When, Not Whether, Lies Will Fail
This was published in the spring of 1999 in the Yale Standard.
In the floodtide of comment and dispute over Mr. Clinton’s recent impeachment, truth itself seemed run aground on some distant spit of land, as if irrelevant. Speakings and writings were presented for and judged by their intended effect, not their contribution to what may be known of objective truth.
So today, how are we to reconcile a penchant for the convenient fib here and there with our personal desire to remain clear-eyed and well-oriented? Only by an unreasoning presumption: that we are smart enough to tell our lies, and too smart to believe other people’s lies.
Right! And every one of us will win the lottery next week, too.
Actual character, actual morality cannot be compartmentalized. Integrity is wholeness. A man unfit in private responsibilities is unfit for public responsibilities.
Our human judgment short-circuits amazingly as soon as third-person shifts to first-person. In our Narcissus of generations, the view from the first person prevails; the subjective eclipses objective reality. If a man, say, Mr. Clinton, shields himself with lies in personal matters, polls depict us Americans as performing a subjective two-step:
One—“if that’s how the man thinks, it’s a free country and he’s just doing his own thing,”
Two—“since the trouble seems to be in his personal life, it doesn’t affect us, so it doesn’t matter.”
You can just about hear the short circuit sparking. Actual character, actual morality cannot be compartmentalized. Integrity is wholeness. A man unfit in private responsibilities is unfit for public responsibilities.
Hear the gapping, crackling thought processes! How can we welcome a percentage of lies in what we’re told when we don’t know which of many other “facts” are also falsehoods? How can it be all right to tell “some lies,” to deceive others, if we don’t want to be deceived ourselves? Abraham Lincoln once summed up his view on slavery on a like note—”As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.”
In an era of self-justifying liars of all stripes, how many deceptions has each one of us already accepted? Are we even unraveling old deceptions as quickly as new ones are settling in? This generation takes global positioning satellites’ accuracy for granted, but hasn’t a clue where truth lives.
A people and nation choosing to live in a subjective hall of mirrors will run into objective truth again, at a time and place not of their choosing. Without a moral course change, the Titanic of nations will party on, then find and crack up upon some very objective icebergs.
All that’s needed for our nation to sink in the waters ahead is to let moral corruption go unchallenged, to greet each new wave of toxic falsehood with silence. As we finish a century of two world wars and many smaller ones, genocide, and unspeakable cruelties in scores of countries, let us look for, prize and embrace truth in our lives, public and private.
The moral laws of our existence, of choice and consequence, are as sure and inexorable as the physical laws science has explored. Truth’s victory over deceit is always a question of when, not whether. In that light, consider just one more echo of the Golden Rule: “As I would not be deceived, so I will not lie to deceive others.”
Is it unreasonable to ask that of our leaders, and ourselves?
Philip Chamberlain, Branford ’70