An Island of Lies
Christians know that Truth and truth exist.
Others prefer the opaque:
Kelly Monroe Kullberg, in her book Finding God Beyond Harvard spoke of her search for the truth — any truth. For “without a transcendent truth breaking into our world and revealing reality, we’re left to our imaginings, despair and power games. The power brokers thrive in a world without truth, for their invent their own, and few have the moral verve to stop them. A world without truth is a recipe for disaster.”
She had to find out if the truth existed anywhere; for at Harvard the conventional wisdom was that the truth was a mythical beast, like the unicorn, which no one had lately seen.
By and by it dawned on her that the truth was in fact everywhere. It had to be. Otherwise airplanes would not fly, computers would not function nor the planets stay on their courses. “The elegant mathematical forms encoded in nature, the nineteen universal constant that are exactly what they must be” were the stuff that kept the world turning. The truth was omnipresent whenever we looked outside the narrow boundaries of the heart of man.
And why was it absent there? Because men wanted to create their own truth. We don’t live in a ‘world without truth’ we simply abide on an island of lies of our own construction. Kremlins are made by man and maintained at immense cost. Thousands if not millions of people are constantly busy patching up the walls of that fortress with the mortar of falsehood lest reality leak in.
Outside the artificial walls lies don’t work. They create high prices, shortages, unemployment, military disaster. But inside the walls the lies work miracles.
The opaqueness of regimes — the Kremlins of the world — is a self adopted metric of power. The intensity of falsehood measures the degree to which they can exclude the facts from their own kingdoms of darkness. It’s a temperature, like airconditioning. For there is no measure of power as impressive as the ability to lie and get millions to accept it as true. Thus the actual function of official journalism has never been to write “the first draft of history”, but to plaster the ramparts with lies.
Perhaps the root cause of the Fall of Empires — whether the Roman or the Third Reich — is they eventually poison the wellsprings of their own fact. They dissimulate until even their statistics and their ‘facts’ are contaminated and the loop closes. They act upon the falsehoods they themselves have made up and thus go off the cliff. All tyrannies die in the end from madness, and each approaches the end with the vague notion that this could not be happening to them. But by then there is nothing to grasp, even their tools have become shadows.