The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth

And How Does One Discover It in a Land of Liars

The Whole Truth

The truth is I was a fat child, boring as meatloaf. The truth is I was a skinny child with a “very special glow.” Take your pick. We make it up as we go along. Not like our baby who spent the last fifteen minutes placing a coaster on top of a cup, trying to make a connection. When I was a fat child, I always knew what was behind Door Number One, even when a waitress thought my family was black and refused to seat us. It was 1959 with spiders as big as marbles patrolling our summer cottage. It was 1959, I just a skinny kid with a big appetite who laughed and laughed. What were you? you’re probably screaming by now. But you’re missing the point. Like when my friend said, “Wherever there are birds there are birdwatchers.” Really? Who says you have to see something for it to exist? I remember my divorced-dad drives home, when I cried into the steering wheel and considered driving off the road or directly into another divorced-dad, or when I was so broke I couldn’t afford an oil change or a new pair of shoes. Is that truth low-down and pathetic enough for you? The truth is I live in the ultimate guy pad with a small cache of automatic weapons hidden under a homemade shrine to St. Jude. All day I nap and read the great classics, sometimes watering my plants. I cry at golf events and pray to be the last swallowed headfirst at The Final Showdown. An incredible world, my world! Whatever you can imagine, whatever you can stand.

It’s odd that many of my essays rely on personal experience, because I have always valued my privacy and have felt, under the dictum that knowledge is power, that the less someone knows about my feelings, the better. Also, I often get uncomfortable, even embarrassed, when strangers share deeply personal information with me.

I guess I can excuse “my” sharing in these essays because, as I have written in an earlier essay called “Who Am I Today?” my “I” is often a persona, an exaggerated version of the real Peter Johnson. Also, my readers, can “x” of my site whenever they want to—an escape route I don’t have when I’m trapped in a doctor’s waiting room with three people—one arguing with a spouse about being lazy; another begging her mother to stop obsessing about her migraines; and a third offering a possible suspect in her friend’s recent STD experience.

For example, just yesterday, I took a thirty-minute bus ride downtown. An attractive forty-something woman wearing black jeans, an exquisite pair of suede ankle-high boots, and a tight-fitting black leather jacket with metal studs on the shoulders sat next to me. She had jet-black short hair, seemingly severed at the neck by a sharp razor. She was striking, in a Chrissie-Hynde kind of way, even without make-up.

Imagine my surprise when she struck up a conversation, no, a monologue, about the frigid weather, Patti Smith, her change in anxiety medication, and a 20-year-old drummer she was living with who had a tendency to throw her lingerie and various pairs of vintage shoes out the window.  

In truth, all of these revelations exhausted me. I’m a 72-year-old empath with unlimited sympathy for almost any “sharer” of feelings, and yet I can only absorb so much chaos without involuntarily twitching and wanting to take a long nap. Just last spring I got rattled when my favorite weatherman took a week off for an “undisclosed” operation, and when after February 2, our backyard groundhog, Woody, didn’t come out of his hole to torment the local asshole cat.

And yet my sympathy for inveterate sharers is also often tempered by a suspicion that they may be exaggerating or flat-out lying, just to attract attention. After all, nowadays, it has become fashionable to lie. And when you get caught, you’re supposed to double down so hard on the lie that the “truth” is often harder to decipher than a Trump monologue on Covid.

I don’t mean to sound superior because I, like all writers, am a liar.  

If I told the absolute truth in my essays, they would be boring.

In fact, maybe the whole above bus encounter is nothing more than a big lie or exaggeration I have concocted to have an interesting opening to this essay.

Which brings me, dear reader, to topic of the day: what is truth and what is lying, and is it ever appropriate to lie? This topic is especially relevant now with certain politicos defending “alternative facts,” and when Donald J. Trump is reported to have told 30,573 lies during his time as president. He just may be the most egregious and frightening liar of all time, because he actually believes his lies.  

So, then, what does one do when forced to live in a Land of Liars?

Perhaps a brief look at the concept of truth might help. Check out the following from a review of a book appropriately called Theories of Truth:

“There are often said to be five main 'theories of truth': correspondence, coherence, pragmatic, redundancy, and semantic theories. The coherence theory of truth equates the truth of a judgment with its coherence with other beliefs. Different versions of the theory give different accounts of coherence, but in all its forms the point is to exhibit truth as an internal relation between beliefs. The pragmatic theory of truth is akin to a coherence theory of this Kantian kind …. The redundancy theory is not a theory of what truth consists in, but a theory about the meaning of the words 'is true'.”

