Plague Journal, The Problem With Lying
The problem with lying is that an individual, or even whole societies forget how to live. One becomes entangled in one’s own misshapen world, the mind-managed world, the one we seek to control, that is slipping out of our grasp. One seems deranged, existentially unhinged as the lies grow in number and scale, the true world slips away and with it, ones sanity. This is true whether of an individual or of whole societies that have “given up” the struggle for truth. Truth is also a production of the mind, because it is impossible to function as a higher organism apart from mind. To seek truth is to be open, to court vulnerability, to confess that one at best, is only partially right. Truth is never pure, is always tainted with error. There are always alternative viewpoints. The struggle for truth never ends. Unless one gives up and gives in to a comfortable lie.
It is only our worldview that dooms us to incompetence.
This world that we seek to control so carefully
is a world that we have created.
We created it by what we chose to notice,
by the images we used to describe
what we are seeing.
— excerpt A Simpler Way by Margaret J. Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers
We know only two things:
This heart within me I can feel and I judge that it exists.
This world I can touch, and likewise I judge that it exists.
There ends all of my knowledge,
and the rest is construction.
— Albert Camus
I would like to learn, or remember how to live,
to learn something of mindlessness.
Something of the purity of living in the physical senses
and the dignity of living without bias or motive.
The weasel lives in necessity
and we live in choice, hating necessity
and dying ignobly in its talons.
I would like to live as I should as the weasel lives as he should.
And suspect that for me the way is like the weasel’s
open to time and death painlessly,
noticing everything remembering nothing,
choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.
— Anne Dillard
There is only the dance.
— T. S. Eliot
*The underlining for emphasis is my own.
2 thoughts on “Plague Journal, The Problem With Lying”
If I may, I would like to offer 4 Henry David Thoreau quotes with a similar bent. I use these in my photograph classes though I feel they are are apropos for today’s blog offering:
• Many an object is not seen, though it falls within the range of our visual ray, because it does not come within the range of our intellectual ray, i.e. we are not looking for it. So, in the largest sense, we find only the world we look for.
• There is no such thing as pure objective observation. Your observation, to be interesting, i.e. to be significant, must be subjective. The sum of what the writer of whatever class has to report is simply some human experience, whether he be poet or philosopher or man of science. The man of most science is the man most alive, whose life is the greatest event. Senses that take cognizance of outward things merely are of no avail. It matters not where or how far you travel, (the farther commonly the worse) but how much alive you are. If it is possible to conceive of an event outside to humanity, it is not of the slightest significance, though it were the explosion of a planet. Every important worker will report what life there is in him. It makes no odds into what seeming deserts the poet is born. Though all his neighbors pronounce it a Sahara, it will be a paradise to him; for the desert which we see is the result of the barrenness of our experience.
• The question is not what you look at, but what you see.
• We must look a long time before we can see.
Looking long is difficult. One needs strength, discipline to journey on, no matter the noise. We see the world not as it is, but as I am.