Editor’s Notes

“For much of our history as a nation, we took great pride in telling the truth. We had an American culture that held truth telling, individual honesty, and personal integrity as an expectation and a source of pride. We paid honor to people who were so honest that their word was their bond —and one of the most dangerous things you could do would be to accuse someone of lying, because people in many American communities would fight anyone who questioned their integrity and honor. We told the truth to each other and we expected people to tell the truth to us. Our leaders took great pride in their reputation for honesty and truth telling — and leaders could very easily lose significant levels of support if they were ever caught in a lie of any kind.”—Institute for InterGroup Understanding

“Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.” — paraphrase of a Buddhist story

In recent times, facts, truth, and honesty have been manipulated in the culture and the media, to the point where their interpretations have become hard to define. Truth is complicated and personal – it’s not black and white. Truth is based in experience. Further, truthfulness and honesty are not the same things. Honesty means not telling lies. A criminal defense lawyer, for example, must be honest but he doesn’t have to be truthful—he has no obligation to tell the defendant’s whole story.

In society we sometimes mistake honesty for the truth, because we all tend to see ourselves as the standard for the truth about reality. We assume we’re unbiased. We assume we are objective. But we are influenced in our perceptions by people who are like-minded. Therefore, truth can be, in fact, subjective. Facts are true by definition and empirical observation. They are objective states.

People present the truth in the best possible light to make their own points and sell their own point of view. The underlying expectation is that what a person says is actually what they believe to be true. The implication is that what they say is true because their opinion is reinforced by evidence-based fact.  

However, in the Art of War, Sun Tzu advocated integrity relative to your own troops and weaponizing duplicity and skillful deception as one tool in an arsenal to defeat an opponent.

“That is not a good set of behaviors and values for our inter group communications. It might feel emotionally right in the heat of partisan conflict, but it is not a safe and solid pathway for us to go down as a country relative to all of those interactions.” (Ibid)

As a nation, we are drifting down a slippery slope toward a society which utilizes deception to engage our natural instincts about tribal mentality and divisiveness. Rather than basing truth on empirical fact, we are trending more and more toward truth-by-consensus. It is important that we take steps to recognize that manipulation and return to truth- and honesty-based values, behaviors and expectations.  This can start with a conscious effort to model such behavior, because there are aspects of truthfulness: being true to yourself and being true to others.

In this issue, our writers explored personal truth and truth in society. There are essays about the philosophical changes induced by dramatic environmental shifts, the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, and how perception affects truth. There are poems dedicated to seeing the world in ways both fantastical and off-the-beaten path; and poems about truths difficult to confront. If we want our society to change, we must shape it ourselves. Let’s start with finding the passionate truth of a well-argued essay or the emotional truth in a well-wrought poem.