From Truth in a Toga to Truth as Insulation

Although I profoundly disagree, let’s start with Protagoras, who said it first, and said it cleanly:

Man is the measure of all things

He said this in the fifth century BCE, in Athens, in what we might now call a seminar room, and Plato spent a good part of his career trying to talk him back off the ledge. The argument Protagoras was making — that truth is perspectival, that what is true for you may not be true for me, that there is no fixed point outside human perception from which reality can be adjudicated — was not a fringe position. It was the position of the Sophists, the professional thinkers of their day, and it was taken seriously enough to require serious refutation. Twenty-five centuries later, we have arrived, apparently, at the same ledge. Now we call it “my truth.”

To Lie and to “Truth”

Before tracing how we got here, it is worth pausing on something the language itself reveals. English has a verb for deception that is native, Germanic, bone-deep: to lie. Old English lēogan, inherited directly from the ancestral tongue, requiring no Latinate borrowing, no philosophical scaffolding. It is the kind of verb that exists because the action it names was common enough and consequential enough to need its own word from the very beginning. English does not have an equivalent verb for telling the truth. We have never had “to truth.” We reach instead for constructions — to speak truly, to testify, to attest, to affirm — all of them Latinate, all of them borrowed from the Romans, who were building legal frameworks rather than moral ones.

Other languages made different choices, and the difference is instructive. Ancient Greek had alētheuein — a verb meaning to speak truth, to be truthful, to tell things as they are — derived from alētheia, the word for truth that Heidegger would later unpack as unconcealment, the bringing of things out of hiddenness into the open. Aristotle uses it regularly. The Greeks had both the philosophical concept and the verb for it, and it is not incidental that they were also the ones who argued about truth with the greatest sustained rigour. The grammatical infrastructure supported the intellectual project.

Hebrew weaves truth and faithfulness together at the root: aleph-mem-nun gives you emet, truth, and he’emin, to believe or trust, as inseparable concepts. Honesty and reliability fused at the etymological level — a language that does not permit you to separate what is true from what can be depended upon. German, the language that has perhaps thought hardest about truth since the Greeks, gives you wahrnehmen — literally truth-taking or truth-receiving — which became the ordinary word for perceiving or noticing. The assumption built into the word is that genuine perception and truth-apprehension are the same act. German also gives you wahrsagen, truth-saying, though the language has allowed it to narrow into fortune-telling, which is its own quiet commentary on how cultures regard those who claim access to hidden truths. English, by contrast, borrowed its truth-vocabulary from Rome and left the verb slot empty. The action of lying was already in the Anglo-Saxon bone. The action of truthing, apparently, needed to be argued for, and English never quite got there.

The Origins of “My Truth”

The phrase “my truth” did not spring fully formed from a podcast or a self-help shelf. It has a genealogy, and that genealogy is worth tracing, because it began with something real. The post-structuralists of the twentieth century — Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard — made the uncomfortable but necessary point that what gets called truth is not always neutral. It is often the truth of whoever holds the power to declare it. Official histories, legal verdicts, medical diagnoses, institutional pronouncements — these have all, at various points and in various ways, been used to silence people whose experience contradicted them. The insistence that lived experience deserves standing even when it cannot be verified by the dominant framework was not intellectually frivolous. It was, in specific contexts, genuinely corrective.

From there the phrase migrated into therapeutic culture, and this is where it began its long slide from instrument to shield. Recovery movements and trauma-informed practice in the 1980s and 1990s found in “my truth” a useful formulation: your experience is real. Your testimony matters. You do not need institutional permission to say what happened to you. This was doing work, and the work was often necessary. The problem is that experience and fact are not the same category, and treating them as interchangeable is the sleight of hand at the centre of everything that followed.

Oprah’s Twisted Gift

Oprah Winfrey is almost certainly the single most influential vector for moving the phrase into common English. Through two decades of television, she established a framework in which personal narrative is sacred, individual truth is inviolable, and the act of “telling your truth” is consistently presented as both courageous and self-evidently valid. This is not a small cultural force. It is the kind of force that reshapes vocabulary. By the time “my truth” had passed through daytime television and into commencement speeches and Instagram captions and political press releases, the philosophical scaffolding had been stripped away and what remained was the rhetorical function: my truth cannot be checked against yours.

Where Trouble Lives

This is where the trouble lives. Unfalsifiability is not a feature of a truth claim. It is the disqualification of one. A statement that cannot in principle be contested, corrected, or measured against evidence is not a truth; it is a preference, an assertion, a feeling, sometimes a story we have told ourselves so many times it has hardened into something that feels load-bearing. These are not nothing. Feelings are real. Stories matter. But they are not the same as what actually occurred in ways that can be verified, disputed, and if necessary corrected. The conflation of the two does not elevate feeling into fact. It just makes the facts harder to reach.

