I see what you mean. What I'm trying to say is that the Western world is too damn obsessed with truth and authenticity: scientific truth, religious orthodoxy, historical accuracy, you name it. You could write the most beautiful poems, plot out the best novels ever, paint the most captivating pictures, etc., but you risk having your work devalued, cast aside and forgotten if you don't adhere to these and other arbitrary standards.Western sciences and disciplines are structured to serve as ways to discriminate not so much against "true" and "false" as against "scientific" and "non-scientific," "authentic" against "non-authentic," etc. It's a way of separating "false" statements from statements "within the true," as it were.This doesn't happen just because there's a need to ensure good quality science and the reliability of methods such as observation, experiments, etc. This is what Michel Foucault refers to as "will to truth" and "will to knowledge," a series of power struggles and relations that privilege the experiences and statements of a minority of qualified (that is, trained/educated) individuals and groups at the expense of non-qualified ones.If you have the power to decide what is "true" and what is "false" in such a way, you'll not only shape the lives and experiences of other people. You'll also shape (or misshape) the ways they make sense of such experiences, how they interpret the world and society they live in, you name it.That's why we need these sweet detours from "truth," scientific or otherwise: they keep us human, get our imagination running, remind us that science, religion, philosophy, and any other field of knowledge can't state or explain all there is to know about the world, ourselves, or each other. Sometimes the ability to tell a good story is more important than whether or not the actual story is "believable" or "truthful."Sorry for going so long about this. I'm writing a thesis and my mind tends to get away from me.Sources:

Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, edited by Colin Gordon. Translated by Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper, Pantheon Books, 1980.



---. “The Discourse on Language.” 1972. Translated by Alan Sheridan and Rupert Sawyer. Lucy Burke, Tony Crowley and Alan Girvin, editors. The Routledge Language and Cultural Theory Reader, Routledge, 2000, pp. 231-40.