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A long passage from Thomas Merton’s Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander and what it opened inside of me: We are living under a tyranny of untruth which confirms itself in power and establishes more and more total control over men in proportion as they convince themselves they are resisting error. Our submission to plausible and useful lies involves us in greater and more obvious contradictions, and to hide these from ourselves we need greater and ever less plausible lies. The basic falsehood is the lie that we are totally dedicated to truth, and that we can remain dedicated to truth in a manner that is at the same time honest and exclusive: that we have the monopoly of all truth, just as our adversary of the moment has the monopoly of all error. We then convince ourselves that we cannot preserve our purity of vision and our inner sincerity if we enter into dialogue with the enemy, for he will corrupt us with his error. We believe, finally, that truth cannot be preserved except by the destruction of the enemy – for, since we have identified him with error, to destroy him is to destroy error. The adversary, of course, has exactly the same thoughts about us and exactly the same basic policy by which he defends the "truth." He has identified us with dishonesty, insincerity, and untruth. He believes that, if we are destroyed, nothing will be left but truth. If we really sought truth we would begin slowly and laboriously to divest ourselves one by one of all our coverings of fiction and delusion: or at least we would desire to do so, for willing cannot enable us to effect it.
Why was it so relieving to read these words? Why was it so important to remember they were written in 1965? I think this is the moral injury of our era, a deep cultural illness that has been with us forever, that seemed to get a little better for a brief moment, whose symptoms are now so florid that even people who say they aren’t shocked are at least a little shocked to see them return. Like the measles. Or a unique mutation of an old virus. That gets worse and then better and then worse again. A spiritual crisis that impacts the entire world. It is absolutely a political crisis, a planetary crisis and an economic crisis. And a religious crisis. And a spiritual one. The lies we know are lies, but that we must go along with anyway to survive. The lies on top of lies that still can’t silence the truth that we all know we are living in a house of cards built from dominance and abuse, extraction and colonization, exploitation and frankly, institutional and corporate sin. The bald faced lying that makes us want to scream and strike out, and the sneaky lies that we sip that in our sparkling water at “insignificant” levels there may be no safe exposure to. The traditional American lies that have always been used to justify genocides and the new ones too. And about cruelty, and abusive reductive binaries, and projections of our shames and horrors on to those we would like to destroy. And we cannot effectively reveal the truth or confront the lies of others, if we don’t know the scale and scope of the lies we have digested and disseminated. No one can show another the error that is within him unless the other is convinced that his critic first sees and loves the good that is within him.
That sentence made me back up. I think it is easier for me to start with examining my own lies, illusions, confusions, distortions, justification, than to try to love what seems to me to be, from where I sit in this moment, to be pure systemic sin and those who have been whipped into a murderous frenzy. I can’t “see the good” when the bad is working to destroy and dispose of so many people. This world is a tricky place.
In our most intact and reflective states we remain capable of self-delusion, of rationalizing, of avoiding our most slippery shames and the most annihilating forms of guilt. We are always negotiating a hall of mirrors. We can lose track of what is real in a flash if we move too quickly.
It is actually extraordinary when any culture, community, or individuals even come close to the truth. We are all wildly capable of living in a fictional world. And the fiction that we are most capable of telling ourselves, the lies that are the most delicious are the ones that are only about ourselves and whatever we want right now and why we deserve to have it, and that anything in our way is an obstacle. All the sins of the world flow from that lie. And no one else can sort that through for us. We have to choose to face the truths we most fear, the most ungratifying, painful, annihilating truths on our own. We can’t even begin to speak about lies and truth if we haven’t acknowledged all the lies we have told ourselves, and those we have spread unthinkingly and those we never even knew we swallowed. I don’t think we can always lead with love, or compassion. But when they are beyond reach, I can keep moving forward with humility, knowing how easy it is, and how many times I have been caught up in a whirlwind of lies. Perhaps we can find a few truths and sit on them, humbly, and build out slowly from there, knowing that we will wittingly or unwittingly engage in a harmful lie one way or another. Just that. We get lost. We don’t know what we are doing most of the time. We wander through all the incomplete myths and distorted stories in our minds. To resist is to commit to the truth and the uncertainty that must always accompany it. To become familiar with our own backsides. To know how and when we are likely to fall into confusion, inflation, and distortion. And to know what lies we have earned a right to confront when we encounter them. Can we learn to show each other our own failures, confronting them directly, receiving them tenderly so that a culture of denial and lies can gain no purchase? If we could only accept that the only way to escape the dualism of lies and truth is to admit that at best we can only each tell a broken, subjective, incomplete truth. Truth transcends us always. We are too small, specks on a planet that is just a speck, to ever know the truths of all the seen and unseen worlds. This is the only possible meeting place. We know not what we do. This life is a mystery, and we can make but a few thoughtful guesses into the void. And some will be wildly wrong. And some will be evil in their effects and implications, and we may not even see it. The miracle will be if we can collectively find a way to forge a loyal, fierce, brave and humble relationship to whatever we wish is true.
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