True illness of the mind and spirit sets in when a man no longer cherishes the truth but despises it, when he uses it as a means to his own ends, when in the depths of his soul, truth ceases to be to him the primary, the most important concern.
—ROMANO GUARDINI
In 2015, writing in the New York Times, Justin McBrayer—a philosophy professor—noted an odd trend in public schools. Current standards in his local school district required students to know the difference between facts and opinions. But in checking his second-grade son’s homework, he realized that every moral or ethical premise his child encountered was treated as an opinion as opposed to a fact. “All men are created equal.” “Copying homework assignments is wrong.” “Cursing in school is inappropriate behavior.” All these things were being taught as opinions, not facts.1
In his essay, McBrayer argued that such a curriculum “sets up our children for doublethink.”2 Students learn standards of conduct and mutual respect in school as part of growing up. That’s always been the case. But today they’re also taught that those same standards are, in essence, elegant-sounding opinions.
In practice, students learn that the only concepts worthy of the term “truth” are those that can be empirically proven. Moral truths accessible to human reason, such as those in the Ten Commandments, don’t really qualify as true. “Our public schools,” McBrayer wrote, “teach students that … there are no moral facts. And if there are no moral facts, then there are no moral truths.” In effect, truth becomes a social convention that humans themselves invent. Thus it can change from culture to culture.
That’s a problem for two reasons. First, in losing a fixed definition of truth, we also lose a sense of goodness and beauty. Why? Because belief in objective truth, and the framework of moral right and wrong that naturally grows from it, is the “bone structure” of a society. It supports every other virtue and roadmap to meaning that can help people build a decent common life. There’s nothing really “shared” in a public arena that invents its own ground rules on the fly—nothing, that is, except a Darwinian struggle for dominance. Second, the damage done to a child’s moral reasoning doesn’t stop with the individual student. It inflicts itself on the wider culture as he or she grows and engages with others.
In recent decades, Americans have grown more and more allergic to claiming that any behavior (especially sexual behavior) is right or wrong, always and everywhere. This is so in public and often in private. “Truth” is a big word in a rapidly changing world, with a lot of intrusive power. And nobody wants to judge—or rather, to be seen to judge—because nobody wants to be judged.
It’s easy to blame this new reality on the power of the mass media and social science scholarship. Each tends to have a corrosive effect on traditional certainties and patterns of life. And each surely deserves some of the blame. But we should also look for culprits closer to home, starting with the mirror. After all, as Tocqueville said, “I do not know any country where, in general, less independence of mind and genuine freedom of discussion reign than in America.”3
That sounds odd, though. Didn’t Tocqueville also claim that individual liberties are better guaranteed in America than anywhere else in the world?
He did. But for Tocqueville, democracy, left to itself, doesn’t encourage strong characters. It creates self-absorbed ones. Democratic man depends heavily on public opinion as the source of his own convictions. Public opinion is the proof (or the disproof) of any institution’s or belief’s legitimacy. In effect, a legitimate opinion exists only because it’s widely held. And it’s through public opinion that “in democratic republics, tyranny does not proceed [through violence and physical coercion]. It leaves the body [unharmed] and goes straight to the soul.”4
It follows that shaping public opinion can shape the course of the culture. Creating and enforcing a new “truth” is simply a matter of mobilizing enough public opinion to make it so. Today’s social media have a massive and almost instantaneous ability to bring the pressure to conform on any selected target. If an end is seen as “good,” justifying the means to achieve it is simply a matter of marketing. And this invites a subtle, chronic kind of lying—the editing and massaging of information—to get the results claimed to be needed.
This is why polling, including which questions get asked and how they’re framed, plays such a key role in American public life. The power of public opinion explains the size of the lobbying and public relations industries. It explains our addiction to survey data. It explains the increasingly explicit editorial bias in the nation’s flagship news organizations. It explains how lawmaking and social science research can literally, if subtly, be molded, and why public views on issues like same-sex marriage can change so rapidly and sharply over just twenty years. All of these trends are thoroughly “democratic”—but only because they emerge naturally from the weaknesses, rather than the strengths, in democracy’s internal logic. Public opinion is not simply spontaneous. It can be formed and re-formed.
