There's no guarantee bad things will happen if you don't tell the
truth. Sometimes bad things happen and sometimes they don't
anyway regardless of what you do. There's no guarantee
good things will happen if you do tell the
truth. Sometimes good things happen and sometimes they don't
anyway regardless of what you do.
I'd like, for a moment, to shift this conversation about
not telling the truth vs telling the truth, away from
being wrong vs being right, away from being worse vs being better, away
from being being bad vs being good. If there has to be any evaluation
at all, I'd prefer to consider it as what
doesn't work
as distinct from what
works.
But even that fairly innocuous distinction imposes something on this
conversation which will only distract from my assertion, which is this:
Telling the truth is a choice. That's all it is. There's nothing
naughty naughty about not telling the truth. There's
nothing goody goody about telling the truth. It's just a
choice. Treating telling the truth as anything other than
a choice buries the truth in so much meaning and
significance (albeit well intentioned meaning and
significance) as to obfuscate the truth almost entirely.
"To not tell the truth, or to tell the truth?".
"Chocolate, or vanilla?".
"To not tell the truth, or to tell the truth?" is a simple
choice in the same league as "Chocolate, or vanilla?". If you
make it any less simple, the truth gets buried. If you make it
any more significant, the truth gets buried deeper. For example,
if you tell the truth in order to be honest or to be right
or to be good, that may be preferable to being dishonest or to being
wrong or to being bad, but it's still an "in order to" -
it's not really telling the truth. Another example:
telling the truth because you're driven to tell the truth by a belief
system. Telling the truth because you're driven to tell the truth by a
belief system, particularly when it's unexamined and
undistinguished that you're driven to tell the truth by a
belief system, really serves nothing other than to besmirch the truth
and to bury it again. Spoken with
rigor,
telling the truth because you're driven to tell the truth by a belief
system clouds the truth with righteousness rendering it
little more than a racket (albeit a well intentioned
racket).
In the case of "To not tell the truth, or to tell the truth?",
there even seems to be an assumed direr consequence which
accompanies one component of the choice: the "to not tell the
truth" component (in contradistinction, there doesn't seem to
be any dire consequences accompanying either component of the choice
"Chocolate, or vanilla?"). But is that because there really
is a direr consequence accompanying the component "to not
tell the truth" ... or is that just a threat I
make in order to force meaning and significance and righteousness onto
being honest and onto being right and onto being good, in other words,
in order to be better and to garner agreement
being honest and on the right side of good?
Again, a racket (albeit a well intentioned racket), but don't you
notice how the tacit "in order to" here begins to reek?
Indeed, can I (ie is it even possible to) step outside of
this legendary eternal classic
battle between good and
evil
at all, and simply look at what my choice is in the matter
of telling the truth, or not - with no history or complication or
meaning or significance or righteousness attached at all? Indeed, can I
(ie is it even possible to) simply tell the truth
"period" rather than being skewed to tell the truth in order
to "something"? (fill in the blank).
That's what I'm asking. That's what I'm inquiring into.
noun
the quality of being true
the real facts about a situation, event or person; a fact or
principle which is thought to be true by most people
<unquote>
If we go with the
Cambridge International Dictionary's
fourth definition of "truth" (a fact or principle which is
thought to be true by most people), I can never be
here to tell the truth because my thoughts about the
truth are always opining over and on top of what
exists. This would imply the best it gets for me is to point
to the truth, yet by virtue of my own human being, I
can never get out of the way enough to really tell the
truth. Which brings me back to, once again, Werner Erhard.
Werner
Erhard
says
"The truth believed is
a lie.".
Werner's not saying don't tell the truth. Werner's not
saying the truth can't be told. Werner's simply saying
believing
the truth morphs the truth out of the domain of truth, and
into the domain of belief. Clearly, the truth is the truth -
it's not belief. Clearly, belief is belief - it's not the truth.
Ergo: the truth believed is a lie (that which
is not the truth). QED.
So ... "To not tell the truth, or to tell the truth?
Choose!".
"I choose to tell the truth.".
"Why do you choose to tell the truth?".
"I choose to tell the truth because I choose to tell the
truth".