What is True?
Two individuals believe in separate, unique truths.
Person A believes in truth A. The tomato is red.
Person B believes in truth B. The tomato is green.
These truths are irreconcilable. Therefore, someone must be wrong. Right?
However, what the two individuals do not know is one, relevant fact:
person B is color-blind.
Instead of seeing colors normally, person B sees red & green as the same color. In an odd way, both person A and person B are stating two irreconcilable TRUE facts. The tomato is both red and green. The debaters do not know this, of course.
Without understanding color-blindness, these individuals could fight and argue forever at no avail.
They could find more people who saw the tomatoes the way they did.
Unfortunately for person B, color-blindness only affects 1 in 12 people.
Democracy rules after all.
Person A must be right – the tomato is red. The green tomato see-ers would be voted out 11 to 1.
To make fun of the debate, Person C decides to create truth C. The tomato is purple.
Person C knows this to be false, but thinks it to be very funny.Â
To A & B’s surprise, many other people think it to be very funny too.
The purple tomato movement has begun.
While acknowledging the falsehood, the movement thought it would be HILARIOUS to find a way to make the statements legitimately true.
Using a great deal of resources, the movement paints every tomato in the world purple from the moment they sprout. They enact propaganda and re-education to make sure everyone knows their new truth.
Luckily, the color-blindness of person B does not affect the color purple.
Finally, persons A, B, and C could all agree that the tomatoes were indeed purple all along.
The debate is over. Without any need for science, curiosity, or investigation, truth has won over.
Tomatoes are purple.
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Fun fact: tomatoes are red due to lycopene.
Image from Nature.com