A New Year’s Resolution That Could Spark Revolution

By Selwyn Duke

It’s that season again, that time for New Year’s resolutions, when we put our minds to perhaps giving up junk food or engaging in regular exercise. Yet while this is all well and good, even better is to add to it the aim of purging the spiritual junk food of sin from one’s life and exercising virtue. And while the virtues are many, one that perhaps warrants some special attention is honesty.

British anthropologist Thomas Henry Huxley once stated that “veracity is the heart of morality.” It makes sense, too. Just as we can’t understand what is proper tennis instruction or medical care if we imbibe lies relating to the endeavor’s principles, how can we know what is proper morality if we’re subject to lies relating to it?

Robert Welch, the founder of The John Birch Society, emphasized honesty’s importance as much as anyone. As he wrote in 1970, “If all men (and women too, of course), from diplomats to drunken bums, would simply resolve tomorrow always to be truthful, about everything — to the best of their knowledge and understanding — and would then abide by that resolution, I believe that fully half of all the troubles and grief of the human race would disappear within six months.”

This isn’t likely overstatement. The “road to Hell” can be “paved with good intentions” only because intent is motivated by information, and what appears as such can sometimes be misinformation. Most people have good intentions, too; they want their society to be better. But it’s as with a computer: garbage in, garbage out. No matter how sound the hardware and software, bad input will generate bad output. Likewise, how can a people in the grip of misinformation relating to politicians and policies choose the right politicians and policies?

And discovering Truth is a process. It’s as with a detective trying to solve a case: He follows one clue to the next, accumulating evidence until he has assembled enough pieces of that metaphorical jigsaw puzzle to see the big picture. If someone, however, gives him misinformation — or if he refuses to follow a lead because he’s scared of what he might find (e.g., a friend or powerful person may be involved) — he may never know the Truth. So it is with all people, individually and in the aggregate. Figuring out the “case” that is healthcare, national security, immigration, or anything else requires following the clues and accepting the evidence, no matter where it takes you.

Now, I don’t suppose very many New American readers are inveterate liars. But the above analogy gets at how honesty isn’t simply a matter of not deceiving others. Even more significant, and perhaps harder to avoid, is deceiving oneself; this is the imperative of intellectual honesty. For once self-delusion becomes reality, telling untruths to others happens as just a matter of course.

Lying to oneself, rationalization, is interesting, too. We do it, obviously, when an aspect of reality is scary, uncomfortable, or highly inconvenient, perhaps because it’s contrary to a cherished agenda. And thinking back to when I certainly did rationalize at times, as a child in relatively trivial matters, you often have an inkling it’s happening. There’s an unease, a sense that you’re hiding from an unwelcome reality, keeping it quarantined in your mind’s recesses so that it never has its day in intra-cranial court.

There is, though, a prerequisite for seeking and accepting the Truth in all things and in all times and in all situations: loving it. And a prerequisite for this is understanding that it’s real, something transcending man and above him. This is just as how we only put God above all else when accepting His reality (and, of course, He is Truth’s author) and loving Him — or at least, in the morally stunted’s case, fearing Him. For it may be hard enough subordinating our feelings, which can be disordered, to divine injunctions, never mind to what’s imaginary.

So a good resolution in this relativistic time, in which occultist Aleister Crowley’s maxim “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” is gaining currency, is to ask: Do we believe in Truth? If so, do we behave as if it exists? Do we do our utmost to be honest with ourselves, making Truth paramount so that it becomes our “agenda”?

If enough Americans were honest with themselves and expressed to others the amount of apropos Truth they know, we’d have a real information revolution, one that would bring us as close to utopia as is found this side of Heaven.

                 This article was originally published at The New American.