These problems are the outward signs of deeper issues that implicate us as citizens. The weakness of the individual citizen is only partly coerced by democracy’s structure. It’s also freely chosen, because we find it convenient. It allows us to assign blame to others and escape our own responsibility. It’s easier to accept lies by invoking a misguided alibi of tolerance and mutual respect than to live outside the cone of public approval. This is clear in every recent national debate over abortion, marriage, family, sexuality, and rights in general. Many of us are happy to live with half-truths and ambiguity rather than risk being cut out of the herd. The culture of lies thrives on our own complicity, lack of courage, and self-deception.
The point is this: Everyone’s grasp of truth rests to some degree on authority. No one is really autonomous. We can’t know everything on our own. We need to trust others for guidance. This is normal. But who and what we trust matter greatly. In American life, democracy and capitalism, despite their advantages, tend to erode the place of traditional authorities (families, religious faith, and other institutions), while putting new authorities (public opinion and market forces) in their stead. And that has consequences.
As we’ve already seen, Augustine teaches that no government can offer perfect peace and harmony. Sin prevents it. The mirage of perfectibility through political action is seductive, but it’s also dangerous. To bring about utopia, modern leaders have done monstrous things. They’ve built whole societies on innocent people sacrificed to lies.
As citizens, we live with certain tensions in creating a decent society. A delicate balance exists between personal liberty and our duty to others, and democracy depends on it. The destabilizing effect of today’s attitudes toward sex, as we’ve already seen, upsets that balance.
Something similar occurs with truth. Democracy tends to unmoor society from the idea of permanent truths. Placing the law, which ideally reflects right and wrong, under the power of elections can seem to put truth itself on the ballot, because most people tend to equate the legal with the acceptable or good. On the one hand, truth becomes relative and contingent on popular whim. But on the other, it becomes radically privatized by the individual citizen.
This dynamic of forceful self-assertion and a simultaneous fear of being out of step with majority opinion is one of the central contradictions of American life. As always, Tocqueville’s thoughts are useful. Just fifty years into America’s independence, he saw the young nation’s character clearly.
Tocqueville said of Americans that they “are constantly led back toward their own reason as the most visible and closest source of truth.”5 The thirst for equality, key to our political and cultural life, tends to make us resentful of anyone else’s intellectual authority. We’ve all heard the words “Who are you to impose your morality on me?”
But that’s not the whole story. As Tocqueville noted, European regimes of his time lacked America’s formal free speech protections. Yet appearances could be misleading. There were always spaces in those older European societies where nearly any opinion could be voiced, and shelter for the nonconforming could be found. In America, by contrast:
The majority draws a formidable circle around thought. Inside those limits, the writer is free; but unhappiness awaits him if he dares to leave them. It is not that he has to fear an auto-da-fé [forced public penance and execution], but he is the butt of mortifications of all kinds and of persecutions every day. A political career is closed to him; he has offended the only power that has the capacity to open it up.6
As with the writer, so with the private individual. One of the worst fates in American public life is being tarred as “out of the mainstream.” The great fear of the average voter is to be seen as extreme. As citizens, most of us urgently want to be inside the constantly shifting range of acceptable opinions. And that yearning creates a chronic, low-grade unease. It also blinds us to the fact that Christian faith, by its nature, is very often “out of the mainstream.”
This weakness in the American system was constrained for a long time by a widely shared biblical moral framework among the people. In the mid-nineteenth century, as Tocqueville wrote, “Americans, having accepted the principal dogmas of the Christian religion,” typically also accept the “moral truths that flow from them and depend on them.” Hence the behavior of individuals was channeled “within narrow limits.”7
Times have changed. Culture precedes and informs politics. And American culture has moved miles from the assumptions of the Founders.
