First-off, one of my Italian friends told me that title: a bad truth is better than a good lie. Secondly, always site your sources is a guide, or code-of-conduct that scares some folks. The question I often wonder is: why?
So let’s hang out with a foray into language for a few minutes today. Letting go of the emotional trigger valve the words “truth” and “lie” have in service of looking at a balloon expelling air while puttering around the room to land in a heap. A balloon absent of hot air looks like what it is: an inert, plasticky material. That’s the truth about a balloon and yet when it doesn’t have air in it….it just lies there. Aside from this banal look at a balloon having a bunch of other undeniable aspects about its existence, its origin, its potential to be inflated, to be popped.
So now we have a relatable mental object conjured by words, that balloon situates itself as a metaphor for beloved potential as a union of what something is and could be. And since things are mutable and changeable, perception and perspectives real aspects of human life to examine and weigh, this phrase my Italian friend said grabbed my attention. What it did was take the hot air out of situations I had allowed myself to get mental about. And when things get too ontologically mental, reality seems to lose its sense of realness. Avoiding the rhetorics love of antagonistic nihilism: debating the existence of reality itself, perhaps a balloon metaphor is a terrible choice of representative subject matter.
Which makes this statement about truth and lies sticky at times. The truth was, a balloon seemed like a great way to talk about something simultaneously complex and simple, and it ended up being a bit of garbage. Sorry about that.
There’s plenty of garbage on the internet. So perfect, now we accidentally landed cosily situated in a contemporary context. There is another thing everyone seems to be able to agree on today: the world has gone mad! As if it was not always that way?
Perhaps the tussle is that a being in the world involves carrying around a filtration system. This filtration system is most physically the diaphragm and the complexity of the nervous system which becomes processed in both the body and the brain. That filtration system is grossly misunderstood and mystifies many who attempt to study it. The filtration system is assumed to be consciousness, or the mind, but that dear friends is a story humans made up and believe. There is a gross breadth and depth we have yet to uncover when it comes to the filtration system, sometimes referred to as the immune system. The business of breathing and thought are noted for being entirely hamperable- and not in the sense of where you put your dirty clothes, but in the sense that it can be hampered with.
You see a fun thing of being not well is learning about things that is not common knowledge and figuring out how to make sense of it all. And in the making sense of knowledge, the well can form again. Great to be well! Much more fulfilling experience of life to be well than unwell. So when something doesn’t really make sense, things are a bit like a cubist painting, that does not really say much about how reality itself is, but more the way the perceiver makes it to be; or in the case of art, the way the artist makes it out to be. And in the case of reality, when reality seems like a schizoid image, then there really is something that is not quite lining up. Perhaps it could be something emerging into awareness, perhaps it could also be a distortion…or a manipulation of reality.
Interesting perspectives and perceptions and all, the aspects of being and becoming have deeply punctured the ideological realm and has now birthed realities littered with a growing numbers of camper vans on streets, people trying to kick other people out of libraries for stickers they don’t like on someone else’s property, and making assumptions about people they know nothing about their life based on conclusions drawn on appearance. Just to name a few. These kinds of things seemed impossible to happen; it’s almost as if parts of society have circled back into history and decided to a mass reenactment.
So when the way things are, and the way things go, do not add up to what is thought about them humans can do a few things: adjust, adapt, be wrong, change, (help me out here, probably a few more choices are available).
Onward and back to the bad ballon metaphor for a minute. (A subjective and not truthful statement there-for the record.) The thing about truth and lies are that people seem to get really confused about why discerning which-is-which matters. That part really befuddles me because we do live in material world (Thanks Madonna. The pointy cone bra wearing one, not the saintly looking one). Personally, when I take stock of history, I started to notice some patterns. Those patterns began to look like very few whoopsies and a lot more of on-purposeies. Water mammals aside, one of the aspects of what is described as human process, is that ideas and results can indeed be incongruent. Taking that into consideration, there still seems to be not so many accidents but instead a people doing things on purpose. So when it comes to figuring out who inflated a balloon, a bunch of finger pointing gets started and keeps going. I again wonder: why? Why is it so hard to be wrong? To own that and move along?
Since all that finger pointing doesn’t really help get to the truth. Not even in court. I would wager someone knows at least on person who was unjustly labelled, and people who get away with indiscretion. Maybe today we all get on with a great deal of bad judgement because we have so many comforts available to us.
I mean really, if you ever try to go on a fast for a week and function normally with whatever constitutes your life, be it family and work, the question of comfort becomes quickly notable.
So that we are permitted so many opportunities for bad judgement, this must mean we have a forgiving society. A body of compassionate and forgiving people. Perhaps that also means we have a body of people who lured young and naive minds into a trap as well. And could things like this be considered the truth?
Getting to the truth, which might also evolve and change throughout the course of life, or hell, a short newsletter blast, perhaps truth is so difficult because humans are incorrigibly prone to seek conformity. This was one of the most mind-bending, cognitive dissonant qualities of studying social psychology. And I had to double check the transcript because I kept accidentally lying and called the study sociology. The difference matters because when it comes to the truth and a lie, the truth is what persists even in the face of a lie.
The weird thing about lie, means to assume a horizontal position. Which seems like a great time to take a philosophical breather and gaze upon a horizontally oriented image. And for the record, you are not my only sunshine. That song always seemed a bit unbalanced to me.
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