A Commonplace Book

Yet, however light in texture the [typical murder mystery] story may be, it is offered as a problem of logic and deduction. If it is not that, it is nothing at all. There is nothing else for it to be. If the situation is false, you cannot even accept it as a light novel, for there is no story for the light novel to be about. If the problem does not contain the elements of truth and plausibility, it is not problem; if the logic is an illusion, there is nothing to deduce. If the impersonation is impossible once the reader is told the conditions it must fulfill, then the whole thing is a fraud.

[A] sentence spun from the imagination, i.e., a sentence composed as a lie, confers upon the writer a degree of perception or acuity or heightened awareness--some additional usefulness--that a sentence composed with the most strict reverence for fact does not.

What is the difference between unethical and ethical advertising? Unethical advertising uses falsehoods to deceive the public; ethical advertising uses truth to deceive the public.

Henry Miller noted that there are two kinds of writers: those who write the Truth and those who don't; simple as that.

How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?

We're perpetually warned about the contemporary rise of cynicism, but a parallel American contagion, often infecting the same citizens, is credulity. The postmodern cynic cum naïf mistrusts the government, the media, and the other élites even as he recklessly embraces this or that line of grassroots make-believe. You believe that a majority of women were sexually abused as children? You believe that Ben Franklin was an anti-Semitic propagandist? You believe that you have seen a documentary videotape of government doctors performing an autopsy on a captured extraterestrial? Whatever.

This laissez-faire ultra-populism finds its perfect medium in the Internet. Not only is every citizen entitled to his or her opinion but he or she is entitled to deliver it instantaneously, studded with chunks of fake information, to the whole world.

...[One site] contains dozens of dense, competently written reports on subjects as various as the Hale-Bopp coment, AIDS, and TWA flight 800, and its frequently updated pages look as professional as those of brand-name news-media sites; the articles assert, however, that the comet may be travelling alongside "a gigantic spacecraft," that H.I.V. grew out of a "U.S. biowarfare program," and that Flight 800 was brought down by "a rift in the space-time continuum."

Thanks to the Web, amateurism and spuriousness no longer need look amateurish or spurious.

I raised questions in "JFK." The movie never said we had the answers. It deconstructed history, if you will. The Warren Commission is the myth, my movie was counter-mythology.

I drink a second mouthful, in which I find nothing more than in the first, then a third, which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is losing its virtue. It is plain that the truth I am seeking lies not in the cup but in myself. The drink has called it into being, but does not know it, and can only repeat indefinitely, with a progressive diminution of strength, the same message which I cannot interpret, though I hope at least to be able to call it forth again and to find it there presently, intact and at my disposal, for my final enlightment. I put down the cup and examine my own mind. it alone can discover the truth. But how? What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which it must go seeking and where all its equipment will avail it nothing.

...for all their differences, the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim worlds have responded to modernity -- increasingly desacralized, technical, and, for many terrifying -- in surprisingly similar ways.... Indeed Armstrong [Karen Armstrong, author of The Battle for God] maintains that all these fundamentalist movements are closely related. They were all prompted by what she calls a "terror of extinction" that gripped many of those who wished to go on believing in the face of the social forces that first began to shape today's world: atheism, 18th-century rationalism, "liberal" religious accommodation to modern life, and the terrors of political decay and upheaval.

And yet, as Armstrong notes, fundamentalism isn't modernity's opposite, but a pure product of it. The premodern religious world did not demand literal truth from its great scriptures. The Torah, Bible, and Koran were mythos -- timeless spiritual truth, not "information." By insisting on the quasi-scientific truth of the scriptures, and by organizing themselves into airtight enclaves suspicious of outsiders, modern fundamentalists from Texas to Tehran reveal themselves as mirror images of the secular absolutists they hate. Their rigid intolerance betrays what Armstrong sees as the humane, balanced ethic of traditional religion.

The problems of civilization and society are largely problems of power, and in particular of political and economic power. Yet peace and welfare cannot be secured by political negotiations and economic arrangements alone. When truth and the values of the spirit are treated only as instruments of power, they are transformed by oppositions of power into fanaticism which seeks to impose one view of truth by use of arbitrary power. The fanaticisms of our times have many causes. One, which is frequently alleged, is the fear, real or trumped up, of an opposed irrational fanaticism. Opposition to fanaticism tends to breed fanaticisms dedicated to the destruction of error. Tolerance seems a weakness in a conflict of powers; yet tolerance is the only rational alternative to organized irrational clashes. The cause of fanaticism, underlying fears and tensions, is ignorance of other historical traditions of thought and culture.