There’s also a factor Tocqueville could not have foreseen: a very powerful market economy. The real soul of modern American life is the market. We work in the market to earn a living. We buy our necessities and luxuries in the market. We’re colonized and shaped by the market everywhere we go, from newspapers to television to computers to smartphones. It’s the elevator music of daily life. And while the market serves our well-being in many ways, and has lifted great numbers of people out of poverty, its “religion” is money and profit. For the market, truth is not a category unless consumers make it so. Which is exactly what the spirit of the market—its relentless pressures and distractions—works against.
As with democratic politics, the market is a mass of individuals making discrete choices within a framework shaped by larger forces, over which they have limited control. It falls to individuals, then, to make truth the primary value in the choices they make.
And we can only begin to do that by placing truth first in our own lives, and demanding it of others.
* * *
OBVIOUSLY, THE POWER OF public opinion has limits. People don’t automatically adopt the ideas that win power in any given election. Inertia, both for good and for bad, is a powerful factor in human behavior. Rather, the process that degrades our appetite for truth in politics seems to work in two ways.
First, many of us are tempted to affirm whatever our favorite political tribe affirms, and deny whatever it denies. Nobody likes to risk losing friends and allies over a policy issue. So we’re subtly pressed to believe what we’re expected to believe as a good “conservative” or a good “liberal.” Anything outside our narrow channel is hostile terrain. But exactly this kind of tribalism subordinates the common good (and often the truth) to party loyalties. And party agendas can be cavalier, short-sighted, and destructive.
The second way we lose the habit of truth is by refusing to think clearly when damaging cultural trends become political orthodoxies. The last thing too many people want is to be seen as retrograde in their views when the cost may be social exile. The same-sex marriage debate was, and remains, a classic case. No one wants to be left behind by the herd. This fear of exclusion sustains an entire therapeutic industry—in effect, a new clergy—of social experts. One of their main expert functions is to enable and excuse the outsourcing of personal moral reasoning. Dubious choices always sound better when they’re blessed by, or at least can be blamed on, a specialist.
Obviously, counselors and experts can also play a vital healing role. Many do. The point is this: When we no longer have the courage to live by the truth ourselves, when we no longer really hunger for it, then we no longer insist on it from others. The result is a culture of evasive unreality, a nation of alibis. And we come to accept more dishonesty and less integrity in our politics as unavoidable rules of the road.
The same applies to the market. We expect to be hustled as part of the market’s liturgy of goods and services. Inflated advertising, sweetened with humor or sex or hints of product-induced ecstasy, is the fuel that runs the consumer economy. We laugh at it. But it works.
Aristotle taught (and experience confirms) that character is formed through habits. As we consciously perform good deeds, we get accustomed to goodness. We start to do good without thinking twice. This is virtue; in the words of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the “habitual and firm disposition to do the good.” As we do good, our relationship with God also grows. So does the grace he sends to help us to continue doing good.
But the process also works in reverse. As we habitually choose against the good, we grow numb both to the beauty of goodness and to the ugliness of evil. We starve and eventually kill our relationship with God, denying ourselves the help of his grace.
Everything true about growing in goodness is also true about growing in truth. We grow to love the truth by seeking it out and living by it. Conversely, the beauty of truth fades from memory as we edit it out of our lives. Eventually we no longer know truth when we see it. We put our minds to the task of excuse making and rationalizing, and these become truth’s reasonable (or at least reasonable enough) facsimiles. We end up believing our own self-deceptions and the lies we tell to others, because we’ve made truth into a product of our own manufacture.
The effect of untruth on the mind and the soul is confirmed in M. Scott Peck’s classic book People of the Lie. Dr. Peck was a noted psychiatrist and author. He was also a committed Christian. His writings ably combine the science of mental health with moral sensibilities, while respecting both.