The deeper irony is structural. “My truth” was developed as a tool for the less powerful — a way to insist that testimony which institutional authority preferred to ignore still had standing. It borrowed its moral weight from the historically silenced. And then it was adopted wholesale by people with every platform and resource available to them, deployed not to be heard but to avoid being held accountable. The politician caught in a demonstrable falsehood, the executive whose version of events contradicts the documentary record, the celebrity whose account of a situation conflicts with six witnesses — all have learned to reach for the same formulation. It is my truth. It does not need to cohere with yours.

What this achieves is not the protection of vulnerable testimony. It is the levelling of all testimony, so that nothing can be weighed against anything else and the loudest or most sympathetic voice wins by default. This is not epistemic humility. It is epistemic surrender dressed in the language of courage.

Protagoras at least had the honesty to make his relativism explicit, to put it forward as a philosophical position and submit it to argument. Plato could engage with it, push back against it, point out its self-undermining quality — if all truth is relative, what is the truth-value of that claim? The contemporary version of the same move does not invite argument. It forecloses it. You cannot fact-check a truth that is categorically mine. You cannot produce contradicting evidence against an experience. The toga has been traded for insulation, and insulation, by design, keeps everything in and everything out.

As already stated, there is no English verb for what we do when we tell the truth. Perhaps that gap has always been an invitation — a blank in the language where an act of will is required, each time, to construct something that cannot be inherited or assumed. Truth, actual truth, is always built rather than given: assembled from evidence and argument and the willingness to be wrong. “My truth” skips that work entirely. It arrives already complete, already valid, by virtue of being mine. Protagoras would have recognized the move immediately. He might even have approved. Plato, I think, would have known exactly what to say.

But then again, perhaps the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz knew it all along when he said “Ain’t it the truth, ain’t it the truth”.

Notes and Sources

Protagoras, fragment DK 80B1: “Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not.” Preserved in Plato, Theaetetus, 151e–152a. Trans. M.J. Levett, rev. Myles Burnyeat (Hackett, 1990).

Plato. Theaetetus. Trans. M.J. Levett, rev. Myles Burnyeat. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1990. The central Platonic refutation of Protagorean relativism, including the self-refutation argument at 171a–c.

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics, Book IV, Chapter 7 (on truthfulness, alētheia, and the truthful person, alētheutikos). Trans. Terence Irwin. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999. Aristotle’s use of alētheuein as a virtue-describing verb is distinct from its epistemological uses elsewhere in the corpus.

Heidegger, Martin. “On the Essence of Truth” (Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, 1930/1943). In Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Heidegger’s analysis of alētheia as unconcealment (Unverborgenheit) is foundational for understanding the Greek verbal tradition around truth.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon, 1977. Power and the production of truth as institutional practice.

Foucault, Michel. “Truth and Power.” Interview with Alessandro Fontana and Pasquale Pasquino (1977). In Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon, 1980.

Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. The “incredulity toward meta-narratives” framework central to post-structuralist truth-claims.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.

Bosworth, Joseph. An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. Ed. T. Northcote Toller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1898. Online edition: bosworthtoller.com. See entries for lēogan (to lie, deceive) and trēowth (truth, fidelity, pledge).

Brown, Francis, S.R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs. A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906. See rootאמן (aleph-mem-nun): emet (truth, faithfulness), he’emin (to believe, to trust).

Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm. Deutsches Wörterbuch. Leipzig: Hirzel, 1854–1961. See wahrnehmen (to perceive, from wahr, true + nehmen, to take) and wahrsagen (to foretell, prophesy; originally to speak truly).

Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books, 1992. The foundational clinical text for trauma-informed approaches to testimony and survivor experience; influential on the therapeutic culture from which “my truth” emerged as a formulation.

Winfrey, Oprah. “What Oprah Knows For Sure About Living Your Truth.” Oprah.com. The phrase “living your truth” and its variants appear throughout Winfrey’s published and broadcast work across the 1990s–2010s; her 2018 Golden Globes acceptance speech is often cited as a high-water mark of the formulation’s public reach.

Frankfurt, Harry G. On Bullshit. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. A useful companion text: Frankfurt’s distinction between lying (which requires a relationship to truth) and bullshitting (which does not) maps usefully onto the epistemological problems raised by “my truth” as a rhetorical category.