"Important truths begin as outrageous, or at least uncomfortable, attacks upon the accepted wisdom of the time."
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Imagine you were a farmer living with other farmers in the middle of Oxfordshire 200 years ago, and one day there comes a man with a stack of paper with lines, images and figures that absolutely means nothing to you and your fellows on it, telling you that there must be a way to make a huge machine out of iron, powered by fuel, that will take you and your families to a place called China on the other side of the globe in 9 hours. What will you say about this idea and what will you do to this guy? “Totally out of his/her mind” might be the slightest reaction. But this brave man is telling the truth, it is just that the truth is so hard to be accepted at that time.
There has been so many times on the history that important truths appearing as a rediculous job and laughed, even fiercely attacked, by the rest of the world. the man who think weight won’t affect the falling speed of an object had to throw two metal balls from the top of a tower to prove he was right; the theory of continents are giant floating board on the surface of earth was treated as dream talking at the first; and the person who told that the earth is not the center of the universe was burnt to death. Even in the last ten years of 20th century, people who though internet could be huge and hot were laughed by Bill Gates and the Microsoft empire behind him. We have to ask why – what is the reason that makes the truths, especially those really important truths contributed a lot in the human history, so unacceptable at the time when they were born.
Fitstly, sometimes the truth itself hurts. You must admit lies are more welcomed by us and this is buried in human nature. It is not to say that we human like lying, yet it is true that most of us will avoid to tell truth when we think it is not a apropriate time to speak it out. How many times have you pretend to enjoy tasteless pasta just because it was made by your friend? How many times did you have to say “well it looks perfect on you” when friend showing you their new bought hat, which actually looks like several piece of distorted cloth? And why would people do that? Because we know that sometimes the truth hurt, we need to not tell it to survive.
And when it comes to things like “the earth is a globe”, it hurts most, and people just choose not to believe or laugh at it, since when this kind of truths newly come out, they are always against some sort of “common sense”, which might has been wrongly existing for hundreds of years. To tell people this kind of reality is like to destroy part of their world. What’s more, these important truths are always far more advanced concerning either with science or some other areas, people just can’t understand them. They are so different ideas that people could not believe. It is the same as the reaction you’ll receive when telling a kid that Santa Clause is actually their parents.
And imagine the rest of the world all believe in Santa Clause and the gift thing, you are the only one who is aware that this is all fake, will you be brave enough to say? That is the third reason why some truths begin as outrageous – there are only a few people who knows it at first. They are weak; they cannot sound as loud as the rest of world can. Even if they can reason the truth perfectly, there is no way to widely spread their voice, especially in the old time. When lies are repeated millions of time by millions of people, they are strong enough to defeat the truths.
Yet, this sort of important truth telling and hurting thing is fading, partly because of the raised education level, partly because of the methods of communication becoming so various and powerful, which makes information reaching people easily and fast. And the most important thing is that protecting different thoughts and ideas gradually becomes a new global “common sense”. With this improvement and progress, we shall see that those astonishing truths will have more chances and easier to be accepted by the world.