Over the course of decades, Peck met patients who didn’t fit a standard diagnosis but had certain recurring traits. These persons showed chronic disregard for the good of others to the point of causing grave psychological harm. They were subtly but pervasively self-centered. Their symptoms were broader than narcissistic personality disorder, but they weren’t sociopaths. They knew right from wrong.
But their main shared trait was the habit of lying. They all lied constantly and effortlessly about everything—especially about themselves, to themselves. As such, they were opaque even to highly trained therapists. More important, they were opaque to themselves. For Peck, the “layer upon layer of self-deception” that “people of the lie” build up insulates them so thoroughly from truth that they no longer recognize it. Their own irreproachability is their only truth.
Peck didn’t mince words. He calls such persons evil.8 While he fleshes out his use of that word in his book, he never backs away from it. Peck’s “evil” people erect so many defenses against self-examination and repentance that these become almost impossible without a miracle of grace.
“People of the lie” embody Aristotle’s teachings on the formation of character. They don’t wake up one morning and decide to be cruel. Rather, they accumulate years of decisions to ignore the true good in favor of their own apparent good, until they fully identify their own will with what’s genuinely good.
As Peck notes, this reveals itself as a preoccupation with appearances: “While they seem to lack any motivation to be good, they intensely desire to appear good. Their ‘goodness’ is all on a level of pretense. It is, in effect, a lie” (emphasis added).9 The evasion of truth soon makes their entire lives little more than an intricate ruse.
For these morally crippled creatures, the pretense of goodness salves the scars of conscience that do exist, but that have been routinely ignored and abused. “The central defect of the evil [person] is not the sin but the refusal to acknowledge it.”10 We all sin, of course, but the unwillingness to take any responsibility for our sins implies a more deeply damaged spirit. And so the evil person doubles down on his or her lies by cultivating false appearances and scapegoating the innocent.
As Peck puts it, “We become evil by attempting to hide from ourselves. The wickedness of the evil is not committed directly, but indirectly as part of [the] cover-up process. Evil originates not in the absence of guilt but in the effort to escape it.”11
One of the most striking case studies in People of the Lie is that of a wealthy couple whose teenage son suffers from depression. As Peck probed the cause of the son’s depression with the boy and his parents, the adults avoided even a hint of responsibility for his mental state. They ignored both their son’s needs and Peck’s advice, and then shifted the burden for their own self-serving decisions back onto the boy and his doctor. After the son acted out by taking part in a petty theft at school, his parents pressed to have him diagnosed as a genetically predisposed and thus incurable criminal.
The story ends with a letter from the boy’s mother informing Peck that they had followed his kind advice and sent their son to a military boarding school. The punchline: This was exactly the opposite of Peck’s counsel. The parents had washed their hands of responsibility for their own son. Any problems would henceforward be the fault of the school or the doctor, but never them. Rather than face their self-deception and damage the illusion of their own goodness, they lied to Peck and further harmed their son.
“People of the lie” don’t reject the idea of all sin—only their own. They’re quite willing to condemn others. In fact, as Peck points out, scapegoating is one of the universal traits of “people of the lie.” They project their own guilt, which they feel but won’t accept, onto others. “Rather than blissfully lacking a sense of morality like the psychopath, they are continually engaged in sweeping the evidence of their evil under the rug of their own consciousness.”12
A person wrapped in deception does not blind himself to sin. He blinds himself to the possibility of forgiveness. In refusing any obligations to truth outside of himself, he closes himself off to the mercy of God. Dr. Peck puts in psychological terms what believers know by faith: “Mental health requires that the human will submit itself to something higher than itself. To function decently in the world, we must submit ourselves to some principle that takes precedence over what we might want at any given moment. For [religious persons] this principle is God, and so they will say, ‘Thy will, not mine, be done.’”13
We typically think of this submission as an act of obedience to God’s will, as Peck mentions. But it’s actually a submission to God’s love and mercy. This requires, of course, admitting our own sinfulness. The spurning of forgiveness is the most self-poisoning symptom of the “people of the lie,” and the source of their despair.
