Truth vs The Truth

I recently watched the film "The Invention of Lying" by Ricky Gervais. There were some truly hilarious moments, I thought, but I found myself thinking deeply afterward about the nature of lying and Truth.

Curiously, I noticed in the film that there was a distinction between "lying" (i.e., intentionally speaking "something that isn't") and voicing one's opinion, with which other people may disagree. This is an interesting distinction to me, since I think that speaking one's opinion as fact, or speaking one's Truth, has as much a tendency to shape the perceptions of others as does outright lying. I do think there are plenty of people who purposefully misrepresent what they know in order to manipulate or achieve a personal, perhaps benign, end. However, I also think that many of us become so convinced that reality is a certain way, we tend to assert that view as fact, while it is almost certainly our own perspective. And that's really the crux, and the reason I felt compelled to write about this: what I find most fascinating about the concept of speaking the truth is that we assume that there is one, that the truth is out there, waiting to be discovered. Philosophers call this idea "positivism," the notion that reality is the way it is, fixed and absolute, and humans' job is to discover and describe it accurately. It is a fundamental assumption in Western thinking, and THE foundational assumption of science as we know it in the modern world. I tend to take a slightly different view.

We create the truth by speaking it, at least as much as we uncover something that was already there. This idea is most obvious in emotional relationships between people. One person tells another "You're beautiful," that person begins to believe it, and that belief in turn creates a confidence, a radiance that is indeed beautiful in a way that others can perceive. The negative side of this is obvious as well, when one person tells another that they're a loser and will never amount to anything. The statement that "You're beautiful," or "You'll never succeed," are naturally not "truths," according to any pragmatic definition of the word, but rather value judgments, assessments, opinions. And yet, with enough power behind them, or frequency, they can become reality.

We see the same principle in history, which is so often written by those in power. To say that Columbus discovered America-- a simple truth that is taught to most American children in Kindergarten and 1st grade-- is of course deeply problematic. Not only did Columbus never set foot on the mainland of North America, you can't really "discover" a place where people have been living for thousands of years. The statement is deeply ethnocentric (biased toward European cultural perspectives) and is fairly inaccurate. And yet it has become "fact," or The Truth for several generations of Americans.

My point in all of this is not just to say that the truth is relative to one's cultural perspective, which is true, (ha), but to go even further to say that the truth is at least half ours to create. We must, however, create it together. As William Stafford put it:

It is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep.
The signals we give-- yes, no or maybe-- should be clear;
the darkness around us is deep.