Truth will ultimately prevail where there is pains to bring it to light.

Truth demands uncomfortable work

We live in an age of instant information, yet truth often feels more slippery than ever. Washington's point isn't that truth is easy to find—it's that it requires actual work. Someone has to dig, verify, ask uncomfortable questions, and sit with complexity long enough to separate fact from noise. That's the "pains" he's talking about. It's not glamorous, and it rarely gets the immediate attention that a catchy lie does.

The counterintuitive part is that this applies just as much to personal truth as it does to historical or political truth. When you're stuck in a bad situation, the easiest thing is to accept the story you've been telling yourself. Real insight requires the uncomfortable labor of questioning your own assumptions, talking to people who see things differently, and sitting with the possibility that you've been wrong. That discomfort is often the price of actually understanding what's happening around you.

What makes Washington's statement feel urgent now is how many people have given up on the effort. We assume truth is either obvious or unknowable, so we retreat into our preferred version of events. But that surrender guarantees that misinformation wins—not because it's stronger, but because someone cared enough to push it forward while others didn't bother to push back.