Today, over the hump, we shift gears from the sparkle of the Christmas side, and into New Years side. New Year celebrations tend to include reflective restarts.
Truth is perhaps the most important, and sadly most under siege, value in these times. Our whole nervous system has evolved to serve one function, discover truth. All our sensations, all our ideas and feelings are working together to do little more than make better predictions about the reality of the world, and act according.
But in our complex world, so much needs to be known, and indeed so much is known, just as so much is unknowable, that we can not possibly discover for ourselves all we need to know, most often we need to take someone else’s word for it. And way too often that word is “Liar.”
The horrible power of a lie is the way it establishes a false equivalency between what he said and what she said. Even without an intentional lie, where there is an objective truth, he and she may have seen and interpreted it very differently, and then cooked their memories in a stew of bias and assumption, ending up both being certain of her/his truth and his/her falsehood.
Worse still for distant, complex and difficult to understand events happening in the context of innumerable antecedents and unique circumstances. If those events, their facts, affect us – if we care about them – we feel the need to access and address them. But so often we hear a wide variety of reports and interpretations from which we try to distill a single truth. There are ways: studious, scientific and academic, to sort through these conflicting histories, but the research detailed above tells us this is not how we tend to decide.
Instead we end up cleaving to our tribes, subtribes and affiliations; we selectively delete nuance and retell histories in ways that satisfy our social and political goals, that strengthen our bonds and allegiances, thereby abandoning the actual truth, and exchanging it for friendship, loyalty, comfort, and any number of other more social values.
These tendencies are urges, like so many others we feel, that may not really lead us to where we need to be in this more modern, accelerated and complex world. The seven deadly sins are all deadly because they too are largely obsolete urges we all feel but should probably fight. Following our hearts will not do. They will lead us to larceny, gluttony, revenge and betrayal among other sad and painful ends.
But there is an antidote to all of this, a simple value that can always recalibrate us to the reality we must survive in: the truth. Not the convenient one, the revealed one or the ultimate one, but the hard-won one, the uncomfortable and inconvenient one, the one we have to dig and study and reason to discover. It may be a difficult path, perhaps one best left to journalists and scientists, but it is our only way out and forward.
Happy Holly Days
HOLLY DAYS 