very idea of truth.
The shift between truth and opinion has been happening slowly for years. I first noticed it through something as simple as television news. When I was in elementary school, we were taught that a journalist’s job was to report the five W’s of a story. Who. What. When. Where. Why. Those were the foundational elements of factual reporting. A reporter was to uncover the facts, and the audience was to decide their own opinion.
But as the years went by, something changed. Reporters began slipping unnecessary adjectives into stories. At first the change was subtle. Older reporting would say, “The police placed the suspect under arrest,” while newer versions began saying, “The aggressive, authoritarian police forcibly handcuffed an innocent man.” To the untrained eye the difference may not seem dramatic, but it is enormous. The first sentence presents facts. The second sentence manufactures outrage. The suspect is now “innocent” before a trial. The police are labeled “aggressive” and “authoritarian” even though these are interpretations, not facts. The purpose of the wording is not to inform. The purpose is to provoke.
More and more news reports are inserting opinion into what is supposed to be an unbiased account. If the goal were truly to inform the public, this shift would make no sense. But if the goal is to create a narrative or inspire a specific emotional reaction in the audience, then the shift makes perfect sense. It is deliberate. It is calculated. It is dangerous. When news stops being about truth and starts being about desired outcomes, it has already become propaganda. And propaganda, even when dressed up in modern clothing, is still propaganda. It exists to manipulate, not enlighten.
This cannot be tolerated. Not by the political left. Not by the political right. Not by anyone who values a free society. If this trend is allowed to grow unchecked, it will only become worse. And given the current state of the world, none of us can afford for this to worsen any further. It is time to stop elevating feelings above facts. It is time to reclaim truth as something solid, something verifiable and something shared. Having an opinion does not make you right. Only facts can do that. And the future of our society may very well depend on rediscovering the difference.
