The historian Howard Zinn wrote, “The most revolutionary act one can engage in is […] to tell the truth.” Indeed! I think the revolutionary part of truth is that it can free us and those around us to live with greater certainty about what is real, even when it hurts, because we are no longer shackled to the energy lying requires of us. Lying demands the continuation of the lie and the amplification of the lie to keep the truth hidden.… Telling the truth creates ripples of authenticity that change the world.…
-- Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis
At times, these days, don't you just want to stand up and scream, "God damn it, just tell the truth for once!"?
Lying is sucking life out of everything.
We were taught from our earliest days not to lie. Kids test the theory, but they know it’s bad (and most adults reinforce that). Life can’t function well when it doesn't rest on truth.
So, when adults do it (especially systematically), it throws the whole balance of things off...way off.
Think about the destabilization of institutions that were founded on the premise of trust — trust in their various forms of truth. Some criticism of them has been well-founded; abuse of trust has occurred. But, just because there is some falsehood, doesn't mean there is no truth.
The prolific rise of misinformation, however, has taken things to a whole new level. It now feels strategic, calculated, political. Besides its insidiousness, it’s shameful. Without too much difficulty, we can observe some of the drivers involved when misinformation has been used before. A favored technique of dictators (and wannabees), it is more highly effective than we would like to admit.
I still believe that truth prevails (at least in the end). But, the refrain that nothing is true has gained a lot of traction in our social arenas. And, this sets us up; ripe-for-the-picking for an unanticipated transference of trust...to anyone who appears strong enough to handle the problems we can't otherwise solve (a well-documented strategy, by the way — see Hitler, Stalin, Kim Jong-un to name a few of the more recent ones. Vladimir Putin has been staging his current strong-man role using destabilizing misinformation in Russia for decades).
It appears that part of human authenticity is pre-disposed to trust. We want to trust. In fact, we need to. So, it's pretty obvious that the object of our trust becomes a rather significant piece of this puzzle.
While the truth can sometimes have a hard edge, it serves us on our trek to true freedom because we are no longer tethered to what isn't true. Perhaps if we were to once again reject lying long enough, we could get back to the work of aligning ourselves with and maintaining what is true — becoming re-energized by what is actually real.
I'm hoping 'Tell The Truth' kicks off a series that focuses on what and why good is a better focus than the bottomless pit we otherwise tend to so repeatedly get sucked down into. If we can't effectively argue for what is bad about bad, perhaps we need to resurrect voices about what is good. These days, couldn't we use a different standard for discussion anyway?
