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Sixteenth in my series of talks for the Unitarians -
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The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth |
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“Then you will know the Truth, and the Truth will set you free” There are some profound and poetic verses in the Bible, but this one from the Gospel of John, Chapter 8, Verse 32 is one of my personal favorites. To place it in context, the verse occurs during a dialogue in the temple after Jesus tells the Pharisees, who want to stone a woman accused of adultery, to let her alone in another oft-quoted phrase. You can look that one up. He goes on trying to convince the audience that he is the Messiah, and he uses this statement about the value of truth to further entice the ones who are still listening. Some of them go on to argue with him that they are already free, but of course they’ve missed the point. Finally, some of the listeners have had enough and pick up rocks to throw at this rabble-rouser (they do seem to enjoy throwing rocks), upon which he somehow makes himself invisible and exits stage left. Like many well-known Bible verses, this one has been widely quoted beyond its original context by all sorts of people who have come to the conclusion that the world is full of falsehood, even as they have accepted the concept of truth as one of their highest moral principles. Perhaps most importantly, it binds moral behavior to a future reward – a fundamental purpose of virtually all religions or systems of ethics. Ironically, the “truth” Jesus is specifically referring to is what might be more accurately described as religious belief, or faith in what he is saying. Regardless of that little distraction, it’s still a great phrase. Simple, profound phrases like this one can be found in all of the world’s great religious writings, in the analects of Confucius, in the Vedas, or the Tao Te Ching, or the Quran, to the koans of Zen. Part of the beauty of such phrases is that while they express important fundamental principles, they simultaneously leave us with more questions, and we are left to contemplate on our own to find the deeper meanings and apply them in our lives. To get started, let’s put off the question of whether the truth will really set us free. First, we need to ask, “What is truth?” and then, “How will we know it when we see it?” This may seem like a ridiculous thing to wonder about. After all, how hard can it be to figure out whether something is true or not? For simple personal observations of events that have already happened, we can usually be fairly confident of our senses. We depend continuously on seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and feeling to survive in the world. If we aren’t objective, we run into problems pretty quickly. Literally. But for things that are beyond the direct reach of our senses it isn’t easy, and we routinely fall into the habit of using faulty logic, accepting unverifiable hearsay, and even trusting illusions to conclude something we haven’t directly experienced is true. Hence, the saying: “we believe what we wish to believe”. And we become heavily invested in a lifetime of accumulated belief. Leo Tolstoy defined the problem this way: "I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives." Every philosopher of any consequence has pondered this problem. They have tried to put rigor into separating truth from conjecture and opinion. In fact, an entire branch of philosophy called epistemology is devoted to this quest. So I’d like to spend the next hour lecturing on all the theories of knowledge acquisition starting with Plato’s definition of justified, true, belief. Sound a little too boring? Okay, how about an example to illustrate instead? Here’s one called: Power Failure From Forbes Online Certain investors think there is money to be made from the free energy business. Evidently there’s [another one] born every minute. Dennis Lee's prey include: environmentalists who want a nonpolluting energy source; religious devotees who believe in his Bible-quoting rhetoric; conspiracy theorists who believe that powerful forces in government and big business seek to control world commerce; and working people who think that a home business might be a good way to augment their income. [Is anyone here getting nervous yet?] All have fallen under the sway of this graying, sometimes wild-eyed man of 59, the founder of an assortment of enterprises with names like Better World Technologies. Lee, if you believe him, has a way to create electricity without burning fuel. There's derogatory term among engineers for what Dennis Lee purports to have discovered: perpetual motion machine. It's a device that creates energy out of nothing. The laws of physics say that no such machine is possible. But there's a physics ignoramus born every minute, and so Lee has made quite a business out of developing this machine. People have parted with as much as $50,000 to buy dealerships to support him. These dealerships are home businesses peddling products like magnetic laundry devices that supposedly eliminate the need for detergent, a vibration-free jackhammer and a paint-on flame-resistant coating. All of these are meant to support the development of Lee's free-energy device. People who buy dealerships are entitled to free energy, once he completes development of the technology. The idea is that they can use the energy to lower their own electric bills or to attract customers to the Lee product line. This operation has some scope. Lee has bought ads in USA