* * *
IN DISCUSSING PEOPLE OF THE LIE, it’s easy to use the words “they” and “them.” But what’s bracing about Scott Peck’s work is that it implicates all of us and our wider culture. The pretense of goodness, the perversely moralistic scapegoating, the self-deception—these aren’t just the sins of “evil” people. They’re qualities rooted in our fallen nature and pandemic in a society based on license. We’re all, to some degree, “people of the lie.”
Dr. Peck wrote about extreme cases, but we should see them as warnings to heed, not specimens to gawk at. The feckless parents discussed above weren’t born with a resentment of the truth. Rather, they nourished it with thousands of little untruths. They developed alibis and habits of deception, especially self-deception, that over many years formed their character. Every one of us is prone to the same process. It’s up to us to see and arrest it before it begins.
That’s not so simple. We live in a culture eager to make truth a boutique experience as malleable as our personal tastes require. As the moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt writes, a vast and congenial river of baloney, humbug, and mumbo-jumbo flows through American culture that has its source in “various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality, and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are.”14 But we need to remember what—or rather who—comprises the culture. Things we can’t control do often impact our personal decisions. But the fact remains that “the culture” is little more than the sum of the choices, habits, and dispositions of the people who live in a particular place at a particular time. We can’t simply blame “the culture.” We are the culture.
Failing to cultivate a taste for truth, then, is an abdication of our duties not just to God, but also to one another. By contributing to a culture that seeks to invent its own truth, we make it harder for others to find the real thing. The results are deeply damaging. Subcultures of deceit emerge in places within our society where honesty is most important.
The United States military is one of the nation’s most trusted institutions, even as other key institutions have fallen into disrepute. A report in an army academic journal suggests, however, that even the military today struggles with a culture of untruths. The report is strikingly similar to Scott Peck’s concerns:
Untruthfulness is surprisingly common in the U.S. military even though members of the profession are loath to admit it. Further, much of the deception and dishonesty that occurs in the profession of arms is actually encouraged and sanctioned by the military institution. The end result is a profession whose members often hold and propagate a false sense of integrity that prevents the profession from addressing—or even acknowledging—the duplicity and deceit throughout the formation.15
The report’s authors find a culture within the military “where it is literally impossible to execute to standard all that is required. At the same time, reporting noncompliance with the requirements is seldom a viable option.”16 Rather than risk one’s reputation, officers routinely sign off on substandard and incomplete tasks. “As a result, an officer’s signature and word have become tools to maneuver through the Army bureaucracy rather than being symbols of integrity and honesty.”17
The pattern is not unique to the military. The Church in her institutional forms has her own long list of problems. But the report does show the way a culture of deception metastasizes from individual compromises with the truth to infect an entire institution—any institution, even one explicitly built on honor. Truth becomes secondary to careerism and the façade of perfection.
A similar issue occurs in education, where a parade of cheating and grade-boosting scandals in recent years has shown that, for many students and even their teachers, the truth is important only if it serves the goal of advancement. Students have cheated for millennia. There’s nothing new about it. But these days in America, 75 percent of high school students admit to cheating on their academic work.18 And the problem goes well beyond high school.
The curious thing about today’s academic cheating is the shift from cheating out of desperation to cheating to stay on top. The archetypical school-age cheater is thought to be a struggling student who peeks at the smart kid’s test answers. But with the proliferation of cheating and the rising stakes of academic performance, the new “typical” cheater is a successful student anxious to remain at the head of the class for college or professional placement.19
A California high school student captures not just the cheating mentality, but a core fact of current American life: “There’s so much pressure to get a good job, and to get a good job you have to get into a good school, and to get into a good school you have to get good grades, and to get good grades you have to cheat.” Note the words “have to.” The student ignores her own agency and blames a culture that requires her to cheat. It’s a plausible kind of lie, pitched both to the interviewer and to herself. But it’s still a lie. The culture of deception is, in part, the free choice of students who decided to cheat.