The Rectification of Names

Tsze-lu said, "The ruler of Wei has been waiting for you, in order with you to administer the government. What will you consider the first thing to be done?"
The Master replied, "What is necessary is to rectify names."
"So! indeed!" said Tsze-lu. "You are wide of the mark! Why must there be such rectification?"
The Master said, "How uncultivated you are, Yu! A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows a cautious reserve.
"If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.
"When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish. When proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded. When punishments are not properly awarded, the people do not know how to move hand or foot.
"Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately. What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect."

SOCRATES: At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters.

Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon.

To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit.

Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

The critical understand that, while some social statistics may be pretty good, they are never perfect. Every statistic is a way of summarizing complex information into relatively simple numbers. Inevitably, some information, some of the complexity, is lost whenever we use statistics. The critical recognize that this is an inevitable limitation of statistics. Moreover, they realize that every statistic is the product of choices -- the choice between defining a category broadly or narrowly, the choice of one measurement over another, the choice of a sample. People choose definitions, measurements, and samples for all sorts of reasons: Perhaps they want to emphasize some aspect of a problem; perhaps it is easier or cheaper to gather data in a particular way -- many considerations can come into play. Every statistic is a compromise among choices. This means that every definition -- and every measurement and every sample -- probably has limitations and can be criticized.

The truth of the matter is, we don't know what the truth of the underlying facts are.

Psychoanalysis and the disciplines of psychology in general began as a new, revelatory development of medical science. There is a distinct possibility that they will end as a discredited but historically significant branch of mysticism.

He knows what Freud felt and sometimes openly admitted, that the world's age-old gathering of insight into human nature is stored in its literature, that poets are and always have been what Shelley once called them, "the unacknowledged legislators of the world" - priest-like expounders of sacred mysteries, "unapprehended inspiration".

What we know, in any field, is largely what we are able formally to express, and the telling of stories is history's most articulately evolved medium for the expression of human psychology and behaviour.

Perhaps what Freud really did was to write the explicit and single-minded parables of hunger and erotomania that literature had not yet written, or had balked at writing during long centuries of Pauline Christian conditioning. Although he ranked himself with Copernicus and Darwin, perhaps we should put him alongside Ibsen, Strindberg, Joyce and Lawrence.

Behind Phillips's fine, discursive book lies a fundamental, informing uneasiness that psychoanalysis may be pretending to an authority that it cannot ultimately possess. When Phillips describes Freud as writing "science which sounded like literature", it is possible to go further and argue that psychoanalytic theory is actually literature dressed up as scientific investigation. Art's strength is metaphorical: it works by analogy, by reorganisation and rearrangement, and has the freedom and irresponsibility of thought itself. Psychoanalysis claims to be essentially a science: to proceed, like physics, by broadly verifiable laws and to embody some sort of literal truth. The drawbacks of this for clinical medicine seem obvious. Freud's doctrine of the powerful unconscious has taught us increasingly to interpret illness in metaphorical terms, yet to resist the idea that diagnostic emotional suppositions may not be hard fact. As Lewis Wolpert, in his recent superb study of depression, Malignant Sadness, observes: "It is curious that conversion disorders, made so famous by Freud, in which emotional conflict was converted into, for example, blindness, deafness or paralysis, seem nowadays to be very rare. One possibility is that many of the cases were indeed due to a physical disorder."

It's not surprising that [Freud] saw dreams as a kind of art, a "royal road to the unconscious" that could be read, picked apart and diligently expounded as though the analyst were a supremely authoritative literary critic. It was his most seductive experiment, and easily the most fallacious.

For him, the work of Freud and the other great psychological thinkers is more imaginatively enabling than it is empirically accurate or "true".

[P]erhaps the truth is less interesting than the facts?

While I find the urge to collect the words and wisdom of others an understandable way to mark one's developing self -- and not a bad way to spend time -- I do have some nagging questions about all this quoting . I wonder if transcription isn't sometimes standing in for thinking, as in the days of copy books. Or if bite-sized bytes of pithiness are all we can attend to. I wonder about what this means about how college students are reading. Are they just seeking nuggets of truth, without paying heed to the context in which they're mining? And what about attribution -- do they know anything about the writers, thinkers, artists, or activists whom they are quoting? Do they make a distinction between characters in novels and authors? When they see a quote that they really like, does it impel them to find out more about the writer, to read more and more deeply, or do they let the quote stand alone?

Monsieur Manesquier [Jean Rochefort] to Milan [Johnny Hallyday]: I hated books at first, but everyone nagged me so much, i started reading. It was like a revelation. Many people talk a load of rubbish, I think we agree on that. As soon as they write it down it becomes gospel truth. And that's a bad thing.

Sometimes the truth of a thing is not so much in the think of it, but in the feel of it.

Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.

