It was Sam Harris who first introduced me to the concept of lying as violence. I read his book on lying, aptly named, Lying and thought it interesting, agreed with most of it and decided to tell the truth wherever possible. If you read the last sentence again you’ll note I left myself wiggle room for a small measure of dishonesty.
A couple of months ago I heard Jordan Peterson discuss the Bible’s book of Genesis. His reading of the creation of the world is that in the beginning there was chaos and darkness, and the word of god/God birthed order and introduced light to the anarchy. Peterson says that god/God spoke the truth and his words created the world, and everything in it. It is truth that brings sanity to the madness.
I’m an atheist, but there is something about what Peterson says that struck a chord and had me thinking about the nature of truth and its impact on reality.
3 Types of Truth
This is where I am right now on the whole truth thing. I’m going to start with the idea of 3 truths. The first one is the truth of reality. The truth of reality is made up of things, or more accurately, everything that exists and everything that happens to the things that exist. A rock exists. It’s not called a rock, in fact it’s not called anything, its just something that is. This rock might be light brown, but as a thing, it doesn’t have colour. All it is, is itself. It is there and nothing more.
This fist truth is the world and the universe in which we find ourselves.
And this world is a very strange and magical place. It is so mysterious humans had to invent stories to make sense of how everything got here and to explain what is going on. These stories required language; nouns, verbs and adjectives that described and explained the first truth, the truth of things. These stories are the second truth. The second truth encapsulates the words and stories that allow us to live in this world together. It is our shared truth that allows us to agree that the sky is blue, that water is wet and that these coins I have in my hand are a fair trade for that coffee you’re making me.
And then there’s the third truth. This is our truth, the truth of who we are, or think we are. This truth is relative, it influences how you interpret and engage with our shared truths, and is unique to you. When people talk about knowing one’s self, this is the truth of who we are and what makes us, us. Most of us struggle with this truth, because pointing at a rock and describing an object as a rock is easy. But pointing at oneself in the mirror and trying to describe who you truly are is incredibly difficult.
To know oneself, you have to define yourself in relation to other people and other things. We become us by understanding who and what we are not. We need the second truth to fully understand our own truth.
The violence of lying
Now, what I’ve been thinking about is what happens when we don’t tell the truth, when we lie.
Lying tears at the fabric of the stories that allow us to live together in this reality. When we speak untruths, we erode the trust in the stories we rely to make sense of everything that exists. Lying is breaks the social contract on which we humans rely on to prosper, to make sense of what is happening around us and to us, and most importantly, to participate in this thing we call life.
Lying rejects not only what we agreed on as being truth, but it gouges at the flesh of our place in existence. It erodes our right to trust ourselves and everything we experience. It takes our right to understand and to gain knowledge from us and thereby undermines our ability to know who we are in relation to the world.
And when someone lies to advance their own cause, it is a violence against all of us because lying slices at knowledge like a scalpel, making it impossible for you and I to know who we are.
Tell the fucking truth, always.