I first think of a courtroom. “Do you swear to tell the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?” It wasn’t until relatively recently that we could make definitive claims about the complete unreliability of “eyewitness testimony” and “experts” relating the “plausible degree of scientific certainty.” People were trained to detect patterns in blood and fingerprints. DNA is still considered practically infallible. Even in the best faith, with an entire profession and schooling dedicated to something, it can be an outright lie.
The persistent criticism to my use of the word “lie” is that, as long as the person doesn’t know they’re lying, it isn’t a lie. It’s this kind of smudge that creeps into reporting. During an interview, a person will outright lie about what they knew or who should take responsibility, shortly followed by the reporter saying something like, “But according to someone else, that statement may not be so certain.”
For some reason, we’re extremely put off by the idea of calling someone a liar. I can only speculate that it has to do with being afraid of being called out ourselves. The problem, if modernity is any indication, is that it gives us this false licence to regard most things as generally true. We succumb to the idea that because “everyone has an opinion” that it’s an okay measure by which to judge information. We’re complicit in our own laziness to look up or define a situation better, so we swallow the shortcuts under the overwhelming deluge of information from our online streams.
But this has dire implications. Your mental health and sense of identity is at stake. Social cohesion and the ability to trust are laid to waste. To abide by “any” information and be physically conditioned to normalize lies is to undermine your survival. But what if the entire time you’re testifying to your life and truth and purpose or perspective, and you haven’t the slightest idea that any of it is untrue?
In a discussion with a friend recently, I criticized him for language that I contended was flirting with “bat shit.” He came back with the idea that we should all think critically about the lies we’re told through the media. It’s an easy enough sentiment to espouse, and a considerably harder task to parse out when you try to get specific and consider the problems at the individual level. He, rightly so, wondered how do you even evaluate information in this landscape to begin with?
If we’re going to drill down on that sentiment, we have to first accept certain conditions about life that can’t be introduced to derail any possible road to coherence. First, nothing is perfect or complete. That doesn’t mean it can’t be complete “enough.” My car is a piece of shit, but if I let the less than 1% of the time it doesn’t work to dictate my opinion of it as “it doesn’t work,” I’m lying to myself and not going to get anywhere. Second, conspiracy does us no favors. “The media” isn’t a thing anymore than “big government” or “the deep state.” Any move to an impersonal mass of devious actors in the background, by definition, is without evidence or reason to introduce to the conversation. It’s also logically incoherent to think an extremely small group can account for the preponderance of forces affecting any one life or place in time. The CIA did do some background crazy shit. They often sucked at it. Who knew that even at the “highest levels” or “most secretive” areas, when you stock it with humans, you get human results. Do they have no impact? Of course not. Are they master hands? Only at persuading you to have a lack of imagination about the degrees of human fallibility.
This seems very basic, but it keeps coming up. Nothing feels real anymore, so you have to beat into people that an objective world still exists.
So what do you do when that objective world is morphed by your, divinely christened by modernity, subjective experience? Are you really whatever the news anchor said about you or what some combatant online has to say? Or are you a “staunch conservative” with principals and rationality who’s just as lost in the ideologue world as your liberal compatriots, who you assure me, you have the utmost respect for?
Whether it’s your politics, or your movie tastes, I feel you have to approach with a skeptical, not unbounded into the relative abyss, mind. That’s it. Maybe you have bad taste. Maybe you have a poor conception of “the economy.” More assuredly, of course you do. You’re one idiot in a sea of hopefully greater idiots. The only thing that is going to help constitute you is a persistent attack on anything that seeks to destabilize the pursuit of finding out what’s true. Once you know the DOW is a useless metric by which to judge the economy, STOP REPORTING ON IT. Once you know there’s more than a few problems with GDP or “the unemployment rate” DROP THE CONVENTION. Yes, it takes work, it’s different and new and hard, but you help absolutely nothing by playing along.
I bring it up often in blogs. Who’s this "me," really? I’ve offered every voice on the spectrum besides downright mindless mania or psychosis. Am I the super-engaged smart guy who always has to try and say the next funny thing? Am I the violent sociopathic patriarch who’s hell bent on being overbearing and judgmental? I find it best to approach descriptions like that with a strong modesty. We’re processes and probabilities. We’re histories and choices. It doesn’t do you much of any good to wrap up anyone in a handful of cobbled together connotations from your chosen language.
But of course, people can tend in certain directions. It’s why I get pissy when I feel someone does a bad job of labeling me, because honestly, who’s going to approach their assessments of people with the same kind of deference and perspective I expect out of myself? My general being and life isn’t a story of a “negative” person. I can’t even recall the amount of times I’ve picked to keep refuting that assessment. For as fucked and stupid as the world is, it’s any wonder why people insist on foisting that shit on me and can’t see the environment in which we all exist. That’s the point right? They don’t even know they’re lying. They’re so used to it, I’m the problem, not a Nazi sympathizer in the White House. My judgmental attitude isn’t an attempt to better assess and navigate the world and my relationships, it’s an attack on the lie in their heart. Well, it is an attack, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong for attacking.
Any domain, the same story plays out. “You speak too harshly!” An entire generation growing up on coddling and historically unprecedented safety is driving us to the brink. We need a return of the old ways. “You didn’t think hard enough about your decisions!” No one’s offering anything else. What haven’t I considered? You don’t know? Then what the fuck are you talking about? “You’re getting so angry at me!” You should be angry at you. Am I “just an angry person” or is every single day of my life spent trying to persuade you that it’s extremely simple metrics predicated on self respect and responsibility that would shut me up until the day I die? I know the kind of people that behave in the ways necessary, and you don’t hear me complain about them.
Your personal self can tend toward objective measures of truth and an excess of words trying to account for and pay deference. Your sense of the world, or of yourself, doesn’t need to be perfect and carries with it all the liabilities one would expect. I don’t think anyone wants to do that work. I don’t think anyone really respects the amount of time I spend thinking and doubting and changing and writing hoping to get to a place where I can maximize the most out of my life and those I choose to have in it. Everything else is going to tend towards destruction and obscurity and the easy way out. Can you even recognize that? Can you figure out how little that has to do with any “opinion” I might hold?
I know when I’m lying. I didn’t always. I know when I should preface a statement with “If all goes perfectly” before I say I’ll have a house in 2 months. I know I said to my ex, “Now don’t take this shit the wrong way, because you know I hate the word, but I kinda love you too,” because both truths regarding my feelings and my hatred for stupid words can exist at the same time. The story and ongoing narrative of your place relative to the people in your life or history in general is constantly changing. Account for it. Capture it with as close to an approximation as you know for sure you’re not lying about. Anything less will bite you and hurts everyone around you. My smallest of small, seemingly totally inconsequential lies, find a way to creep back into my mind and cause problems if I don’t resolve them. It’s my experience people will outright deny there’s a giant lie at the center of their being in the first place. They aren’t an expert witness. They’ve lost the capacity to evaluate. And they refuse to understand the process before invoking the “scientific” nature of their opinion.
Just spend the rest of the day paying attention to how many times you might be lying. Think about how much you might have to rework in how you speak to the world and to your experience. Feel how stressful it is to be that person if there’s no one around willing to confer and do the work with as well. Then come back and talk to me about being judgmental or negative. Then try and give me a full account of your love and understanding. We’ll live or die as a species solely on whether we figure out how to take responsibility for ourselves. How much longer are you willing to be part of the problem?