Well, that certainly solved the problem, proving once again the uselessness of philosophical analysis.

Nietzsche, I think, is much clearer on truth (which of course he doubts exists). He also rightly points out how lying manifests in different kinds of behavior:

“Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself—in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity—is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them.”

If we buy into what Nietzsche says, it doesn’t matter whether we lie or not, a conclusion that would truly anger St. Augustine, who never thought lying was acceptable, unless a man lied “unwittingly.” To him, a lot is about intent. “A liar,” he says, “loves to lie, and inhabits in his mind the delight of lying.” He finishes with, “Good men never should lie.”

I fall somewhere in between Nietzsche and Augustine, and would argue for something I call the Noble Lie.

Here are a few Noble Lies I have told and would tell again if given the opportunity.

1)      When the polar bear (my son’s favorite animal) died at the zoo, I told my son (6-years-old at the time) that the bear was on “vacation,” not realizing that I would have to follow that up with other lies when my son kept asking, “When will the polar bear be back from vacation?” One of my hippie friends told me it was unfair to “shield him from the truth.” But then he was the guy who felt it was okay to let his son eat a chocolate fudge sundae for breakfast at Newport Creamery, arguing that there was no truth to the idea that sugar hypes up kids, even though a half an hour later, he had to drag his son out of the Creamery as he kicked and screamed and call his dad an “asshole.”

2)      I told a friend of mine, who spent his whole life obsessed by how remote his father was that his father once told me how proud he was of him. In “truth,” his father never said that to me, but I told my friend this lie on the day his father died, and my lie significantly lessened his pain. How did I justify such a lie? Well, I knew his father. He was a good man, just emotionally distant from everyone, and I truly believed that if he were capable, he would have told my friend that he was proud of him and that he loved him.  

3)      When my son was in middle school, I would call him in sick a few times each semester and we’d go to Mystic Aquarium or the zoo or to play golf on a nice spring day. Why would an educator do something like this? Because it was fun, and often educational, depending on the destination of our private class trip. It was also a way of getting closer to him. And it was cool to play hooky when everyone was at school or work. It’s something he will remember more than one of my lengthy lectures on hard work and decency.

4)      Just yesterday, on the elevator up to the urologist’s office, a man, with no prompting, became furious that we had to wear masks. Covid was a fraud, he said, etc, etc, … the whole litany of wackadoo theories. I tried to ignore him, but he followed me into the waiting room, and just kept at it. Once I had quieted him, I looked him in the eyes. I mustered up a few tears and told him that he had a right to his beliefs but that I had lost my mother, brother, and a son to Covid, so he should think about what he says, and who he says it to. He grumbled but genuinely seemed moved for a moment before relocating on the other side of the waiting room. Most of what I had told him was a lie, but not a “complete” lie. My brother did die of complications from pneumonia and Covid in December, which devastated me and made me want to punch this Covid denier in the face. But what’s really important here is that this guy didn’t deserve the truth. In short, in my long life, I have lied many times, and will continue to do so, to people who don’t deserve the truth—people who just want to use it to acquire power or to manipulate it in order to cause others pain or to advance themselves.

To me, all of the above are Noble Lies meant to save people from hurt, to have harmless fun, to instruct them, or to make fools out of the ones who deserve to be made fools out of.

This approach to lying can be tricky of course. What if someone told you that he had lied to his spouse about having an affair so as not to hurt her? Or if they lied on their application to college because they knew that using the “college essay” as a criterion for acceptance was nonsense, and that their life experiences compensated for their lack of educational pedigree? Or that they wrote an essay on truth or lying where everything from the opening prose poem was a lie or a fabrication, even the quotations, just because they wanted to make the point that absolutely nothing matters in life.

Fortunately, I would never do anything like that to you. I also trust that you don’t have the time to fact check, anyway.

But I do wonder what Augustine would say about the above examples of lying.

I’ve always liked that dude.

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You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com

His most recent book of prose poems is Old Man Howling at the Moon

His most recent book of fiction is Shot: A Novel in Stories

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