Sacred truth

The word 'truth' is unusually around in our cyber- and other spaces. The word 'post-truth' has been declared word of the year by those who write dictionaries. A Times correspondent described 'post-truth' as lying - it's that simple. My generation can call a spade a spade, he declares. There is much generalised anxiety around about the idea that perhaps we are increasingly being fooled into misperceptions, to the extent that we are no longer in touch with reality. Do we all live in a Matrix, or a Truman Show kind of world in which we are 'normalised' into believing that what is real is not in fact real at all?

This idea is not new - what is? I recall a great sci-fi writer of another generation (E F Russell) who wrote about our planet as in fact a scientific experimental laboratory, run by aliens of far greater advancement than us in knowledge. Little did we know that they might call a halt to the experiment at any time . . . .

All such perspectives seem to be grounded in huge anxieties, which we don't care to admit to often, that we are in fact unimportant little creatures, dots upon dots upon dots, frequently way off beam, who take ourselves fantastically seriously without just cause. Are we Hamlet's 'the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals,' or are we 'this quintessence of dust?'

We could engage with this argument at great length - possibly arriving at very little useful conclusion.  It's narcissistic in its essence - born of the need to feel like 'the Great I Am' and the fear of not being. Equally, we could say, 'why does it matter?' The why question is what often comes up in psychotherapy.  I find that people want to know whether they are important or not - whether they are valuable, whether they are valued. And the reason they want to know is because nobody has given them much to go on in the past. The parental job, among other things, is to help your children find their own worth and feel confident in it. But often parents have too little sense of self-worth themselves, and cannot transmit to their children what they never had themselves. They themselves are confused and uncertain in this difficult world. Do they matter? Do their children matter?

The ultimate cop-out is to say, 'What is truth anyway?' as Pilate did. I can't really blame him, in the difficult world of Judean and Roman politics of the first century. But it is a cop-out in the sense that shoving aside the existence of truth is meant to relieve you of responsibility. I didn't actually lie to you - I just told you the version that suited us both at the time! It's an attempt to escape from that responsibility by shelling the very idea of truth. Deny truth and you are free to say whatever you like.

The fact is, though, that we have always been free to say whatever we like. Haven't we? What curtails our freedom, or appears to, is the world of consequences. Patients who struggle with a powerful sense of being in chains - being denied the right to their point of view, being controlled, being shut in, shut down, shut up - are sometimes demanding the impossible, namely the right to say and be whatever they want without any consequences. Yet, provided you are prepared to accept the consequences you can do and be and say anything you like. But consequences there will often be! It takes courage to accept the consequences of your behaviour, because you feel that what you have to do or say is that important. It is the essence of the struggle to be a self in a world that is over-peopled with other selves also struggling in the same way. If you want to be free to commit crimes, don't expect them not to put you in jail! If you want to stay in bed mornings, don't expect them to forgive you for being late for school! What these struggles are about, it seems to me, is the immensely difficult task of finding your place in the world, where you are not a lone wolf but one of a community. You can have your share, but you cannot have it all. Not without consequences.

But are there always consequences you may wonder? It can be a desperately unfair world where some people seem to get away with no consequences at all for their behaviour. I think the word 'seem' is important here. You may lie and cheat and not get found out, it is true - but you yourself will find you out. The idea that life is a breeze if you play by no rules and collar all the bonuses is wrong, or at least a partial truth. There is always the overhanging fear that one day . . . . someone will find you out. Justice has a long arm in a world where records are always left somewhere of everything we do. Abused children grow up and get courage to spill the beans. Investigative journalists expose fraudulent behaviour that goes back decades. You are always having to cover your tracks. Always having to make excuses, think up fresh lies and deceptions. The quality of relationships is tarnished by lying and deception. You imagine that nobody knows - that it is your dark secret. And then you find out that everybody knows! Has been treating you differently from way back as a person who cannot be trusted. All hope of real closeness, of intimacy, goes out of the window. You inhabit a phoney world where nobody is expected to be real, to be in the now. You have put yourself in the Matrix, in the Truman Show, willingly! And this is a fate worse than death.

A particular issue for a lot of people, I find, is struggling for the right to say things - find a voice and use it in people-to-people situations. If they could do that, they probably wouldn't need psychotherapy! But their fear is too great. Won't people be angry with them for disagreeing? Won't they lose their closest relationships and be abandoned? Won't they be unpopular? (This is a particularly powerful fear in teenagers - a fate they can only gasp with horror at!)  I don't dismiss such fears as trivial. Not at all. But you tend to find with experience that being disliked in one quarter gets you rather liked better in another. Also, being abandoned is actually not the worst thing that can happen to you (I exclude childhood of course in this). It may be that, having got rid of some deadwood in your life, you may have cleared the first space in your life to do something for yourself alone. Imagined consequences may turn out quite differently from what you thought. Imagination plays tricks, enables our internal worlds to speak many varieties of untruth to us - to whisper in our ears all sorts of negative stuff.

So I want to speak up on the side of truth as being psychologically healthy, if nothing else. However, there are caveats worth thinking about also. It pays to be thoughtful about what truth actually is. Very few truths are sacred and inviolable. Truth is not perception. We are creatures of perception - we tend to think that what we perceive to be happening is the only truth there is. Keep an open mind to the possibility that your perception may differ from that of other people - and that neither may be wholly wrong. Check out the facts. Do the work of a good journalist and make sure you know the event history. Social media don't seem to mind whether you have checked anything or not. Everything that is said is presumed to be the case. And a lot of people seem to be be extremely gullible. "It was in the papers" was once a common self-defense against being challenged. Not now. But 'it was on Twitter' has become an easy substitute. Time we became harder to fool. Time we came to value truth more highly. The alternative is to join the world of The Truman Show and not even know you're doing it.