I Can Neither Confirm Nor Deny
How to survive in a Post-Truth age
An acquaintance, a while back, explained to me that they were able to lie without compunction. And that this had served them very well over the years. Lies had gotten them out of sticky situations, and in many ways had made their life run more smoothly. Occasionally, the lies were told to protect other people’s feelings, but mostly they were for expedience. In fact, my acquaintance was disarmingly honest about their regular practice of deceit - which was kinda funny.
It also shocked me a little. I mean, I was brought up to think that lying was not okay. And that if you did lie, then you should feel pretty damn bad about it. Karma would come back to bite you, at the very least.
That was another surprising thing my acquaintance said — lying for them was largely guilt free.
Our conversation triggered me to internally review my core values and codes of behaviour. Why do I believe it is bad to lie? Why do I value the truth? And is there such a thing?
It seems like the right time to be having that conversation. Afterall, the post-Truth era is upon us. Although, some believe we’ve always been a post-Truth species anyway.
I had the good fortune to recently interview a leading Australian ethicist, and he spoke of his concerns about the difficulty in verifying facts. We can’t be experts on everything, of course, he said. But these days, we largely rely on gathering the evidence that helps us determine veracity, from that turgid, meaning-masticator called the Internet (my words, not his!).
So how on earth then, do you sort the chaff from the hay in a world where Tik Tok is regarded by some as the visual equivalent of Wikipedia — the place where you find out what’s what in the world?
Okay, I hear you. This is a slightly different issue than lying all day, every day in your personal life.
Or it it?
If you accept the idea that we spend every waking moment constructing and interpeting our own reality from a mish mash of learned, culturally-influenced, heavily-curated data, then you must also acknowledge that the information we rely upon to form our belief systems and notions of whats right and wrong, is being harvested from people mirroring that exact same process as us, all around the world.
There may be such things as facts and absolute truths out there, but how can we ever know what they are, when we’re being bombarded with so many different versions of reality, sometimes deliberately peppered with falsehoods? (This may say something important about the power of consensus, or shared realities, but that’s for another time.)
Look at history. It’s filtered through the lens of its record keepers, who had their own biases and beliefs, and often times misrecorded even the most basic information. History misspells names, messes up dates, genders, locations, adresses, and the details of events. History remembers bad people well, and good people poorly. History forgets as much as it remembers. It ignores many. Though some of history’s ommisions and mistakes may have been unintentional, they are, in effect, lies from which we base our sense of truth about how things were. And how things were, is the springboard for how things are. History has long been our guide and our teacher.
I suppose I’m asking you… if our lives are riddled with lies, founded upon ambiguous and corrupted truths, then why do we (how can we, realistically?) place such strong moral value on honesty?
If you think about it for too long, it’s enough to send you into a big ol’ flail.
But here’s where the human mind is so brave and efficient. It specialises in growing cognitive filters that distil what we believe, and therefore, how we take action, into an essence that we like to think of as our moral convictions. Our inner truths. The non-negotiables by which we measure everyone else. The sticky truth of ourselves and how we feel we should be in this world.
It’s a bit like a coffee percolator.
So, I imagine that the very best we can do when it comes to knowing and (valuing) the truth over lies, is to periodically swap out those filters and appraise the new brew that’s dripping through.
For the moment, though, being cosy with consciously lying is not a flavour I plan to swill around in my coffee cup.
And I’m ok with that.
