Sources of Obstacles to Truth

There is a story about an unusual way to boil a frog. Vegetarians with a weak stomach may want to skip to the next paragraph. It goes like this. If you heat a pot of water with a live frog in it, and you turn up the heat really fast, so the water temperature soars quickly, the frog will notice the temperature change and skip out of the pot. However, if you turn the heat up only a little, to simmer, say, then the water temperature will rise ever so slightly and so slowly that the frog would not notice, and eventually get boiled alive.

I don't know if it is a true story, and have never attempted to prove its validity. I remember it because like all useful parables and anecdotes, it has the ring of truth, and convey in poignant imagery the danger of desensitization. We are bombarded with falsehoods from all sources all the time that we become desensitized to falsehoods when confronted with it, and accept it without question. I use the term falsehood specifically refering to false information accepted blindly or deceptively as true. When a story is understood to be false, or understood to be not necessarily accurate or valid or true, then it has a place as a lesson for messages and illustrations. But when something false is held up to be true, then it is falsehood that literally murders truth. Although the complete and universal truth called by many different names cannot be defined, cannot be enumerated in any finite human language, it can be murdered by falsehoods that proclaim themselves to be true. When we tolerate little lies, and little falsehoods, we tolerate a little cut in the death by a thousand cuts of truth.

All the obstacles to truth have their origins in some aspect of falsehood that we tolerated not because we are evil or deceptive, but because we thought a little of it won't matter, is tolerable. We may be correct in that particular specific circumstance. Being human, we have free will and the ability to choose. It is when we given up our freedom to choose, to say no, that inch by inch, we cross the Solzhenitsyn Line as a result of the pulling forces from social pressure to selfish greed, that a tolerant civil society like the German Weimer Republic can create the Nazi German death camps. Without the soul-searching alarm and actions of many patriotic Americans, the Abu Grahib torture chambers could lead to much worse horrors. The mealeability of the human psyche is both one of its key strengths, and one of its key weaknesses. We can adapt because we can change ourselves to fit into any situation. Alas, some situations should not be tolerated by society. As individuals we must tolerate whatever to survive, but as a society, tolerating intolerance is, paradoxically, social suicide. A community of individuals cannot accept intolerance, must be open and inclusive to all, if it were to remain a healthy vibrant community of individuals rather than a collection of mind-numbing order-following clones that conform to a "social norm". The constitution of any long-lasting society must exclude intolerance from its foundation; otherwise, cracks will eventually form, as in the American Civil War, or the Watts Riot, or the French Riots, or the Danish Muslim protests. It is the responsibility of society, Rousseau's Sovereign, to protect the right and well-being of each individual, in exchange for each individual's submission to the authority of the State. When the State neglect its duty to give protect even one member of a minority, it has neglected its duty to all as individuals, which is the ultimate minority.

We accept little falsehoods here and there, to convince ourselves that all is well, to convince ourselves that we are better than "they". Little by little we step closer to the Solzhenitsyn Line until we cross over to the land of falsehoods, where war can be waged on false premises, based on false beliefs, and for false objectives. The late great M. Scott Peck spent a lot of time soul-searching before writing the book, People of the Lie, precisely because he feared that it might be used by people to indiscriminately accuse anyone and everyone of evil. It is so easy to demonize an enemy. It is much more difficult, and right, to love thy enemy.

The sources of obstacles to truth lie in our lack of courage to face the truth, so we accept little by little the little falsehoods that make our lives easier at the expense of living a life of truth, until one day we can no longer tell the difference, when we are lost to truth, isolated from it, cut off from the source of utopian happiness.