Today and has conducted two national tours, showing his wares to thousands
of people in every state. He claims he once had a net worth of $50 million
and that he has employed hundreds of people. He is still active despite the
efforts of attorneys general around the country to put a stop to his
endeavors. Lee claims to have a motor that puts out five times as much energy as is needed to run it. He also claims to have a generator that is 100% efficient. What's awesome is what you get when you connect the generator to the motor. Since only a fifth of the generator's output would be used to run the motor, the balance would be available as free electricity. Awesome, at least, to the sort of people who attend Lee's seminars. Any engineer would snort with laughter. Though Lee says he could hook his two inventions up to make free electricity, he also says he hasn't done it. "If I did do that, I'd have to tell you I've done that, because God hates a liar," he says, and he's not ready to reveal the technology until he can get 1.6 million people to pack two football stadiums in every state in the U.S. to serve as witnesses and to ensure his safety from the government and industry barons who would no doubt want to stop him. Lee's dealerships, along with some penny-ante operations like selling videos and books about his free-power miracle, have kept him going for nearly two decades. Eric Krieg, cofounder of the Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking, a society of amateur debunkers, has started bringing dealers into contact with one another. Krieg, a 46-year-old electrical engineer who works for JDS Uniphase, started an anti-Lee Web site after taking in one of Lee's gala events in Philadelphia in 1996. Since then he's met former dealers who claim losses of $10,000 each and one man who mortgaged his home to invest $30,000 with Lee. Last year, without the aid of a lawyer, Lee sued Krieg in New Jersey district court, demanding $1 million, accusing Krieg of stalking and libeling him. Krieg is fighting the suit. Losing the suit would hardly be traumatic for Lee. He doesn't take setbacks lying down. If states should ban his shows, he argues, it would be to protect the energy companies. "I have had my brains beat out by people like you for 30 years," he says, referring to this article. "All the power, and you still haven't stopped anything from happening. Because ultimately it's going to happen." [Well, maybe not.] If anyone here has never fallen victim to a con artist, please raise your hand. {Pause} I want to shake your hand after the service. And you’ll have to pardon me if I’m a bit skeptical. You may simply not yet realize you’ve been conned. Maybe it wasn’t something as egregious as a perpetual motion machine hoax, but if you’ve been out in the world awhile, at some point, most of us realize we’ve been had; a victim of a snake oil salesman, a huckster, or a charlatan. Their schemes don’t have to be so grand. When I was growing up, my grandfather was taken in by a couple of guys who mysteriously happened by their little place out in the boondocks between Tatum and Beckville and noticed that his roof looked worn out, and they offered to save him a pile of money by applying a coating that would allow him to avoid re-shingling for a long time. You can imagine what happened. When it was all done, the roof had been painted spaceship silver, and my grandfather, who was a dirt farmer with very little income, was several hundred dollars poorer. Of course he still had to replace the roof shortly thereafter. Has anyone here ever received an e-mail from someone in Nigeria notifying you of a large sum of money due some deceased relative of yours? Did you read it all the way through the first time, hoping that it just might be real? Has anyone ever invested in penny stocks based on a hot tip? Did you make any money? Has anyone got rich selling Amway, Tupperware, or Mary Kaye? Has anyone even found a fad diet that really keeps those pounds off forever? I could go on… When this happens to us, we feel embarrassed afterward and wonder how we could fall for something so obvious in hindsight. But don’t beat yourself up too much; it happens to most of us. All of us risk being taken for a ride when we interact with a fellow human, whether it is a conversation, a business transaction, or a romantic encounter. We become vulnerable because most people we interact with on a daily basis are reasonably reliable, and the con artists use that knowledge when they catch us off guard and betray our trust. The techniques of the successful con artist are well known. These include:
There are lots of examples of blatant frauds like this, but you’re familiar with the concept, and new ones happen every day. Parting a fool from their money is one thing, but the behavior I find more disturbing is the pervasive and deliberate abuse of language by the powerful to sway us to support a previously rejected idea. This particular form of propaganda is sometimes called doublespeak, coined from the terminology in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. The current popular doublespeak term for doublespeak is “spin.” An example will illustrate: Many of you are old enough to remember when the old Soviet Union had an estimated 150,000 soldiers in Afghanistan bogged down in a Viet Nam-style conflict supporting an unpopular Marxist government allied with the Soviets. You may also remember that their adversaries, the mujahedeen, were called “freedom fighters” by our leaders at the time, and that our government sent over two billion dollars worth of weapons to the battlefield to aid them in their quest for power. The Soviets finally gave up and left after 10 years of guerilla warfare, with the great cost in money and lives significantly contributing to the breakup of the Soviet Union. In Afghanistan, civil war ensued among the many warlords and their followers. After several years, a faction of the former “freedom fighters” ultimately won control of most of the country and restyled itself as the Taliban, supported by sympathetic fundamentalist elements within neighboring Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, two long-time allies of the United States. The Taliban rapidly instituted one of the most repressive theocracies in history, relative to our culture. As if this wasn’t enough, I will never forget watching video footage of their destruction of the giant Buddhas of the Bamiyan Valley, a place where a real civilization flourished along the Silk Road over 1500 years ago. Of course everyone is aware that the Taliban provided a haven and sympathetic ideology for those who would ultimately lay the plans that resulted in the mass death and destruction of the World Trade Center in New York. Henceforth they would be called “terrorists”, since they were sponsoring attacks on our people rather than on the people of our enemies. It is beyond irony that we found ourselves engaged in armed conflict against the very people we once supported. The problem here is not that the objectives of these people changed, or that the truth was difficult to comprehend. The problem is that many of us went along with this deception of language, propagated by people we are supposed to trust in our government and our news media, that a warring faction can be properly called freedom fighters one day, and terrorists another day, depending not on how they behave toward their own people or toward their adversaries, but on whether they are with us or against us. I used this particular example because it would be familiar to us as Americans, but I certainly don’t think that our government and media are behaving worse or differently from other governments or media who are trying to influence their own populations. In many countries, the use of propaganda is much more direct and is orders of magnitude more deceptive. The point is that even if those we listen to bias their rhetoric with positive or negative euphemisms depending on whether they wish to glorify or vilify another person, country, or idea, ultimately it is our own failure as individuals to discern the truth, to insist on plainspeak, that allows the deception to continue. When we are deceived, it is too often because we want to believe what they are saying. This technique, where new labels are attached to old things in order to trick us into believing they are new or somehow different, has become standard practice in almost all communication these days. It is certainly common in virtually all large institutions, whether they be government, business, or religious organizations. We tend to use it ourselves when it serves our own purposes. And although we are all entitled to have opinions, we are also fooling ourselves when we practice sophistry. The trouble is, this misuse of language is an insidious thing, it is applying the technique of the con artist subtly and slowly. It is sugarcoating the poison pill, so you don’t even notice while you are swallowing it. It devalues the real purpose of honest debate, the free exchange of clearly expressed ideas, where even if we fail to agree in the end, at least our meaning was clear. What can you do? When you speak or write, make a conscious effort to use clear, neutral words to describe things. When someone tries to sell you some snake oil by using doublespeak, check for understanding with something like, “So what you are saying is…” and insert words with clear meanings. At least roll your eyes when your internal obfuscation meter goes into alarm. When someone makes a claim that sounds dubious, question them until they produce some evidence. And although it is much harder, insist on clear evidence even if you sympathize with their position. If evidence is not forthcoming, and they insist you simply believe them, move away as rapidly as possible. And how about part two – will the truth really set you free? I want to believe it, and it makes me feel better to seek honesty and objectivity in my dealings with other people. But we are each on a different journey. For you, I can’t make any promises. You’ll have to find out for yourself whether the truth will set you free. 8/28/05 |
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Last Update 8/28/05 |