It would be foolish, though, to blame academic cheating mainly on young people. Fierce academic competition—or at least the competition to get into the “right” schools—places huge pressure on persons just emerging from childhood. The combination of high stakes and the implicit message that honesty can be set aside for a while to serve a sufficiently vital goal like long-term financial success almost guarantees a culture of lying.
The pressure often starts within the family. Evidence suggests that a great deal of cheating is done to please parents.20 In many U.S. households the family culture—not the big, bad, soulless society “out there,” but the values passed down from parents to their children—places achievement above honesty. And when parents are, for example, “‘diagnosis shopping’ to get a doctor to say [their children] have [attention deficit disorder] so they can have extra time to complete their SAT test,” it’s not hard to see how that message is being sent.21
The banking industry, corporate life, the mass media, religious ministries, athletics, law schools: Each has its scandals. In nearly every case the pattern is similar: Truth is adjusted or “interpreted,” ignored or justified away, to get seemingly urgent results. And deceit then spreads and takes root like a weed.
* * *
CARING FOR LANGUAGE, WROTE Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, is a moral issue. “Caring for one another is not entirely separable from caring for words. Words are entrusted to us as equipment for our life together, to help us survive, guide and nourish one another.”22 This is why honesty in a leader always ranks among the qualities most admired by colleagues. No one wants to hear bad news or criticism. But people consistently prefer the truth to soothing lies that end in bad surprises.
For McEntyre, language is a life-sustaining resource. And like any other resource, it “can be depleted, polluted, contaminated, eroded and filled with artificial stimulants. Like any other resource, it needs the protection of those who recognize its value and commit themselves to good stewardship.”23
It’s useful to keep this in mind in answering Pontius Pilate’s very modern, perfectly cynical question, What is truth? (Jn 18:38). The word “truth” (veritas in Latin) comes from the Old English triewth or treowth, meaning faithfulness, constancy, trustworthiness. It may ultimately derive from the Indo-European base word for wood or tree, “the semantic link being the firmness or steadfastness of oaks and such trees.”24 The idea that “true” means something “consistent with fact” dates back a very long way and took on the added meanings of real, genuine, accurate, and correct over the centuries.
For Christians, of course, truth is a Person. As Jesus says, “I am the way, and the truth and the life” (Jn 14:6), the incarnate Word of God. And God, the source and sustainer of everything real, can’t lie. This is the substance of our faith.
But in an everyday sense, “truth” means the conformity of what we say and hear with things that are real—“real” being more than just material, measurable data but never excluding them. When we tell the truth, we’re faithful to the facts as we know them, whether we like them or not. We can never escape our point of view, but we’re truthful when we make an honest effort to present the facts fairly and accurately, respecting the rights of the people who will hear them—whether we like them or not. That’s telling the truth. Therefore words are precious because they can serve or subvert this important task.
It’s been a bad century for words. Language has “rectified” borders, “neutralized” antisocial elements, “pacified” villages, “liquidated” enemies of the people, “resettled” Jews, “cleansed” religious and ethnic minorities, and regretted the “collateral damage” of combat—all on an industrial scale.
Laundered words and empty slogans, as George Orwell suggested, are the political obscenities of the age. Evasion and understatement mislead the hearer. They also corrupt the user. Dishonest language not only reflects a lying spirit, it also feeds it, leading to more mendacious thinking, more lies, and more corrupt action. And the result? “In our time,” Orwell famously said, “political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible … When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims,” one turns to “long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”25
Orwell fought as a socialist in the Spanish Civil War and was a bitter critic of the Catholic Church. But in many ways, he was an honest man. He saw and despised the duplicity of Soviet “aid” to the Spanish Republic firsthand, much of which consisted in crippling or murdering other noncommunist forces on the left.
