There is a common cliche that there are two sides to every story. When encountering a situation between parties, there is always two different versions, and the balance between the two is most likely the closet to what really happened or is it?
We all see our own version of events and our memory of those events can be very clear in our mind, but we could be psychologically inserting false memories to align our thoughts of the events to reconstruct that narrative we believe to be true.
There is also the progressive distortion effect of the story when it gets passed from one person to another. As the mediator between two parties trying to ferret out the real story is always a challenge, as there is often a side you do take and to remain unbiased or neutral is a very difficult mental challenge. When these parties are using secondhand information to describe the story, it even become much more off track to the real story, but we do seem to treat it as a real story and act accordingly.
I know secondhand information is off track and often by a long shot. If you ever have been a receiver of a conflicting story and they tell you a series of events or conversations from a secondhand source, but you are the primary source and firsthand witness of that, you will see that the secondhand source is so off, with just a little sprinkling of the truth, but the further it goes from the sources to third-hand and to gossip level of dissemination, it’s basically far from the truth to even be remotely useful to be of any value, but everyone still treats it as the truth.
A friend told me that President Truman would often times read ten articles from different newspapers about or covering the same story, as they often differ from each other and that you can use all these different versions to paint yourself a close picture of what really happened, and most often times it was in the middle between the two extreme versions of the story. I don’t know that this came from Truman or not, as I haven’t verified it, but it is another example of maybe even quoting President Truman from coming up with this truth-seeking exercise could be false itself.
The middle is usually the case. When one person said this happened, and the other person explained a different version, usually both combined with the extremities chopped off is what most likely happened. Before leaning towards the favored party or believing a story from another person and be especially careful from secondhand sources and beyond. Know that decisions are made from inaccuracies that can have serious consequences. Look at multiple sources and remember that usually the middle line is where the truth is revealed.
