The Truth ... and Nothing ... (But the Truth?)

“I can't tell a lie, Pa; you know I can't tell a lie.

I did cut it (the cherry tree) with my hatchet.”

--George Washington

When a six-year-old Washington accidentally damaged his father’s beloved cherry tree with a new hatchet, George was driven by his conscience to own up to his actions. This was the story told to me by my grade school history teacher. And I, along with the rest of my gullible classmates, believed every detail to be true.

George Washington, the father of our country, could not tell a lie, and we all knew good children of the 1950s must learn from George and apply that important lesson of veracity in our lives.

However …

Fact and legend are often confused. Imagine my surprise when I learned Mason Locke Weems, a clergyman and one of Washington's first biographers, based this story on hearsay. Weems was a moralist who wanted to create a role model for young people like me, a boy all too eager to absorb an idealized version of American history.

In fact, Weems’s The Life and Memorable Actions of George Washington was first published in 1800, but his anecdote about the cherry tree was not added until the book’s fifth edition, which hit the shelves in 1806. Weems claimed he had heard the story from an elderly friend of the Washington family, but there is no evidence to support his claim. Nevertheless, Weems confidently related how the value of honesty was firmly inculcated in Washington by his father. I guess most of us gullible children just accepted the tale and understood it to be part of a lesson to praise the value of the truth.

What About the Truth?

The truth? What about role models? Now I am almost sixty-nine years old, and I fear the inherent value of this virtue is almost extinct. I hear people say: “There's your side. There's my side. And there is the truth” as if lying or stretching the truth is perfectly acceptable behavior. In the present partisan climate, Americans accustomed to “the slant” and “the spin” value honesty less and less. Gone is integrity. It has been replaced with “what I can get away with.” I think lies are so much a part of the culture now that children see little value in truth telling.

Oxford Dictionaries’ International Word of the Year for 2016 was “post-truth,” defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” The use of the word in English language text spiked 2,000 percent in 2016 compared to the previous year. Oxford said in its news release that the spike was driven “by the rise of social media as a news source and a growing distrust of facts offered up by the establishment.”

In a post-truth world, alternative facts and fake news compete on an equal footing with peer-reviewed research and formerly-authoritative sources. Even though they are aware that the process of arriving at the truth can be slow and even fallible, most people tend to reject the rigid discipline of conducting unbiased investigation, preferring to put credence into opinions that support their own predetermined prejudices.

We live in a time when many belittle science and expertise in order to oppose traditional democratic institutions. People these days love theories, conspiracies, and crackpot ideas. When the facts conflict with their sense of identity or political ideology, then, to them, the facts – and, of course, the truth – are disposable.

Commonly Accepted Ignorance

“Epistemology,” is the study of knowledge. This field helps define what we know and why we know it. However, on the flip side of this is “agnotology,” or the study of ignorance. The word stems from the Neoclassical Greek words agnōsis, "not knowing," and -logia, “maxim.”

Agnotology is not often discussed because studying the absence of something – in this case, the absence of knowledge – is incredibly difficult. More generally, the term also highlights the increasingly common condition where more knowledge of a subject leaves one more uncertain than before. This study of ignorance has increasingly become an effective political tool.

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”

—Isaac Asimov

Powerful people often use ignorance – agnotology – as a strategic tool to hide or divert attention from societal problems in which they have a vested interest. For example, conservative think tanks such as The Heartland Institute work to discredit the science behind human-caused climate change.

Combine the influence of ignorance with research that says most people lie at least some of the time, and truth loses intrinsic value. There, in the dark and validated by agnotology, people don’t think lies are that serious or of any real concern. Even when they acknowledge someone has been caught lying, they readily dismiss the offense. This has become part of the slow death of the truth.

Never have so many people had so much access to so much knowledge and yet have been so resistant to learning anything. In the United States and other developed nations, otherwise intelligent people denigrate intellectual achievement and reject the advice of experts. They care not about the truth.

Author Tom Nichols – professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and adjunct professor at the Harvard Extension School – calls this “the death of expertise.” This execution of evidence is not just a rejection of existing knowledge. Also, it is fundamentally a rejection of science and dispassionate rationality, the very foundations of modern civilization.

Thus, Nichols believes any inherent truth suffers from an irrational conviction among Americans that everyone is as smart as everyone else. Nichols says …

“This is the opposite of education, which should aim to make people, no matter how smart or accomplished they are, learners for the rest of their lives. Rather, we now live in a society where the acquisition of even a little learning is the endpoint, rather than the beginning, of education. And this is a dangerous thing.”

The search for truth and the subsequent application of its attainment are noble moral and educational practices. I believe the decline of ethics and religion has made lying more acceptable. And, the death of expertise surely has fueled this great indifference to the truth.

When parents tell children that “honesty is the best policy,” but display dishonesty by lying or adhering to principle supported by agnotology, such behavior sends conflicting messages to their children. Parents' dishonesty must eventually erode trust and promote dishonesty in their children. As we know, it actually becomes easier to lie with more practice.

Lying triggers emotional arousal and activates the amygdala, but with each additional lie, the arousal and conflict of telling an untruth diminishes, making it easier to lie. Scientists (2026) have also found that the amygdala became less active mostly when people lied to benefit themselves. In other words, self-interest seems to fuel dishonesty.

Senior author of the study Tali Sharot, PhD. explains ...

“When we lie for personal gain, our amygdala produces a negative feeling that limits the extent to which we are prepared to lie. However, this response fades as we continue to lie, and the more it falls, the bigger our lies become.”

The “danger flags” in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm are no longer fictional symbols. Hannah Arendt wrote in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism …

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (ie the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (ie the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

If a novelist had concocted a villain like Trump – a larger-than-life, narcissistic, prejudice demogogue, she or he would likely be accused of witless flights of fancy. Michiko Kakutani, writer and literary critic for The Guardian, (2018) says …

“However, the president of the U.S. has set the nation on the path of monumentally serious consequences with his constant assault on truth and the rule of law, and the vulnerabilities he has exposed in our institutions and digital communications.”

The overriding fear – already largely realized – is that Trump, in his kingly manner, says so many thing that aren't true, that he and his gullible and emotional believers will occupy a parallel universe of falsehoods in defiance of any other interpretation or logical challenge. In his alternate reality, Trump continues to gaslight the nation, blurring fact and fiction.

According to The Washington Post Fact Checker …

“In his first 869 days as President, Donald Trump said 10,796 things that were either misleading or outright false, Do the math and you get this: The President of the United States is saying 12 untrue things a day.”

The steady erosion of truth continues from the top down, and now the abrasion threatens the broader idea that we, as humans, have things on which we all can and should agree. So many “cherry trees” have been laid to waste in complete and false denial that their untold branches obscure a functioning political landscape. Even if we do tell a child a mythical legend about truth and an ethical future president, the moral of the story is now lost in the times. That young person only has to open his eyes and ears to the hypocrisy to dismiss the virtuous behavior.