Why Truth Is The Highest Value - Leo Gura (Actualized.org)
Source: YouTube video transcript
Author: Leo Gura (Actualized.org)
Date Extracted: September 9, 2025
Core Thesis
"We're only making one radical claim in this entire episode, which is that truth is the highest value. If you don't place truth as your highest value, you are making a profound mistake."
Key Insights & Powerful Quotes
The Fundamental Problem
"People do not care about truth. This is a general statement that applies to all of mankind across all cultures, all times, all eras, man, woman, child, anybody, scientists, religious people, doesn't matter."
"Nobody of course admits to themselves that they don't care about truth. Everybody believes that they care about truth. Everybody already regards their worldview as the truth."
The Nature of Truth
"When I'm talking about truth in this episode, I'm not just talking about beliefs like whether you believe the earth is round or flat... That's too superficial. Caring about truth is not about needing some particular content of your mind to be true and then defending that or crusading for it."
"To care about the truth is to have a very curious and open mind to want to go on a truth-seeking journey, not to be defending answers."
Why Truth Must Be Highest
"Reality is truth... There is nothing more fundamental in existence than truth. So, if you don't place truth as your highest value, what's going to happen is that you're going to prioritize other things over truth. You're going to prioritize survival over truth. Meaning that then you must fall into self-deception, falsehood, and illusion."
"Anything less than truth as your highest priority must lead to corruption. Corruption is the non-prioritization of truth. To prioritize anything above truth, that's corruption."
The Ontological Foundation
"God is truth. I'm not saying a belief in God is truth. I'm saying reality itself is God and reality itself is truth. Obviously, reality itself is more fundamental than your feelings about it."
"It's as if God said to himself, 'Of all the things that I could choose to create something wonderful based upon, what is going to be the one central organizing principle?' And it has to be, of course, truth. Truth is so important that it's as if God said, 'Not only am I going to just follow this organizing principle of truth, I'm literally going to make truth my being. I'm going to become truth.'"
What Happens When Other Values Are Placed Above Truth
Money as Highest Value:
"If you place money as your highest value in life... you're free to lie, not just to others, but to yourself. You're free to bullshit others and of course yourself. You're going to start to believe whatever you need to believe in order to make as much money as easily and quickly as possible."
Family as Highest Value:
"If you place family as your top priority, but your family is fake and corrupt and maybe even doing something illegal, living in toxic, inhumane ways... you're being loyal to a fake false family. What good is that? This is literally what the mob is, the Italian mob. What is that? That's what happens when you place family and friends over truth."
Love as Highest Value:
"If you set love as your highest value, you will get neither the highest truth nor the highest love. And if you set truth as your highest value, you will eventually reach the highest truth, love, goodness, beauty, intelligence, and God."
The Self-Correcting Nature of Truth
"Caring about truth is self-correcting. If you care about truth, you will find and fix your own epistemic errors over time. I won't need to babysit you. You won't even need my episodes anymore. You will just go on a truth seeking journey for yourself."
The Burden of Truth
"I've cared about truth so much that I've been carrying this burden of caring about truth. And I didn't even realize I've been carrying it for like 30 years... Life is so much easier when you're not carrying the burden of truth. Like, wow, so much easier because you can cut corners, you can cheat, you can lie, you can manipulate to have sex, you can manipulate to earn money."
What It Really Means to Value Truth
"Valuing truth means doing hard work. You can't value truth and be lazy at the same time. This is a contradiction."
"If I don't see you sacrificing your survival for truth, then you don't care about truth. And what do I mean by sacrificing your survival? I mean sacrificing material rewards. I mean, I want to see you sacrifice money, power, sex, fame, success, and luxury."
"Valuing truth means not selling out. This is huge. Not placing yourself into compromising jobs and careers... A lot of untruthfulness simply comes from your choice of job and career and putting yourself into a compromising position."
The Connection Between Truth and Corruption
"The source of all corruption is not setting truth as your highest priority."
"Every intelligence agency is a source of profound corruption in the world and the direct cause of many wars because these different intelligence agencies are covertly waging a cold war against each other, stealing secrets from each other, trying to sabotage each other."
Truth and Love
"Truth is love... At the ontological level, love is truth because you can't have one without the other. So anybody, any human who's telling you that, oh, truth is not so important to me, love is, they're full of shit."
"People who don't prioritize truth, they are incapable of love. When they tell you that they love, they're full of shit. Their love is a fantasy."
The Ultimate Surrender
"In the end, what are you surrendering to? In spirituality, we talk about surrender. What are you surrendering to? ... You're surrendering to truth."
"On your deathbed, eventually, you're going to be forced to surrender. So, no matter how much struggling and manipulation and lying and bullshitting you've done your whole life, all the fantasies, everything, at the very end of your life, you're going to be forced to surrender. And what are you going to surrender to? You're going to surrender to the truth of your death."
The Path Forward
"Caring about truth is necessary for proper life. You can't live properly without this. A key question of philosophy is how do you live the good life? What is the good life? What does that mean? Well, the central pillar of that is caring about truth, living truthfully."
"Spirituality is not just about realizing God and awakening. Spirituality is about becoming pure, more pure. Why become pure? Because it gets you closer to God. How do you become pure? By loving truth more than you love everything else."
Final Wisdom
"Truth is the solution to all problems. The more you surrender to truth, the less problems you have."
"Nothing I say has value unless it is true. The lesson here is that I want you to take is that your values really matter. Your values determine your destiny. Have you thought through the logic of your values?"
Summary
This profound philosophical discourse argues that truth must be humanity's highest value, not as an abstract concept but as a practical organizing principle for life. Leo Gura demonstrates how prioritizing anything above truth—whether money, power, family, or even love—inevitably leads to corruption and suffering. The teaching emphasizes that truth is not merely propositional knowledge or beliefs, but the very foundation of existence itself, synonymous with God and reality. Only by placing truth as our highest value can we escape self-deception, achieve genuine love, and live properly aligned with the fundamental nature of existence.