Philosophers love truth — that's a truism. What about the rest of us? Do we love truth or falsehood? Truth, we naturally affirm. So why are we swimming in falsehood?
Last fall, a peculiar scenario played out involving restaurant menus. They weren't true. You'd read one thing on the menu and be served something quite different. First came the revelation about restaurants run by Hankyu-Hanshin Hotels. Then it snowballed. One prestigious establishment after another came forward with shame-faced mea culpas: We do it too. Hotel restaurants, department store restaurants. The Osaka Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Tokyo's Imperial Hotel. The Renaissance Sapporo Hotel. The Hotel Okura. Takashimaya Department Store.
What fools they made of us! How they must have laughed at us, sitting there dressed in our best clothes, smugly ordering the best fare, not even suspecting that the premium "kuruma shrimp" was really commonplace tiger shrimp, the high end "Miyazaki pork" was really middling Iwate pork, the "fresh" fruit juice was really frozen — and so on and so on.