There is no truth. There is only perception.

So said Gustave Flaubert, the great French novelist, considered by most to be The Great French Realist.

Following recent Singaporean incidents such as the suicide of David Widjaja in NTU and the infamous AWARE saga, I am beginning to see why such philosophy exist.

How can one hope to know the true circumstance of things when everything is smeared with a cloud of opinion? One can think that the Josie Lau team were a group of radical Christians out to hijack a secular women's association to spread their personal beliefs, while another can think that the opposition old guard are promoters of homosexuality. There would be no end to it. It seems like we always tend to see the world in distinct ways: Christians hate homosexuals and plan to take over the world; Homosexuals plan to take over the world by turning everyone gay.

The thing is, most of the time, we just act according to what we think is right. And there are 6,706,993,152 different ways of doing what is right. What we see as methodological and organised takeovers of our society are nothing but the push and pulls of the aggregate values of Singapore. That is something we would have to face and find in ourselves to accept in all things

I do not believe that there is no truth, just that it is impossible to know it. Much like how it's impossible to see the two sides of the same coin in one glance, we can never know the entirety of Truth. Perhaps that's why we are embroiled in wars and conflicts, forever insisting on the authenticity of what our faction holds to be true.

One would think though, that the human race would one day cease to argue once they all realise that there would be no end to it.

Take for example Cheney's defence of the usage of torture in the interrogation of terrorists. There can be no end to such an argument. A security hawk would think that such criminals deserve the harshest punishment to exact the information they require while the opponents would see it as a breach of human rights. (Though if you really think about it, it would be quite funny to see the wardens pleading the terrorists to let on the location of bombs they have planted: "Hey man, can you please tell me where your buddies are going to crash the next plane?")

I guess at the end of the day its to each his own. We all have to seek our own truth.