Nothing but the Truth

When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember that it is even there, but it is still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.
from the HBO miniseries ‘Chernobyl’ by Craig Mazin

The Cost of Lies

The quote above comes from the closing scene in the excellent HBO miniseries depicting the Chernobyl disaster.¹ In this scene Valery Legasov, a member of the USSR Academy of Sciences played by Jared Harris, is explaining how a Soviet RBMK reactor explodes. The Chernobyl catastrophe illustrates how utterly destructive lies can be. The story is told largely from the perspective of Legasov, who was assigned to the Soviet commission investigating the disaster. The miniseries digs into the secrecy and lies that led to the disaster² and ultimately contributed to countless more deaths in the immediate aftermath. The story is a reflection on what happens when a corrupt system predicated on lies collides with reality.

We recently witnessed the same type of thing in Afghanistan. Twenty years of lies came crashing down as the U.S. withdrew their forces from Afghanistan. For two decades we listened to the generals tell us about all the progress they were making there building the Afghan National Army and Police Force. Countless American officers advanced their careers by inventing metrics to show the progress that everyone wanted to see. They told us how many recruits they trained. It didn’t matter if the same recruit entered training multiple times only to desert so that he could sell his uniform and then reenlist. Each new commander had to inflate the lies of his predecessor.³ If he came clean and told the truth his career was over. So each one invented new ways to demonstrate progress that was nonexistent. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction concluded that “the American people have constantly been lied to.”⁴ As one officer put it, “Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible.”⁵ Lies, all lies. The finest minds in defense, intelligence, and foreign service were so caught up in the fiction they created that they were genuinely shocked when the Afghan Army collapsed practically overnight, ceding the entire country to the Taliban. They couldn’t keep millions of dollars of equipment from falling into Taliban control. They failed to arrange safe passage for Americans and abandoned Afghan collaborators to face gruesome reprisals.

Ketman is Poison

The Soviet Union was a notoriously awful deceit-mill. But Western countries increasingly operate on a deficit of truth in a similar fashion. Elected representatives outsource governance to bureaucrats or the private sector and we call that democracy. Big Tech deprives people of information. They defend their censorship saying it’s necessarily in order for people to be better informed. Globalization flattens cultures and we call that progress. We’re no longer a serious people. Rights get disconnected from duties. Degradation is celebrated as liberation. Vice is treated as virtue. Racism is rebranded as anti-racist. Skepticism is ironically touted as anti-scientific. Practically everything has to be falsified in order to achieve this fantasy. You don’t actually have to believe any of it. You only need to behave as though you do. Pretend that you’re not pretending. In other words, live by lies.

The fact that we conceal is a uniquely human quality. We lie not just to manipulate, but to hide the bad things we know we have done. We also choose not to see things as they are. We choose to believe lies. We all become willing participants in the deceit. We abdicate reason, conscience, and responsibility. And so we pursue knowledge for its instrumental power rather than a search for truth.

In his book Live Not by Lies Rod Dreher borrows the concept of Ketman from Polish dissident Czeslaw Milosz. Ketman is a Persian word for the practice of maintaining the outward appearances of Islamic orthodoxy while inwardly dissenting.⁶ This is the same strategy people living under communism had to adopt if they wanted to avoid trouble. It’s what those of us who aren’t woke do today at the office or at school to avoid the baseless suspicion of racism, sexism, or bigotry. Milosz warns of the dangers of living this double life. We risk becoming the character we despise. It inevitably corrupts. This is what led some Christians to collaborate with communist regimes and even Jews to collaborate with their Nazi captors. It’s what makes us enforce divisive, and just plain bad, policies at work. Ketman is like the wraithlike dementor from the Harry Potter series that sucks out one’s soul. It’s one thing to be persecuted by liars. But to live the lie is something else. It warps the psyche and the soul. Ketman is poison.

By adapting to these conditions we help create the very conditions that perpetuate the lie. We are both its victims and its instruments. Those of us who participate in this system share a degree of responsibility for it. There is something within us that makes us far too accommodating of these pseudo-realities. There is something within us that prevents every effort to revolt. We are afraid to sacrifice some material comforts for our moral and spiritual integrity. And so the system alienates humanity while alienated humanity involuntarily supports the system.

The blame falls on each of us. We misuse words to get what we want, to impress, to win an argument, to manipulate. These are all attempts to bend and twist the world to serve ourselves. We want to appear competent, to prove a point, to avoid conflict, to disguise ignorance, or to deflect blame. But no one is strong enough to bend the truth. Rather, we deform our souls as we bump up against it.

