telling-the-truth
These words, adapted from Hannah Arendt, open the HBO miniseries Chernobyl—a horrifying look at not only the nuclear fallout from the 1986 disaster, but also the ghastliness of a society dedicated to spin over substance, to convenient lies over unpopular truth.
Intellectual Life as a Refuge from Falsehood?
I recalled Chernobyl’s opening recently while reading Zena Hitz’s new book, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. 
Hitz reflects on the life of the mind by interacting with writers ancient and modern, probing the purpose behind our intellectual pursuits, and questioning some of our cherished academic assumptions. Along the way, the question arises: How should we pursue the truth in a world that has no tolerance for facts that fight against our preferred narratives?
One answer is to find in the intellectual life a refuge from a world devoted to lies. Hitz points to the Italian Jewish author Primo Levi, whose work in chemistry sustained him in the years leading up to World War II, through the horrors of Auschwitz, and the occupied Italy of the postwar period.
Levi takes the pursuit of scientific truth to be a vital antidote to the self-serving lies promoted by the fascist government, lies promulgated in schools as well as in sources of news and “information.”
Hitz describes why people are so easily persuaded to lie, or at least to not speak the truth:
When I lie to someone, I use that person’s openness to the world, his or her power of perception and rational judgment as a means to get what I want. I want a wife and a mistress: I lie to attain both. I want to spend my morning in peace and quiet—I cover over some truth that might spark conflict at work or at home. The personal lie appeals not only to the audience’s rational judgment, but also to their own desires: they too do not want to be disturbed by a difficult truth.
Political and Public Lies
But what happens when personal lies become public lies, stories that societies adopt as their own, even when the facts do not align? Hitz points out how easily the political process can find lies more useful than the truth, so that power is acquired by the spreading of falsehood.
As a political leader, I aggrandize myself by exaggerating threats. I rely on my audience’s concern for their own well-being and the facts that determine it. I appeal to natural fears of uncertainty and weakness as well as to fantasies of strength. The more successful I am as a leader, the more dependent I am on lies: the vague threat of war turns into a direct lie about the facts of the matter, the unprovoked attack, the enemy at the gates. Words and stories become a means not only to present a false reality, but also to flood the airwaves, to drive out alternatives. The lies resonate and take hold in us, their audience, because they help us to pretend that deprivation is temporary, that suffering is curable, or that a confrontation has vindicated us or shown our strength.
The Ego vs. Your True Self By Saratoga Ocean
We might shrug our shoulders at this description and sigh in relief that only totalitarian regimes face this kind of false reality. But the truth is not a casualty merely of dictators—whether fascist or communist.
How to Live an Intellectual Life
Zena Hitz
Temptation to Compromise with Lies
Lest we think that only the former Soviet Union or places like China or North Korea today are suffused with lies, Hitz quotes the French political philosopher Yves Simon, an anti-Nazi Catholic who observed how easy it is even for truth-loving people to facilitate, spread, or at least not oppose lies:
“I do not know, I cannot imagine, any group which does not include among its current ideas an enormous dose of lies. That being the case, the alternative is inevitable: either one must like falsehood, or one must dislike the familiar setting of daily life.”
Hitz explains:
Simon sees that if lies prevail in social life and if truth is necessary for one’s full humanity, daily life with others is virtually unbearable. What, after all, does daily social life consist in? A disparaging remark about another group; a rumor or story meant to draw outrage; a news story dug up by partisans seeking advantage; a crude expression of allegiance to an institution as flawed as its denigrated rivals. All of these are fundamental to the fabric of social life, especially in times when social life is unusually politicized, as it was in Simon’s time and as it is now, for us. We speak to our own advantage: to feel comfortable, to assuage anxiety, to play a part in the struggles for power and status around us. Our purpose in speaking is rarely to communicate the truth about something. In this way we diminish the value of those we speak to; we treat them as our tools and deny their dignity.
