“Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.”
- Demosthenes
Truth is a very powerful and even dangerous thing. Yet, its danger does not threaten those who desire truth, but only those who desire to suppress it. A good example of this is the recent presidential election in Iran.
President Ahmadinejad, an anti-semitic brutal, dictator has run Iran into the ground. He has suppressed the voice of his people and their cries for reforms for years. Now that the people have spoken, he has hijacked their voice by stealing this election. His people have taken to the streets to protest and they have been met with violence and thuggery. His rival, the more democratically minded Mir Hussein Moussavi, has been treated with disrespect and is being treated as a criminal by the Ahmadinejad regime. If it were not for sporadic connection to the internet, the news of the protests and election fraud would likely not be making its way westward. I hope that Ahmadinejad will eventually be overthrown by the people he has so long repressed.
Suppression of the truth, however, is not localized to brutal, middle-eastern regimes. Even in our enlightened, and industrialized nation there are many who seek to hide truth from those who need it badly. This form of suppression, albeit very subtle, is suppression nonetheless. It usually takes the form of social conditioning such as constructing cultural markers. How many times do you hear scientific programs begin with statements like, “billions and billions of years ago man evolved”, or my personal favorite, “that is a violation of separation of church and state”. Such deceptions have been platforms for perpetrating one of the greatest hoaxes in the history of western civilization-the attempt to replace the worship of God with the worship of state.
How endangered we feel will tell us how inline we are with truth. The fact that many in this country don’t believe that truth exists or worse don’t care should signal us that we are in peril indeed.
