Don’t Believe Me? Look it up.

"What is truth, really?" | Castles in the Sky #2

Per capita, Iceland has both the world’s most novelists and the world’s most strongmen. I would love to visit and be one of them, a strongman novelist with his friends, listening to Sigur Ros under the Northern Lights. Someone once told me that high schoolers in Iceland have better educational outcomes than their U.S. counterparts, and even though I found the comparison jarring, I didn’t investigate this fact.

Iceland is tiny. My hometown of Houston, Texas, has about six million people in it. It would take the population of sixteen Icelands to fill Houston. 

The United States is the world’s third most populous country. I only learned this by looking up facts about Iceland. I was surprised I had not investigated this before. I make shit up as much as the next guy, but trust me on this one.

As a kid, I would relentlessly investigate facts. I never stopped asking questions. When did I stop following my curiosity? When did you stop following your curiosity? 

Which fact in this introduction did you find most interesting? Did you look it up? Do you plan to? I bet it’s the Icelandic strongmen novelists. After you finish this, will you follow your curiosity google and search, “novelists per capita?” Maybe you will just keep scrolling and reading. I often do.

By now, “social media bad,” is a cliche. It’s all “feeds.” Like we call the big bags of low quality corn that farmers give to livestock. Social media feeds are algorithmically determined, showing us what we want. Maybe we’re more like livestock than we realize–just consuming the same shit over and over and over. 

Some medieval artists in Rome would specialize in something called a féd (pronounced feed), which was a copy of a masterwork by a great artist. They would travel from town to town with retainers and fake credentials, attempting to pass of the féd as the actual masterwork and sell it to a local noble. Maybe we’re more like those artists than we realize–just looking for praise by capitalizing on the success of others. 

Let’s pivot back to the strongmen novelists listening to Sigur Ros under the Northern lights in Iceland. 

Tourism to Iceland is booming. Anthony Bourdain went to Iceland on one of his early TV shows. He almost died in a snowstorm. He worked out with a bunch of strongmen, and their post-workout meal was a stew with potatoes and carrots. Off camera, I imagine that two of the strongmen stayed behind to workshop novel ideas.

“I thought, ‘tell it to my timeline,’ was such a good line,” Murdour said, “but it just doesn’t seem in character for Delilah.” 

“Yas king,” Sigurður said. “She bangs on about how hard it is for her to confront Adam, but when I wrote this scene I could not think of a way for her to quit that was in character.” 

“Yes, she’s a great character, very spunky.” said Murdour. “Perhaps she should quit her job by Tamago.” 

“Tamago?” asked Sigurður.

“It’s when someone quits by leaving a post-it note on their boss’s desk–very popular in Japan,” Murdour answered.

“You are right,” Sigurður said. “Now, let’s max out on bench press.” 

Anthony Bourdain wanders blindly through the snow outside the window.

Cool story right?

We could both stand to cultivate a little more curiosity and actively investigate the new facts we learn. We need to approach the new like children, incessantly asking questions and exploring our curiosity, instead of sticking to the scripts we run through our head all day. It would make us happier. It would make our lives fuller. It would probably even make us money–finding a way to stay stimulated in our jobs. 

Most importantly, it might also lead us to the truth. 

You were prepared to read all the way to the end of the essay, just completely skipping over the first comment about strongmen novelists. That’s understandable–but really, were you going to look it up later? How do you know I was telling the truth?

If you weren’t looking them up, that’s cool, but what about féds? Did you think that was an interesting idea? 

I made it up. Did you not notice one of the characters is named Murdour? That’s not an Icelandic name–it’s the British spelling of Murder. Tamago, from their conversation, is just Japanese for egg–not quitting your job by post-it. (And Icelandic men don’t tell each other, “Yas king.”) 

After all, I’m an unreliable narrator, or am I?

The next time you encounter a fact that surprises you, that’s a sign: you need to follow that thing. If your intellectual orientation is to go down the rabbit hole every time you hear a surprising fact, it will fill your life with wonder, but also make you less susceptible to bullshit. 

“Nobody’s got time for that!” You think. “In an age of information abundance, we have to trust our curators. There’s too many rabbit holes to get lost in.” This is a brittle defense against bullshit. No curator is completely trustworthy or reliable. Just a few lies or misstatements can spring through their shields like weeds through the sidewalk.

Imagine if I had not told you that féds were fake, or that Tamago was egg in Japanese. Just harmless facts, but what if you had repeated it in conversation? The most likely outcome is you don’t remember the details of the fact at all, but you don’t need to remember a fact for it to affect how you think about things.

Somewhere in your mind you would file your impression of féds somewhere, maybe in your thoughts about Rome, or art students, or social media. The impression that the fake Tamago phenomenon left would be filed somewhere about Japanese people, or the nature of work, or late stage capitalism. Even if you’re not consciously noting or remembering facts, the sediment of these impressions accumulate on your worldview.  

It’s good to follow up when we hear a fact that surprises us because curiosity is a muscle, and flexing it will put more wonder and excitement in our life. It’s also good to follow up with facts we didn’t know but didn’t surprise us. Some entity could be astroturfing our awareness of some topic without us even knowing it by virtue of the facts that we let slide, subtly adding to our impressions of that thing.

If you hear something new that surprises you, follow that. Scratch the itch. If you hear something new that doesn’t surprise you, follow that too. You will not be able to look up everything all the time. The important thing is that you learn to lean into the things that spark even a little curiosity, because over time it will bring joy into your life, it will make you less susceptible to bullshit, and you know what? It may even save your life, as noted by famous Abraham Lincoln biographer: 

“In the carriage ride on the way to the Ford Theater where Lincoln was assassinated, Lincoln and his wife, Mary Todd, saw some traveling acrobats in a park. As they were a rare sight in those times, Mary Todd expressed interest in stopping to see them, but Lincoln said no. 

‘But we’ve already seen the play at the theater,’ Mary Todd said.

‘I have no interest in seeing something new–perhaps you can come back without me,’ Lincoln said. 

Hypotheticals are not the domain of a historian, but we can wonder what might have happened that night if Lincoln had been as curious as his wife.” 

You’re pretty sure that story’s bullshit huh? Look it up. 

After all, curiosity can lead you to the truth in ways that critical thinking might not.