The truth should always be told, whatever the cost. Discuss.

We human beings put a high value on the telling of the truth. Because our society is almost entirely reliant on the cooperation of its individual members, the way our different members interact is on the basis of mutual trust which is built upon and maintained by being truthful to one another. Hence, we place people who exhibit trustworthy characteristics like integrity, honesty and uprightness in high regard, using their examples as standards of behavior to admire and emulate. However, despite the prevailing idea that “honesty is the best policy”, due to the complexities and subjectivities of what constitutes the “truth” and how the cost of such “truths” can negatively impact society and individuals, the telling of the truth is more often than not a judgment call rather than an absolute imperative in human discourse.

Strictly speaking, the truth refers to information that is either self-evident or verifiable by factual evidence. For example, a statement such as “one plus one equals two” is truth that is self-evident in that any item that is counted together with another item, whether similar or dissimilar, amounts to two items. This principle is likely to hold true over repeated experiments without any change in the result of the count. One plus one will always equal to two. Where not self-evident, the truth refers to a hypothesis that is logically proven true through the inference afforded by observable evidence. The hypothesis that it is raining, for example, is verified by observing the weather for signs of liquid precipitation that manifests itself as raindrops falling through the atmosphere and “ponding” when they contact the ground.

Most of the time however, what we human beings take to be the “truth” is seldom so absolute. The information streams that we traffic in are often more complex than the examples given above. As such, we cannot afford the time to verify every piece of information that we are required to process and act upon. So human beings tend not to rely so much on truth as on “good faith”. That is, unless the information we receive appears far beyond that which we might expect, we simply assume it to be true.

As far as we know, no other creature is as dependent on information as us. Individually, our lives, relationships, activities depend on and revolve around the information we receive from others and the information we transmit to others. We rely on information to make a myriad of daily decisions that are as mundane as what to eat and how to prioritize our time with whom, where, doing what; but also major decisions that potentially have great impact on our lives, and collective society as well. The decision to upgrade a house, for example, is a major decision that has consequences for an individual family’s finances, but several families deciding to upgrade at the same time could wreak economic disaster as it did with the sub-prime crisis in the US a few years ago, the reverberations of which the world has not fully recovered yet.

Bad information leads to bad decision-making which in turn leads to a social catastrophe. If only we had known the truth that the banks were indiscriminately handing out loans thus inflating the housing market too quickly, causing debtors to default on their loans en-masse, thus bankrupting the banks whose downfall would take the economy with them… perhaps we would have been less anxious to upgrade in the first place thus averting the pathetic state we are in today. Thus, because people’s actions are based on available information, it is best that the information available is truthful in order for people to make the best possible decisions for themselves while avoiding causing harm to others.

While we hold truth to be at a premium, it is virtually impossible to verify every piece of information we encounter. Nevertheless, we have to make decisions and act on them otherwise we will become too paralyzed with uncertainty to live a normal life. What helps us cope is our capacity to trust others, that the information they carry to us is trustworthy and therefore true. Likewise others trust that the information we relay to them is equally trustworthy and therefore true too.

This trust is easy to break, however, and difficult to rebuild once broken. The consequence of breaking trust is excommunication or disconnection from the information network. When people are angry with one another they stop talking; or even sometimes instead of sharing information as they once did, they overload the channel with the noise of shouting and verbal drama. For the worst cases of broken trust, we exile trust breakers by removing them from the mainstream network and sending them to jail for a time as criminals. Some violations of trust are so grave that such violators can never be integrated into the mainstream again. For example, “Bernie” Madoff’s Ponzi scam was so audaciously deceitful that it earned him a jail term extending far beyond his remaining life expectancy. Hence it is always important to maintain our relationships with the people that make up our network by being true to one another.

The problem is that although we may genuinely wish to be always truthful, there is no guarantee that the information we convey is absolutely true. In fact, truth can be compromised due to having insufficient information, or conveying misinformation (which is unintentionally false), or even disinformation (which is intentionally false, designed to advantage one or some over others, or to justify otherwise unjustifiable actions).

The first circumstance is the most common because we do not have to capacity to know all there is to know, so we take an approximation of the truth and pass it off as the truth. The more meticulous of us approach this approximation through the use of statistical analysis which assumes that within a certain stated degree of error, truth is generally found in the majority position. Hence, for such claims as “9 out of 10 dentists recommend Crest” the implied truth is that for people deciding which toothpaste to buy, Crest is the brand of choice since so many people (especially those who claim some authority on the matter) cannot be wrong. Whether Crest the toothpaste fulfills its purported purpose is a secondary issue since we base our decision on its popularity and not its effectiveness.