Dreher is deeply concerned about where this leads. His latest book draws lessons from the 20th century’s Marxist experiment. He invokes Hannah Arendt, the foremost scholar of totalitarianism:

You can surrender your moral responsibility to be honest out of misplaced idealism. You can also surrender it by hating others more than you love truth. In pre-totalitarian states, Arendt writes, hating “respectable society” was so narcotic, that elites were willing to accept “monstrous forgeries in historiography” for the sake of striking back at those who, in their view, had “excluded the underprivileged and oppressed from the memory of mankind.” For example, many who didn’t really accept Marx’s revisionist take on history—that it is a manifestation of class struggle—were willing to affirm it because it was a useful tool to punish those they despised.⁷

This sounds eerily familiar today as the elites who monopolize each and every center of cultural production increasingly embrace neo-Marxist critical theory under the guise of advancing human rights or antiracism.⁸

Communism was premised on the understanding that Marxism was only compatible with a new type of man. Any means for bringing about this new Soviet Man was justified, no matter how brutal. This new man was a fiction. But the suffering this brought was no fiction when the the fiction manifested itself in real life events like the Holodomor and The Red Terror.

The big lie today in the West is the idea of the radically autonomous Self. We aim to be like God, depending on nothing and no one. Man is the autonomous ruler of himself. Any value that impinges on one’s freedom is seen as a fetter. But this freedom no longer has any direction or measure. I discuss this corruption at length in a previous post. This absolute autonomy and self-sufficiency is an illusion. People don’t exist as isolated individual minds. We’re born into a world that we didn’t create which is already saturated with meaning. Our identity is enmeshed in a network of human relations.

If nature is a self standing reality and people are nothing more than disembedded autonomous individuals whose freedom has no higher aim, then one is only free to the extent that they are free from all constraints. Truth itself becomes an intolerable constraint. There cannot be any objective truth then, only power. In this case religious claims, philosophical arguments, reason, logic, and science are all merely tools to conceal the will to power. If a man thinks he is a woman, then women and girls must welcome him into their bathrooms. If Generals must lie about the progress they’re making training, advising, assisting, and equipping the Afghan National Army in order to advance their careers and inflate their budgets then so be it. But if the individual can do as he pleases, why shouldn’t the commissar to do as he pleases?⁹ If millions must die in the Holodomor to bring about some new and better reality, then who are we to stand in the way? And if the commissar needs an election result to lend credibility, then officials must assert that the election was ‘free and fair.’ If society needs abortions, then the courts must find ways to justify these procedures. If society needs a novel vaccine, then regulators must declare it ‘safe and effective.’¹⁰ If society is inherently racist, then any racial disparity in outcomes is evidence of racism. It’s all conclusion driven.

Václav Havel saw the fate of those living under communism as a warning to the West. In his essay ‘The Power of the Powerless’ Havel describes a lowly greengrocer’s participation in this system of lies.¹¹ As long as Havel’s greengrocer is living within the lie he is a threat to no one. But the lie only works if it’s universal. By rejecting the lie he illuminates truth. This shatters the world of appearances. It holds up only as long as people are willing to live within the lie. It topples under its own weight when these falsehoods are revealed. The truth pulls back the curtain exposing the rotten foundation. Others become conscious of the lie. An honest greengrocer suddenly becomes an existential threat to this system predicated on lies. This is precisely why the Soviet Union expelled Aleksandr Sozhenitsyn in a desperate attempt, as Havel said, to “plug up the dreadful wellspring of truth.” The system had to defend the integrity of the appearances it created.

The Truth Sets Free

On the eve his expulsion from the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn urged his fellow countrymen to embrace truth, eschewing every form of lie no matter how benign or how costly it seemed. In what would be his farewell essay ‘Live Not by Lies‘ Solzhenitsyn described how the Soviets “put whomever they want on trial, and brand the healthy as mentally ill.”¹² They demanded submission to lies. One’s loyalty was proven through “daily participation in deceit.” And so Solzhenitsyn found within himself the simplest most accessible key to liberation: that is personal nonparticipation in lies. “When people renounce lies,” Solzhenitsyn wrote, “lies simply cease to exist. Like parasites, they can only survive when attached to a person.” Maybe we’re not ready to step outside and shout the truth. Let us at least start by refusing to say what we do not think. Solzhenitsyn went on:

