Excuse me, ye sensitive ones, if the term “bullshit” offendeth, but remember that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Say “flim-flam” if you prefer. Either way, this smell is decidedly not sweet. We can observe today that the social media weather is hot and steamy. We baste in it until our skin drips. At a minimum, your clicks are desired. Don’t worry if the image was made with artificial intelligence or the voice is not that of an actual person. Above all, don’t think too much! Let influencer persuasion take you where it will, tempting your wallet or your assent or your vote. Take the clickbait.
I sent out an alarm two years ago on this subject, but the situation remains grave. For an introduction, see Deception: The Swiss Army Knife of Bad Actors. But today’s post is not a repeat. Rather, fresh insight, new perspectives! About a year ago, I had a successful spiritual retreat in the Grand Canyon that brought light to this same subject from a different angle.
We must be truth seekers and must believe that we live in a stable reality. Once we understand it, we can trust it to always be what it is. You can count on the truth. (Although, alas, we cannot always count on our correct interpretation of it.) For us Christians, we can trust Jesus’ statement that we shall know the truth and the truth shall set us free. As opposed to deception, which enslaves.
Down in the Grand Canyon, I meditated on a couple of passages in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. The character, Father Zosima, had great wisdom to share. (Who gave him that wisdom but the author himself?)
At the time, alone in a desolate canyon in the doldrums of December, what Zosima said about love really struck me. I’ve been meditating on it ever since. The quote below can help us develop a love habit as opposed to a deception habit. We’ll also reflect on love when we get back to lying and deception.
Zosima said (Part II, Book Six, Chapter 3, p. 319):
Brothers, do not be afraid of men’s sin, love a man even in his sin, for this is the likeness of God’s love and the height of love on earth. Love all God’s creation, both the whole and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love animals, love plants, love each thing. If you love each thing, you will perceive the mystery of God in everything. Once you perceive it, you will begin tirelessly to perceive more and more of it every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an entire, universal love.
As a Christian, I believe that the Creator is loving and that being a loving person is more important than anything. Zosima’s guidance makes me think that every leaf and every grain of sand is truly part of the Creator, part of the essence encompassing all the natural world, but including the supernatural.
My meditations have led me to think about whether one can love inanimate objects in the same way as people. Even without a deeper understanding, trying to love everything might convey what Zosima was getting at: the Creator’s love is an invisible life force that holds everything together. To go deeper, however, we may benefit by seeing all loving as meeting the Creator at a specific place, like an altar or a rock cairn, or a church. Meeting the Creator there is not to dismiss the value of the place, for the Creator made it out of himself, and it reflects his nature. That place can be a rock or a leaf, but it can also be a person.
In another section of the book, Dostoevsky has a character ask a crucial question of Father Zosima, and his reply has become a famous quote from The Brothers Karamazov. The character is the elderly father of the three brothers, who has been portrayed as a debauched buffoon who cares for nothing but himself. He does not come to Father Zosima with any semblance of reverence or sincere desire to learn anything. For him, the monastery and the group of monks are nothing but a joke. Yet, he beseeches the elder.
But let’s read Dostoevsky here with a twenty-first-century mind’s eye. The buffoon who presents himself to Father Zosima bears a striking resemblance to our current White House occupant, a paragon of megalomania, buffoonery, and bullshit artistry. This late-night tweeter of rants pretends to care about Christianity only for the sake of votes and power retention. Imagine that presidential advisors have encouraged the man to visit this monk, because he is undoubtedly a very wise human being. The President deigns to go see Zosima, and they converse a bit before, as though in a confessional, our national leader says (in the character, Fyodor Pavlovich):
p. 44, Part 1, Book 2, Chapter 2.
“That remark you just made: ‘Not to be so ashamed of myself for that is the cause of everything’—it’s as if you pierced me right through and read inside me. That is exactly how it all seems to me, when I walk into a room, that I’m lower than anyone else, and that everyone takes me for a buffoon, so ‘Why not, indeed, play the buffoon, I’m not afraid of your opinions, because you’re all, to a man, lower than me!’
“That’s why I’m a buffoon, I’m a buffoon out of shame, great elder, out of shame. I act up just because I’m insecure. If only I were sure, when I came in, that everyone would take me at once for the most pleasant and intelligent of men—oh, Lord! What a good man I’d be!
“Teacher!” he suddenly threw himself on his knees, “What should I do to inherit eternal life?” It was hard even now to tell whether he was joking or was indeed greatly moved.
The elder looked at him and said with a smile:
“You’ve known for a long time what you should do; you have sense enough: do not give yourself up to drunkenness and verbal incontinence, do not give yourself up to sensuality, and especially to the adoration of money… And above all, do not lie.
“Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lies comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect toward himself and others. Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love, and having no love, he gives himself up to passions and coarse pleasures in order to occupy and amuse himself, and in his vices reaches complete bestiality, and it all comes from lying continually to others and to himself.
“A man who lies to himself is often the first to take offense. It sometimes feels very good to take offense, doesn’t it? And surely he knows that no one has offended him, and that he himself has invented the offense and told lies just for the beauty of it, that he has exaggerated for the sake of effect, that he has picked on a word and made a mountain of a pea—he knows all of that, and still he is the first to take offense, he likes feeling offended, it gives him great pleasure, and thus he reaches the point of real hostility.
This wisdom of Dostoevsky, expressed through fiction, was written around 1880 and has probably proved prescient many times in the almost 150 years since. Zosima may have been a cloistered monk, but he could see right through people. He knew that lying could become habitual, degrading the ability to distinguish truth from falsehood, and leading to continual self-deception.
Notice that Zosima connects deception to a loss of ability to love. Are they opposites? The point of deceiving another person is to gain something for oneself. Having assumed that reasoned persuasion (respecting the other’s humanity and freedom) will not work, we resort to bullshit or propaganda, or simply lying. To love another person, you have to care about their point of view. You have to want the other person to find fulfillment in life and to be fully human.
The Bible tells us that the Creator loves each one of us and has blessed the entire Creation. One way to understand this love is to believe that the Creator wants each of us to find fulfillment in our existence and to be fully human, to be fully who the Creator made us to be.
I have found a second way to see it, as mentioned above, which occurred to me from dwelling on Zosima’s guidance about loving everything. Think of other people as a place to encounter the Creator of the Universe. (You can do this with grains of sand, too, but that doesn’t diminish the value of people.) Meeting the Creator this way does not treat the person as a mere conduit. It is more like the other is an instance of the Creator, and meeting them and exploring who they are is a way of encouraging their humanity, while experiencing the Creator’s awesomeness.
One begins to see why deception and love are opposites.
Today’s world, with its endless distractions and social media temptations, calls for a couple of foundational grounding points:
- Value truthfulness and believe in the stability of what is real over fake presentations by deceivers.
- Realize that lying and deception are the root of all evil, and if we don’t fight off the temptation to engage in it, we will suffer alienation from ourselves and others.
I recommend a couple of short books for further enlightenment about truth and bullshit. The author, Harry Frankfurt, was a philosopher who died in 2023.
On Bullshit see Wikipedia buy at Amazon
On Truth see Wikipedia buy at Amazon
Here’s another recommendation, which is a way of seeing yourself and others as a possible meeting place to encounter the Creator. The poem by e.e. cummings:
Perhaps, wise Zosima would also counsel us not to despair. Have faith that Love and Truth will outlast these earthly frustrations!