For this reason – or reasoning – we human beings who are not meticulous statisticians are notorious trend followers, basing our decisions on what the rest of humanity has decided on before us, then adding our own endorsement to the numbers, thus creating a self-perpetuating “truth” that makes up for our lack of knowledge. We may not be intentionally carrying on an untruth, but we cannot say that it is the truth either. Regardless, this sort of conversation is part and parcel of the mass of trivia we pass around our network on a daily basis. Coke, Nike, McDonald’s, anyone?

Less forgivable is misinformation or the misconstruing of observable evidence resulting in a conclusion that although faulty is acted upon, causing unintended consequences. When US aerial reconnaissance observed evidence that its military analysts interpreted as a build-up of weapons of mass destruction by a rouge state, Gen Colin Powell took this information to the UN and persuaded a coalition of Allied forces to invade Iraq in 2003, only to find no such thing in reality. The cost of the campaign was heavy in military and civilian lives lost, not to mention the political and economic instabilities resulting thereafter in the region. Perhaps it could be said that the misinterpretation of the evidence was due to insufficient evidence, but deciding to put “boots on the ground” was a seriously expensive way to discover the truth as it turned out.

Yet, would it have been better not to speak out against what could have been information of an actual threat to the world? We are faced with such dilemmas all the time, though perhaps on the individual level the consequences are unlikely to be so great. Whether we speak our suspicions and risk being wrong or hold back and wait for further information that may arrive too late is a judgment call on our part. It’s a decision we make based on the urgency of the situation to act balanced against the potential harm that may arise out of our inaction. All we can really do is make a decision – not making a decision is also a decision – and hope for the best.

Of the three situations, the least forgivable is the conveyance of disinformation which is deliberately misleading so that one party can benefit at another’s expense. This we have already seen in the case of “Bernie” Madoff, fraudster extraordinaire; the financial ruin he caused others who believed his deception; and the consequences to himself once caught in the lie. Ungenerous people would also point to the 2003 invasion of Iraq as a covert US plot to destabilize the middle-east and control the flow of oil in the region so that US commercial and industrial interests can flourish heedless of the suffering caused on both sides of the conflict. We frown on such outright dishonesty (though the accusation against the US is itself largely unverifiable) and it is this sort of untruth spoken with malicious intent that we discourage in human discourse as the consequences are often disastrous.

On the one hand, knowingly conveying an untruth is a social no-no as we have seen. The general assumption is that the truth benefits people while untruth harms people which is why “honesty is the best policy” in human interaction. On the other hand, people lie to each other all the time although the intention is not malicious – quite the opposite, in fact. Apart from the basis of trust, good human relationships are also based on positive emotional experiences with one another. In order to maintain these experiences, our relationships are negotiated through rules of politeness and proper etiquette which guide us to say the ‘right’ things at the appropriate time even if they are not necessarily true. For example, we complement and flatter each other from time to time as we reinforce our relationships with good feelings towards one another. We may not mean what we say: “that’s a gorgeous hat!” “You’re looking buff! Have you been working out?” “No, that dress does not make you look fat!” but we say it because either saying it makes the other person feel good about themselves, thus strengthening the relationship, or not saying it (or being really truthful) is emotionally hurtful, thus jeopardizing the relationship – definitely an unwanted consequence.

Withholding the truth on a social scale is also sometimes necessary. If a misplaced word could jeopardize an interpersonal relationship, society must be even more circumspect with certain forms of sensitive information that could adversely affect the morale, cohesion and security of the people. For this reason, every society has some formal code or standard governing public discourse. Depending on the prevailing attitudes of society, this code can be liberal or restrictive; administered by the state or by industrial self-regulation or some in-between hybrid. More liberal societies such as Denmark run the risk of vehement social unrest and take it in their stride as we have seen during the riots resulting from the publication of 12 political cartoons that told the truth from a certain biased perspective but enraged its Muslim community as the same cartoons violated a different truth held sacred by the community. Not every society has the stomach for communal upheaval, though. Singapore society recently arrested two teenagers for posting racially insensitive remarks on their social networking accounts. Although the posts probably arose from true feelings, Singapore suppresses such sentiments from being aired in public to prevent any potential ill-will between its diverse ethnic groups from escalating out of control.

Telling the truth regardless of the cost is a nice idea, but is ultimately unrealistic. The ‘truth’ as we bandy it about in our daily conversations is seldom absolute in the first place. Truth is subject to interpretation, sometimes misinterpreted by unquestioning people and passed on as truth in their turn. The best we can realistically hope for is that the truths we transact are reasonable assumptions based on good faith. And because people trust their sources, they fail to check and verify the truth behind the information they receive, so while the intention is to pass on the truth, because we do not do our due diligence we in turn inadvertently pass on something that is only roughly approaching the truth. As long as we assure ourselves that there was no malicious intent to mislead our audience, most of the time that is good enough for us.

xmac12/7/12