Rejecting a Culture of Lies

It was a very revealing moment. I was driving with a friend through a major university campus. He was working in an office responsible for managing the resources of the university. And I happened to say, “You know, I’ve been wondering. I know there are complex moral questions like what to do if there are five guys in a lifeboat but only room for four, but I’ve started to suspect that most of our moral issues from day to day are fairly straightforward applications of the Ten Commandments that only seem complicated because we convince ourselves that in this instance it would be better to steal or lie or whatever.”

“Lying,” my friend exploded. “If we could only get people to stop lying. In my office, we can’t even figure out what we have because everyone is always lying, so we can’t make any reliable judgments about what we need.”

For example, he explained, that since they knew every department always overstated their budget by 20 percent, his office simply cut every budget by that amount, presuming that they had lied. Some departments began to catch on to this and had started to overstate their budgets by 25 percent. As a consequence, his office began cutting every budget by 25 percent.

After a while, this game of cat-and-mouse becomes so complex no one knows anymore what target they are supposed to be shooting at or whether they have any real arrows left in their quiver.

We all live in circumstances in which we cannot know everything we need to know to make all the decisions we need to make. So we need to be able to trust the truth of the information given to us by others. One rejoinder would be the classic one of Pontius Pilate: “Truth, what is that?” There is your truth and my truth. Or, as some pragmatists claim, truth is what serves some pragmatic end.

But hasn’t our recent experience shown us the dangers of allowing “truth” to be subservient to someone’s pragmatic ends?

Mark Twain once wrote, “There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics.” In our age, we know that there are Lies, Damned Lies, and News. To take a recent example, consider the case of Elaine Riddick, a passionate black pro-life advocate who was raped when she was 13. After giving birth to her child, she was forcibly sterilized by the doctor. And ever since, she has been fighting for the rights of women and unborn children.

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