9 Pieces of Wicked Wisdom Explained
By: Donn K. Harris
Tags: Philosophy, Sociology, Wisdom, Deep Thoughts, Truth

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7. So you’ve told me that Truth is an outdated concept and that my adherence to it marks me as inflexible and self-righteous. I replaced it with authenticity. Your move.

This is from the Mendacity piece, recently reworked to include Donald Trump’s contribution to the Bullshit Arts.

There has been so much practice hiding or twisting the truth, people are actually able to make coherent arguments about why lies are OK, or why they are not really lies but alternate truths or facts, or personalized versions of the truth that are part of our inalienable rights. (My truth …….. is my truth.) — All right, I give up, I decided to override it and come up with a quality it would be harder to discredit.

Authenticity seems to be rock-solid. You are what you say you are. You are grounded, real, and there is an in implication that the truth matters to you. Authenticity is not only concerned with facts, but neither does it distort them.

So to the doubters I say: Make your case against authenticity. Lie to me and tell me you are authentic still. It’s going to be harder. Maybe you’ll force me to extend beyond authenticity. I’ll be ready because I believe that there is a quality, and a word for it, that is beyond the petty machinations that brought down truth. I’ll find it.

8. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is not king — he’s a heretic, a lunatic, and he will be jailed and isolated. A team will be put together to refute anything he is saying.

(my riff on the ‘Biblical Paraphrases’ from Erasmus, Dutch Catholic scholar in the Renaissance, 16th century, original in the Old Testament, Book of Genesis: ‘In the street of the blind, the one-eyed man is the Guiding Light.’ H.G. Wells reimagined the concept in his 1904 short story, ‘In the Country of the Blind.’)

You’d think the man with a bit more capability would be recognized for it and others would appreciate the guidance. He could keep them from falling into pits and many other dangers and even write beautiful poetry about what he could see and share it with his contemporaries.

But the ancestors have been around a long time and they passed down the wisdom of the pits and how to avoid them, and they’ve done fine in their immersive darkness. This newcomer with his tales of a new sense — well, it’s been discussed by the blind philosophers, who did, in the abstract, conjure up this idea of a new sense, of a way to gain awareness of people’s presence, how near or far, or after a storm what things had been upended …….but that was only a mental exercise, they believed. But on the first storm after his arrival, the one-eyed man proved quite adept at finding things and returning them to their previous location, and some of the people grew excited. If it were true, there were many things that could be accomplished. And when the old philosopher, very respected and independent, who refused to join the Council that led the village, said: ‘I believe this is true. Every time the concept is deliberated, there are so many things that are immediately in need of this extra power. That tells me it’s built into us but we’ve lost it somehow’ — the Elders grew nervous. People listened to the old man. But the nominal leader of the Council, the devious and caustic blacksmith, figured out the newcomer’s angle: ‘Under the cover of the storm, he knocked the items about and thus knew where they were to dazzle us with his — what did he call it — sight? That’s sorcery! And fraud!’ And so the one-eyed man was arrested and the charge of heresy was added and as they dragged him to his cell he yelled: ‘And still the tree is green,’ further verifying his madness — what was this green he kept speaking of? It was a word from science fiction.

This little fable is illustrative of the world’s immediate recalibration toward the center whenever something new and challenging emerges. The nail that sticks out shall be hammered down. In American society, that’s reneging on a promise. We were brought up to be assertive, original, to observe few conventions. Then we enter the adult world and there’s the hammer again. The same one that you tried to use on a window pane and a screw — the hammer is now turned on you and they’re using it to pound you back into the flat plane of the wood. Next time you only get a little ways before a quick hammer stroke puts you in your place. The word appropriate was born here. The one-eyed man is eventually broken, or sedated, or entertaining fantasies of a revenge that he is powerless to enact.

This is our world. We need to recognize what is right in front of us, understand that some of our actions contribute to the marginalization of divergent thinkers.