OUR UTTER CONTEMPT AND DISREGARD FOR TRUTH IS OUR UNDOING

With the passing of each day, I am ever more alarmed by the pervasiveness with which persons of power and privilege in politics, corporate media and corporation demonstrate a deliberate willingness to engage in lies and deception. One form this takes is the facile and malicious smearing of those they consider to be threats to their power and privilege. The other is constructing false narratives designed to hide their own complicity in acts damaging to the lives of millions of individuals. There seems to be no limit to the depth of malevolence and depravity to which they will sink. Moreover, the aspersions and vile characterizations of the targets of their venom call upon tried-and-true disparaging tropes and are geared to tap into persons’ fears so as to inhibit any critical examination of the bullsh-t they disseminate. The most recent and despicable example was Hillary Clinton’s and her proxies’ smear of Representative Tulsi Gabbard as a Russian agent. The corporate media, by and large, appears to be more than willing to do the bidding of the powerful by parroting their lies. This makes their assertion that they are “news” networks is utterly ridiculous.

Somehow the assertion that there is something called “truth” has been called into question or dismissed as a vestige of corrupt and antiquated world-view that wielded the idea of truth as a weapon of oppression. While there is no question that there is some truth to this assertion, the utter abandonment of truth is just as mistaken an extreme. Further, it is contributing to the decline of all that is good and decent. The toxic narcissism and extreme individualism valorized by neoliberalism has made “truth” for many people what they want it to be. In other words, there is confusion between “belief” and “truth”. As Alan Watts astutely pointed out, “Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would ‘lief’ or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes.” We have raised this confusion of the two to an art. Repeatedly, we stubbornly insist that life conform to our preferences and then feel a sense of outrage when it fails to do so. Why? Because there is a “way things are” that stands firmly opposed to those preferences. Franz Kafka made the point well when he observed that it a fight between you and the world, back the world. Recognizing that there is something bigger than us, something that exacts some demand or obligation upon us, helps to provide our unbridled ego with a much needed sense of perspective.

But people in power don’t want us to stop trying to impose our desires and wishes on reality. This is because they have placed many of those desires and wishes within us in order to seduce us with their lies and keep us under thumb. And so we may close our eyes to the fact that our planet is dying because we have been convinced by those who are raping it that there is nothing to fear from the reckless disregard and greed. Or we may think that the resurrection of an even more vile and toxic form of McCarthyism that sees Russian villains and plots everywhere is worthy of our apprehension. All the while it disguises that the real enemies of our democracy are much closer to home. Or we may believe that eliminating the obscene inequality of our society and providing health care, education, a well-paying job and a decent home to millions of Americans are pipe dreams. In the meantime, the 1% continue to enjoy a far disproportionate degree of wealth and privilege.

A distinction made by the eminent writer on religion and spirituality, Karen Armstrong, seems particularly relevant here. She points out that there are two ways of knowing. One is the form dominant in our society and that is most commonly the means employed to deceive and obfuscate. This is logos which is approaching life from a rational and pragmatic stance (i.e. the realm of beliefs, thoughts, language). The other is mythos which is not root in thought but action and is employed to give life meaning particularly in the face of pain and suffering (i.e. the realm of values and action). While there is a place and worth to abstract speculation, theorizing and categorizing, it has its pitfalls as well. We can become lost in the constructs we create and fail to see that they are manufactured by us and do not precisely conform to something objective. We can also be seduced by cleverly crafted language aimed at diverting us from discovering what is true. So it is that Armstrong asserts that the common assumption that the heart of religion is creed or adhering to a set of beliefs is mistaken.

Instead, Armstrong maintains that religion is based on mythos because it is a practical and ethical discipline. It is what we do and not what we say. At its heart, as an ethical discipline it distinguishes between what is and what ought. It accepts that there are moral imperatives, a commitment to compassion and justice, that require us to treat others as we wish to be treated. It is precisely these “truths”, these moral imperatives, which are most maligned and disregarded in today’s political discourse. They consistently fail to form the center of our concern as we are beset by the onslaught of lies, diversions and obfuscations that have become part of our daily fare. Though it seems trite it nonetheless remains true that actions speak louder than words. The reckless disregard for truth is more than just prevarication. It is a dangerous disregard for compassion and justice, and thus a disregard for the inherent worth and value of every human being. Those who demonstrate this moral bankruptcy must be exposed and rejected. We must look instead to those whose actions reflect a sincere commitment to compassion and justice for our way forward and out of this moral morass. That is a truth worth living and dying for.