“The Debt We Owe to the Truth” May 24, 2020 Dr. Roger Ray
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“Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later that debt is paid.”
At my age it often pains me to call someone as young as this a “scientist” but it is true. Rebekah Jones single-handedly created two applications in two languages, four dashboards, six unique maps with layers of data functionality for 32 variables covering a half a million lines of data. Her objective was to create a way for Floridians and researchers to see what the COVID-19 situation was in real time. In spite of her remarkable intellect and accomplishments, she was fired by the Florida Department of Health earlier this month for refusing to manipulate the data on her program to scale back the numbers of virus infections in the state of Florida. She had put in 16 hour days for two months to accurately inform Floridians and tourists of the potentially life threatening virus and she refused to turn her program into a tool for propaganda. I don’t know what the future holds for Rebekah Jones and I don’t get to vote in Florida, but it would appear that the Governor’s position is wide open.
Scientists are not always right, in fact, they are forever changing their body of knowledge in light of new information. No one would want to take any science course with even a 10-year-old textbook. A good scientist is always a stickler for the truth as best as the truth can be known, which is a deep commitment to honesty.
Propaganda is not always dishonest. When Florida’s tourism department talks about beautiful white sand beaches, orange and grapefruit groves, amusement parks, and water sports, they are not lying, they are just accentuating the positive. When they don’t want you to talk about high hotel taxes and sneaky “spa” charges automatically added to your bill, or about which cities are increasing their numbers of Covid-19 cases, well, that becomes dishonest propaganda. So, in this case, let’s not call it propaganda, let’s call it what it is: a lie. The state of Florida wanted to lie to residents and tourists about how serious this virus is in their state.
Florida does not have a state income tax. They have shifted their tax burden onto the millions of tourists who flock to their beautiful beaches and amusement parks every year and so, you can understand, Florida’s state government is in dire need to replenish their coffers. But is it okay to lie about a lethal disease in order to lure more tourists back to the state?
have accused our president of being, are people who have a need to tell a lie, even when the truth would serve them better. It is a compulsive behavior. In all my years, I have only known a couple of people who were compulsive liars. Most liars will tell the truth when the truth serves them, the difference between them and honest people is just this: honest people will tell the truth, even when the truth is not to their advantage. Liars will lie in order to serve their own economic, financial, or personal causes. I think that a lot of journalists and TV news hosts use the descriptor “pathological” to mean, “boy, he lies a lot!”
The kind of liar that I find to be rather more disturbing are those who are delusional liars. These are not simple con-men who are, like a dishonest used car salesperson, changing the facts in order to trick you or take advantage of you, but more a person who tells a convenient lie and then appears to believe it themselves.
For example, when President George W. Bush wanted Americans to support an invasion of Iraq to take weapons of mass destruction from Saddam Hussein, and he said, “Free nations don’t develop weapons of mass destruction,” did he recognize the irony and hypocrisy or did he not know that America has the largest arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in the history of the world? Did he know that Saddam didn’t actually have any? Or did he believe that our nuclear arsenal is “good” and only “defensive” and that we are good guys and whoever we invade had it coming?
There are many countries that our former president cannot visit because, if he did, he would be arrested for war crimes, crimes he is clearly guilty of having committed and yet, we see him in public events, laughing and joking with Michelle Obama (easily the most beloved political figure in the world today), who also seems to be willing to befriend him and join in the charade of pretending that starting an illegal war and killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people is just what you do, you know, some people like to play tennis, some people like to play golf, some presidents try to wipe out polio, others engage in mass murder. You say potato, I say “you are a war criminal.”
But, honestly, sometimes I feel like I am the only one who cares. There is no hue and cry among Americans to bring the war criminals of the first decade of this century to justice. Do you see how complacent we have become to lies that result in moral outrage?
The media talking heads are discussing the firing of the watch dog who was investigating Pompeo both for this arms deal with the Saudis and for using staff as personal servants but I have not heard anyone mention the fact that in the Reagan administration, the sale of arms to Iran over the objections of congress became a matter of concern that sent top White House officials to prison and came close to ending the Reagan administration. What is different between this arms sale and the one 40 years ago to Iran? 40 years ago, we still took justice and democracy seriously and doing things illegally as if you were a 3rd world dictator was not tolerated. Now, in the America of Donald Trump, we just fire the investigator. I feel like Democracy has died and somehow, we forgot to even hold a memorial service.
My point here is simply that we can get used to almost anything. My patriarchal ancestors ran a slave plantation in Kentucky, and they were very religious! They didn’t free their slaves because of the moral hypocrisy, their slaves were freed by a Civil War. But I grew up 25 miles away from that old plantation and it didn’t even dawn on me to notice that the black young people that I knew from working on the farm didn’t attend the school that I attended.
Men and women, it never even dawned on me that schools were segregated until they started talking about school integration on the TV news. The American policy of Apartheid, that kept black citizens in inferior schools, trapped in generational poverty, never even reached my consciousness until it was pointed out to me. We were raised with the belief that America was all about freedom while we kept a significant portion of our population in legal and forced poverty and segregation.
