Never Face the Facts

That's what the sign says, hanging in my office: NEVER FACE THE FACTS. This is not meant as an affirmation of massive denial. Rather, it is an attempt to point people in the right direction.
We have a social obsession with making sure that our own point of view is supported by scientific, objective reality. I recently overheard a person who was telling everyone about some convoluted bizarre conspiracy theory (did you know that the 9/11 tragedies were caused by a secret U.S. government plot? neither did I) that this off-the-wall idea had been tested by several scientific groups. Now that I think of it, he didn't say what the results of those tests were...
The only real fact is that we have a hard time determining what the facts are. Back in 1997, Elizabeth Loftus and her students carried out more than 200 experiments to discover the etiology and prevalence of false memories, how they resemble real memories, and how to tell the difference. In these experiments, false memories were created in participants, using a variety of conditions. The result was called "imagination inflation." In another instance, two psychologists were able to so confuse participants they actually signed confessions for damage to a computer that never happened.
But even more than the inevitable subjectivity we face, there is the issue that we use "facts" as a way to avoid dealing with feelings. If we can distract the discussion to determining exactly who, where, when and how, we don't have to confront our feelings about the what. And sometimes these debates about factual details become talking more and more about less and less, whittling nothing down to a fine point.
But sometimes we need to give up this quest for factual certainty. Sure, if we are working in the sphere of law, which must decide by its very nature what is real and what is unreal, or if we are building a building and must dwell in the very embodiment of the material, it would be confusing at best to derogate factual details. The fact is, we live in a world that is factually slippery. Ask any police officer, and you will learn the unreliability of eyewitnesses.
Does that mean that we must resign ourselves to a world without certainty? It sounds like a nightmare, where nothing is solid. The point, however, is not to consign ourselves to trying to catch a black cat in a dark room (and not knowing for sure there is a cat there to begin with.) The point is to recognize the importance of our inner reality as much as the world around us. The spiritual, emotional, psychological reality is not bound by facts, but it has just as much importance.