In the Jesus Revolution (movie in theaters) the young main leads talk about a world of lies in 1968. “Were you quoting Ginsburg?” They discovered they were believing Ginsburg’s lies but found a way to truth and life.
If we’re going to be trusted, we need not only to refrain from telling lies, but we must be able to identify lies when we hear them and then not believe the lies. That seems straightforward and simple enough until Fox News, in February, admitted and settled with Dominion Voting Systems for lying about sabotaged vote machines.
The lines that caught my eye, leading me to write about trust and lies (rather than about Fox and politics), are these. “It is not just that the Fox News audiences don’t care if they’re lied to. Lies are what they crave…lies are exactly what they want to hear.” (Amanda Marcotte in Salon, February 21, 2023, quoted widely).
Journalist Marcotte implies that these fools, alone, are not merely gullible, but willingly (or insanely) want to live in a world of lies. She is explicit that other journalists who lied, including the NY Times’ Jayson Blair, lost their careers over telling known lies. Well, it’s good to know that such people have all been identified and that the rest of us are safe. What a relief!
What nonsense. Who actually believes that it is even possible for the lies to be confined to one source?
Who actually believes that any media outlet is telling the truth as best they can all the time? Who is that naïve?
If all those who want to be lied to have been isolated, who can explain the ocean of lies that are passed around and believed daily? Does anyone think that we have not been lied to about political issues? Does anyone think that politicians, whether in the big cities, states, or the federal government, are typically telling the truth? Even the fact checkers are lying to us and to each other. Worse, people willingly believe them.
And then there is European Football (FIFA) with decades of fixing soccer games. People love lies.
We are facing a paralyzing fear that Artificial Intelligence will fill the world with lies. The world is already filled with paralyzing lies. And Marcotte actually writes about people having an insane appetite for lies. Are we to believe that she is not part of the circus? Are any of us really excluded? Of course not.
We are even eager to lie to ourselves; almost a different topic, but it’s worthy. Beyond the ’Sorry, my phone died” lies, we almost believe that “I’m not angry” or “I’m fine to drive,” which are all as thin as dogs eating homework. On a larger scale, we tell others things like, “The kids will be fine.” Internally, we remind ourselves daily of lies like, “The real me is a fraud,” or “I will never get free of my mistakes.” As children of lies, we put on a tough game face (don’t talk to me) and isolate ourselves (destroying trust), leaving us vulnerable to a bouquet of dead weeds, of which the first is depression, and the worst are actually poisonous to body and soul.
Why not say that since truth has been found dead in the streets, we have fractured into groups of people who believe mere narratives? Narratives are packages of perspective that explain life. They used to be serious, helpful, even mostly true. Now there are tribal and even personal narratives that explain the world. Aldous Ames, a spy of the WW2 era, betrayed fellow U.S. spies and counterspies, resulting in their deaths in Russia. He said, with striking simplicity, that it did not matter because he did not know them. They did not exist (in his insane world) because he didn’t know them. His narrative was based on lies.
Politically or ideologically charged arguments in the hands of people of any stripe are dangerous, though some of their fears are well-founded. We not only face the possibility of social disintegration, but of letting the real liars disappear into the fog of lies. I realize that I’m writing at the moment of the Durham Report, but I’ll leave the political red meat to others.
Bonhoeffer and others remind us of the gaps that we try to fill between who we are and who we want to be (future/growth) or between who we think we are and what we imagine people think of us. All important.
Solzhenitsyn said, “One word of truth will save the world.” He was shaming the endless lies of the Soviet system. Has that pattern of lies penetrated our world? We could conveniently blame the communists or the media-politicians or Adam and Eve. We can join Marcotte in blaming those with an appetite for lies, our very own selves. All of us. It is universal. What if that ‘one word of truth’ entered the world in Jesus Christ? For all the mistakes of people of faith over the centuries, who besides Jesus has provided that one word of truth?