If preaching has any meaningful role in the 21st century, it is a weekly attempt at shining a light in the dark places of our awareness . . . those places where we are blinded by the sheer gravitational pull of the status quo . . . the willingness to accept things as they are as being what they should be. Preaching is subject to the charge of being just talk, but, when it is done correctly, it is talk that most people have refused to hear, to think about, or to allow themselves to be otherwise conscious of. Hopefully, it is consciousness raising talk.
I was struck earlier this year by the HBO special on the history of Chernobyl, that horrible nuclear accident in Russia that happened in the spring of 1986. True to form for Russia, everything they said about the incident was an attempt at covering up the seriousness of the event. The line from the series that arrested my attention, that I took as our wisdom lesson for today, is this simple observation: “Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later that debt is paid.”
I do not personally believe that God judges with reward and punishment for our lies and misdeeds.
I don’t think that I believe in a Karma, but I have to admit that there is some sense in which the universe seeks moral balance. Honesty is a virtue. Obviously, those of us who sincerely want to be good people will value honesty. It is also true that honesty is its own reward. We are not honest in hopes of avoiding a negative outcome in a final judgement, we are honest because we want to be that kind of person, we want to live a virtuous life. But, without a final judgement, without a supernatural theistic god who intervenes in human affairs, still, there is a debt that is incurred by dishonesty, a debt that somehow will demand payment, if not from the liar, then from the culture that has accepted and grown accustomed to the lies.
The initial deaths from the Chernobyl accident were few, but the lies, the denial, the face saving, caused tens of thousands of deaths over the next few years. Lying creates a debt to the truth, a debt that must eventually be paid. Our invasion of Iraq, which was supposed to be a quick and dirty regime change military event, has turned into a decades long nightmare that has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands, the wasting of trillions of dollars in resources, and the creation of two or three generations of angry future terrorists. The lies that led us into that war created a debt for which our children and grandchildren will be paying dearly for decades.
Of course, when I outlined this message in January, I had no idea that a pandemic would soon be altering the way the world lives and, frankly, dies. Unless you only listen to Fox News, you know that our president refused to take briefings on the virus in January and that he engaged in denial in February and has been mired in an endless cycle of lies, misinformation, and mismanagement ever since. How many of the nearly 100,000 Americans who have died might have been saved by a more honest and competent response?
Within days, there were hundreds of cases of Covid coming into the hospital. Officials quickly traced these new victims back to their church, demanded a full roster of members from church officials. They then tested every member and those who were positive, they then traced down every person they had been in contact with. As a result of this quick and efficient response, with readily available testing and a public that did not resist the wearing of masks, South Korea has had 264 deaths from the virus as of Thursday of this week. They tested their first case the same day we did. And yes, South Korea is not the United States, in fact, the population density in South Korea is nine times what it is in the United States, so, you might have expected them to have five or six times as many deaths as we have had. But, instead, our casualty count is between 300 and 400 times as great as theirs.
No one can conclusively say that Trump’s lies are directly responsible for 95,000 deaths in America, because careless and stupid behaviors on the part of many Americans has certainly contributed to the debt created by Trump’s lies and incompetence, but we cannot deny the fact that if we were to trace the tragic death toll in America to a single starting point, the way South Korea traced its biggest outbreak to a single elderly woman at a church service, this whole national nightmare could be traced to the White House, and the blame laid at the feet of one orange narcissist. Rather than a thousand deaths, we have had 95,000.
I published an article in the Springfield NewsLeader in January about the debt created by lies, though at that time I was talking about Boeing covering up the dangers of a new airplane, the 737 Max, with 346 deaths in two crashes. And I talked about the deception of the Iranian government surrounding a passenger plane that they accidently shot down.
The point, however, is the same; that our public has grown accustomed to governments, corporations, and even individuals, who tell lies because they don’t like the truth. I don’t think that I have dealt with a single divorce counseling case in 40 years in which both parties didn’t try to describe the other in the most damaging light possible, not because it was true, but because they wanted it to be true. . . we all want to be the hero of our own novels.
The curious thing about memory is, if you create a false memory and tell the fake story a few times, your memory actually changes and you can no longer remember the truth, you can only remember the lie. I believe that George W. Bush is sincerely offended whenever he hears himself being called a war criminal because he no longer believes that it is true. No one can see inside of Donald Trump’s skull and few would, even if they could, but I suspect that he actually believes a great deal of his own hype, not all of it, but a lot of it. Because he wants it to be true.
And now, we have “Bubba” claiming
In a post truth world, it becomes all the more important for communities of faith to courageously and prophetically both proclaim what is true and to adamantly reject what is false.
It is not too much of a stretch to say that the lies from the Trump administration about the current pandemic has cost America tens of thousands of lives. Just as lies told by Boeing about their 737 Max cost the world hundreds of needless deaths. And, we can add, decades of lies from both the Catholic Church and many protestant denominations including my former denomination, the Disciples of Christ, covering up pedophile priests and pastors that resulted in untold suffering and not a few suicides, one of whom I knew personally. And individually, when we give into lies, malicious gossip, character assassination . . . there is a debt created that someone will pay.
Let’s not tolerate that immorality in government, business, or religion, and let’s not engage in it ourselves.
If I may call upon our patron saint, Soren Kierkegaard, to land the final hammer blow today: There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to accept what is true.” In an empire built on lies may we forever be the treasonous ones who are devoted to the truth, no matter where the chips may fall.