What Orwell didn’t see but would have equally despised were politically engaged American reporters like Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway, and photographers like Robert Capa, who covered the war as they preferred to imagine it, with or without the truth, and who “were prepared to manipulate the reality of what they witnessed to produce something—a photograph, a film, a journalistic dispatch—that they hoped would further the cause they believed in … the finer points of truth could be set aside without conscience.”26
Later, at the height of the Cold War and its systematic degrading of truth by ideology, the philosopher and critic George Steiner wrote:
Languages have great reserves of life. They can absorb masses of hysteria, illiteracy and cheapness … But there comes a breaking point. Use a language to conceive, organize and justify Belsen; use it to make out specifications for gas ovens; use it to dehumanize man during 12 years of calculated bestiality. Something will happen to it … Something of the lies and sadism will settle in the marrow of the language.27
Lying comes in many forms, some of them appealing, some of them omissions of inconvenient sources or facts, but all of them a kind of violence. The Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper summed it up when he said that “the abuse of political power is fundamentally connected with the sophistic abuse of the word.” And the degradation of man by man, and the systematic physical violence against human beings, have their beginnings “when the word loses its dignity” because “through the word is accomplished what no other means can accomplish, namely, communication based on reality.”28
“Communication based on reality” brings us to the news industry, and there, too, the record is less than sterling. Overt lying certainly can and does happen in America’s news industry. Jayson Blair at the New York Times, Stephen Glass at the New Republic, and Janet Cooke at the Washington Post are merely the most high-profile cases in recent memory—along with NBC’s former news anchor Brian Williams and his factual “mistakes.”
But much more common is a chronic newsroom prejudice in the shaping of certain kinds of news. Planned Parenthood is assumed good, while critics who secretly film its cynicism, profiteering, and barbarism are assumed bad, to cite only one of many examples. And the language of “abortion rights,” common in most newsrooms, has the familiar Orwellian ring of avoiding an unpleasant reality (killing a child in utero) by calling it something else.
Thus does the magic of words rework the sinews of the universe.
And as in the news media, so, too, in politics. The White House elected to power in November 2008 campaigned on compelling promises of hope, change, and bringing the nation together. The reality it delivered for eight years was rather different: a brand of leadership that was narcissistic, aggressively secular, ideologically divisive, resistant to compromise, unwilling to accept responsibility for its failures, and generous in spreading blame.
As the prophet Jeremiah noted even longer ago than Orwell, Steiner, and Pieper, every one of us, given the right combination of pressure and temptation, has a heart that can be “deceitful above all things and desperately corrupt” (17:9). Too often in the real world, as one scholar observed, quoting Pascal, “We ‘hate the truth, and people hide it from us; we want to be flattered, and people flatter us; we like being deceived, and we are deceived.’ The deceptions we particularly seem to want are those that comfort, insulate, legitimate and provide ready excuses for inaction.”29
Every deceit is a trip to unreality, and unreality can be a pleasant place to visit. But it’s a narcotic that always wears off with an ugly hangover. For an individual, a taste for it is tragic. For a people, it’s lethal.
You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free. So says the Gospel of John (8:32). There is no justice, no beauty, no goodness, without truth, because truth is the voice of God’s authentic reality. Truth is the measure of reality itself; and without it, “justice” is a human equation based on power and arbitrary will. We were meant for something higher. We were made to be the kind of creatures who share in the glory of God himself. Freedom is the self-mastery to know and to do what’s right, and thus to have the capacity to stand upright in the presence of God’s judgment and love.
And this is why the great American Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor said that the truth will not only make you free, it will also make you odd. In a world of hyperbole, duplicity, factual disfigurement, and spin, speaking plainly and living honestly in obedience to Jesus Christ is an abnormal behavior. And the cost of that discipleship (but also its rewards) can be high.