Our way must be: Never knowingly support lies! Having understood where the lies begin (and many see this line differently)—step back from that gangrenous edge! Let us not glue back the flaking scales of the Ideology, not gather back its crumbling bones, nor patch together its decomposing garb, and we will be amazed how swiftly and helplessly the lies will fall away, and that which is destined to be naked will be exposed as such to the world… Let each man choose: Will he remain a witting servant of the lies (needless to say, not due to natural predisposition, but in order to provide a living for the family, to rear the children in the spirit of lies!), or has the time come for him to stand straight as an honest man, worthy of the respect of his children and contemporaries? …there is no loophole left for anyone who seeks to be honest: Not even for a day, not even in the safest technical occupations can he avoid… choices to be made in favor of either truth or lies, in favor of spiritual independence or spiritual servility. And as for him who lacks the courage to defend even his own soul: Let him not brag of his progressive views, boast of his status as an academician or a recognized artist, a distinguished citizen or general. Let him say to himself plainly: I am cattle, I am a coward, I seek only warmth and to eat my fill. But if we shrink away, then let us cease complaining that someone does not let us draw breath—we do it to ourselves! Let us then cower and hunker down, while our comrades the biologists bring closer the day when our thoughts can be read and our genes altered.¹³

Living in truth won’t be easy. But it’s the only option for the soul. The truth is like fire. It burns off the deadwood. It can be uncomfortable, especially when you begin to realize just how much of yourself is a lie. We lie to be polite, to avoid trouble, to save face. We lie all the time. And when we have something to say but don’t say it, that too is a lie. For many of us, most of the things we say and do are lies. They are the words and actions of someone, or something, else. They are the words of an Ideology. They’re the actions of impulsive desire. We know they’re lies because they make us feel week. Words that are true, and truly our own, make us feel strong. It’s hard to find our own words. But we don’t really exist until we do.¹⁴

Solzhenitsyn parted with some practical advice for his comrades. He implored them to not participate in the lies. He gave some specific examples of what that might look like. A person who refuses to participate in lies…

Will not write, sign, nor publish in any way, a single line distorting, so far as he can see, the truth;
Will not utter such a line in private or in public conversation, nor read it from a crib sheet, nor speak it in the role of educator, canvasser, teacher, actor;
Will not in painting, sculpture, photograph, technology, or music depict, support, or broadcast a single false thought, a single distortion of the truth as he discerns it;
Will not cite in writing or in speech a single “guiding” quote for gratification, insurance, for his success at work, unless he fully shares the cited thought and believes that it fits the context precisely;
Will not be forced to a demonstration or a rally if it runs counter to his desire and his will; will not take up and raise a banner or slogan in which he does not fully believe;
Will not raise a hand in vote for a proposal which he does not sincerely support; will not vote openly or in secret ballot for a candidate whom he deems dubious or unworthy;
Will not be impelled to a meeting where a forced and distorted discussion is expected to take place;
Will at once walk out from a session, meeting, lecture, play, or film as soon as he hears the speaker utter a lie, ideological drivel, or shameless propaganda;
Will not subscribe to, nor buy in retail, a newspaper or journal that distorts or hides the underlying facts.

By following Solzhenitsyn’s example, we too might become wellsprings of truth. Lies are an inauthentic response to truth. The truth is ever present beneath the lie. It is the repressed alternative, the authentic aim to which living a lie is an inauthentic response.¹⁵ Let us stop perpetuating lies and instead live in the dignity of truth. Let us no longer be willing participants in the deception.

We must find it within ourselves to live in the dignity of truth as Dreher urges. Not everyone has the strength to stand up and say what they believe, but we could at least stop affirming what we know is false. Let us carve out spaces where truth reigns. Because, as Jordan Peterson points out, “The Truth is what makes the world. The Truth is what redeems the world from hell.”¹⁶

Fear begets lies. It’s time to stop being afraid. Dreher recounts a conversation with Maria Wittner, a Hungarian patriot and participant in the 1956 revolution. “We live in a world of lies, whether we want it or not. That’s just the case. But you shouldn’t accommodate to it,” she tells Dreher. “It’s an individual decision for each person if you want to live in fear, or if you want to live in the freedom of the soul… I’ve been thinking a lot about fear, as such,” she says. “Someone who is afraid is going to be made to do the most evil things. If someone is not afraid to say no, if your soul is free, there is nothing they can do to you. In the end, those who are afraid always end up worse than the courageous.”¹⁷

Too often we focus on what the truth will cost us. We need to consider the cost of lies. No doubt we might face alienation, retribution, and ostracism for telling the truth. This was the fate of Legasov, the Russian scientist investigating the Chernobyl disaster from the opening of this piece. The miniseries closes with the following monologue:

We are so focused on our search for truth we fail to consider how few actually want us to find it. But it is always there whether we see it or not, whether we choose to or not. The truth doesn’t care about our needs or wants. It doesn’t care about our governments, our ideologies, our religions. It will lie in wait for all time. This alas is the gift of Chernobyl. Where I once would fear the cost of truth, now I only ask, ‘What is the cost of lies?’¹⁸

The Cost of Lies

Ketman is Poison

The Truth Sets Free

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