“What is truth?” said jesting Pilate, and would not wait for an answer.
There are those who do not want to hear the truth. Such people may seem to be congenital liars who can barely stand to be in the presence of truth-tellers. The liars regard the truth-tellers as fools who can be easily duped by a well told lie. But even the practiced liar has to have a marvelous memory or he will trip over his lies, whereas the truth is not difficult to remember, a fact in favor of telling it. While a truth teller does not have to brag about being a truth teller, a liar may sometimes brag about his lying, at least to other liars. The only time he might not brag is when he is caught in the lie and dragged off to jail for it.
We can always debate which is more fatal to human happiness: raw lies or half-baked truths. A Raw Lie is one of this sort: There is no God. Here is another. There is no devil. The misery that follows the telling and believing of either lie, whether told to others or to one’s self, is incalculable. We generally see it right away in the way people think and behave. The advantage of confronting a raw lie, then, is that it is detectable and we know right off what we are up against. People can choose or not choose to believe a raw lie. They can confront a raw lie with the truth if they have just a little courage. Even a raw lie well told is not necessarily immortal. It can be beaten to death by honest people.
A half-baked truth is another matter altogether. A half-baked truth can be more seductive than a raw lie. Consider the strategy the Serpent used with Adam and Eve. He told them that if they ate the fruit of a certain tree, they would become as gods by virtue of knowing both good and evil. So by disobeying the Lord and eating the fruit they do gain the knowledge of both good and evil. But the Serpent only tells them what they want to hear, the half that intrigues them, the half that promises to make them gods. He does not tell them the other half (which the Lord had already told them) that if they should eat of that fruit, they will surely die. Yes, so easy to forget the truth if we are offered something in exchange for believing the lie.
And so it is that government itself, if it is satanic, will tell half-baked truths for the purpose of selling people notions that seems attractive at first, but down the line can be fatal. Consider, for example, the preaching of a socialist economy, to the extent that everyone is promised an inexpensive or free ride for this and that. Then, of course, the benefits come as promised. But at what price? This is the part of the truth that is withheld until the bill comes due, the taxes come due, and the taxpayers realize (if they are not stupid) that they have been duped.
That is the condition of the European economy today, which is on the verge of bankruptcy, a condition that the American economy is fast approaching. The government of the Soviet Union long ago abandoned its half-baked truth promising a Communist paradise. The Russian people may be no better off than they were under the half-baked truth of Communism, but at least today they can openly confront the Raw Truth: they have a gangster government. They can either choose to accept it or demolish it.
Thomas Jefferson could see the core evil of socialism long before the morally and philosophically bankrupt Karl Marx arrived nakedly sporting the emperor’s new clothes. As Jefferson said in an 1816 letter to William Plumer:
I place economy among the first and most important virtues, and public debt as the greatest of dangers to be feared. To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. If we run into such debts, we must be taxed in our meat and drink, in our necessities and in our comforts, in our labor and in our amusements. If we can prevent the government from wasting the labor of the people, under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy.
Increasingly it is difficult to prevent such waste. Venal rulers make the people their victims. This is not to say that the rulers alone are at fault. The voters elect their rulers, and too often people are foolish in the way they vote. A nation full of ignorant, stupid, and indifferent citizens, combined with politicians easily bribed, is apt to lose its way. The greatest of civilizations have fallen from the venality of enemies within, rather than enemies without.
Those who control the levers of education will raise up either a generation of free souls or a generation of fools. Socialist teachers as well as a socialist media have united against the people, who, as Jefferson put it, cannot be happy. How to bring collective sanity back to educators, the media, and the people at large is surely one of the great challenges of our age.
Very likely only a Renaissance of authentic Christian morals can save the world. But religion too is now everywhere under attack, both by liars within religion and liars outside it who seem increasingly to be a deceitful and demonic ruling class. So far as that goes, a prophecy of Jesus proves to be an infallible truth: “If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also.” (John 15:20)
But Providence always provides. In a nation consecrated to the Queen of Heaven, as many nations are, there is one clear and well trod path toward rescue. We can always reach for our rosaries.