How does one fail at finding the truth unless they don’t really want to know the truth?
I’m with jaskalass on this. It’s very easy to succumb to group think, no one is immune from it, it’s a primitive trait that has served humans well for hundreds of thousands of years. What I’ve found is that when I come across something that is counter to my beliefs or a knock against “my team” (I don’t have a team but I recognize I side with one political party more than another) instead of dismissing the claim I will look it up and see if I can verify it. If I’m able to verify it, I accept it. If you find yourself dismissing claims with out looking to see if the claims are true, then you’ve succumbed to group think. It requires one to not care about being wrong if it means knowing the truth. With enough practice it becomes second nature and you will find yourself fact checking a lot no matter which “side” made the claim.
How do I answer this question? First off it was itself the answer.
1. You don't find it. It finds you. The search for truth is the ego seeking affirmation of its
raison d'etre. It is a game the ego plays to keep you from feeling what it came into existence to protect you from. It is the sense of "I" that enables you to identify yourself with whatever conditioned source of good you were forced to accept as authoritative. It is your ego. It is there to protect you from pain that you would not have survived as a child had you not transferred being yourself into an external approved so called good.
When you go looking for truth your ego does the looking so it deceives you at every turn. You as this ego do not want to know the truth because knowing the truth would mean remembering the pain that caused this schism between who you were and what you had to become, the pain of the loss of real identity and the simple joy of being who you were.
2. I am not talking about say whether welfare disables or empowers people, political questions and the like. I am talking about Truth with a capital T. What is the meaning of life. What is the fundamental premises by which you live your life, how you really feel. Who are you and what motivates your actions, what does it all mean. These questions are perhaps only important to people who suffer, or more to the point, those who know that they do. The whole point of the ego is to remain unaware.
3. We experience fear when the ego is threatened. How does that work. It happens when the validity of our ego identification with the good is threatened by something in the present that reminds of our repressive past, when once again we are told our identity, who we really were and now what we became instead, come under attack. This is why we herd like animals hoping for the safety of numbers. The like minded do not challenge the illusions they hold in common.
But regardless of how rigorous one's intellect is regarding proving fact from fiction as long as there is ego identification that has not recovered its source there will be some form of prevarication. Truth is not words, principle, theories, ideas, philosophy. It is a state of being, awareness in the present. You don't find it. You wake up to the fact it is you and what you have always been. It is so utterly simple except the truth is the last place we were permitted to think it is. You were told you deserve punishment and guilt.