See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda. (Applause.)

Labels are a means of communicating without getting close to the subject. Labels are untouched by human through; that is their purpose. Once we have labeled an idea we have caught it, put it in irons, disarmed it of all ambiguity and consequently never have to give it honest consideration. Labels are a blow to literacy, truth and manhood. They are death of the soul and the curse of nations. Without labels we would not have murder. Without labels we would not know war.

"To see this age! A sentence is but a cheveril glove to a good wit. How quickly the wrong side may be turned outward! . . . Words are grown so false, I am loath to prove reason with them." So Feste the jester laments in "Twelfth Night." Or pretends to lament. Or truly does lament, under the pretense of pretense. (Like our own late-night jesters -- David Letterman, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert -- Feste is ironic even about being an ironist.) He's not really the Lady Olivia's fool, he says: he's "her corrupter of words," and, like Shakespeare's still greater Fool in "King Lear," he uses corruption of language to purify meaning. In his age, as in ours, wise fools sabotage words to get at the truth.

"What was the Sherlock Holmes principle? 'Once you have discounted the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.'"

"I reject that entirely," said Dirk sharply. "The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks. How often have you been presented with an apparently rational explanation of something that works in all respects other than one, which is just that it is hopelessly improbable? Your instinct is to say, 'Yes, but he or she simply wouldn't do that.'"

"Well, it happened to me today, in fact," replied Kate.

"Ah, yes," said Dirk, slapping the table and making the glasses jump. "Your girl in the wheelchair -- a perfect example. The idea that she is somehow receiving yesterday's stock market prices apparently out of thin air is merely impossible, and therefore must be the case, because the idea that she is maintaining an immensely complex and laborious hoax of no benefit to herself is hopelessly improbable. The first idea merely supposes that there is something we don't know about, and God knows there are enough of those. The second, however, runs contrary to something fundamental and human which we do know about. We should therefore be very suspicious of it and all its specious rationality."

Are we not threatened with a flood of information? And is this not the monstrousness of it, that it crushes beauty by means of beauty, and annihilates truth by means of truth? For the sound of a million Shakespeares would produce the very same furious din and hubbub as the sound of a herd of prairie buffalo or sea billows. Such vastly multiplied content in collision brings no credit to thought, but rather its destruction. When faced with such a fate, is not Silence alone the redeeming Ark of the Covenant between the Creator and the Reader, since the Creator gains merit by refraining from spinning out just any old content, and the Reader gains it by praising such manifest self-denial?

The time has come for America to hear the truth about this tragic war. In international conflicts, the truth is hard to come by because most nations are deceived about themselves. Rationalizations and the incessant search for scapegoats are the psychological cataracts that blind us to our sins. But the day has passed for superficial patriotism. He who lives with untruth lives in spiritual slavery.

War was always a moral issue for Westerners, he said, because we had forgotten what war was really like on the receiving end, and the very way we thought about war was a kind of intellectual luxury most other cultures couldn't afford. Westerners would never admit to the practical necessity of war; in this, he said, apologizing for use the term, lay their do-rui, hypocrisy.

...Iranians, he went on, understood American pragmatism better than the American people themselves, not being fooled by the official reasoning. The war in Iraq wasn't about terrorism, he said, although it was bound to make terrorism worse: everybody knew that. It wasn't even about oil.

'You need a war to sell stuff,' he said cheerfully. 'Arms and computer systems, mostly. Construction. Roads, factories, and all that. That's how the Americans maintain their economy. Big economies need wars every few years, just to survive.'

It was refreshing to hear this from a citizen of the very country that America was now poised to attack. Yet it was characteristically broad-minded. In the course of all these journeys around the country I had never heard a word against Americans; only expressions of a kind of resignation, and deep sadness at the contemporary American perception of Iran.

I asked him whether he believed politicians had a responsibility to avert bloodshed; I had seen what bombs did, I said, and the results were never pleasant.

'You'd never be a politician,' he chuckled, and deftly flicked the butt of his cigarette into a nearby urn. 'Politicians can't afford to care,' he said. 'It's like this: if politicians were the humanitarians you'd like them to be, they wouldn't be politicians, because politicians have to start wars to keep their economies going. They'd have to kill themselves if they faced up to the truth.' This, he added was the very reason that religious men didn't make good politicians, as in Iran: they had to lie for their work, and lying was bad religion. The West didn't have that problem: lying was much easier for us.

I have a commonplace book for facts, and another for poetry, but I find it difficult always to preserve the vague distinction which I had in mind, for the most interesting and beautiful facts are so much the more poetry and that is their success. They are translated from earth to heaven. I see that if my facts were sufficiently vital and significant -- perhaps transmuted more into the substance of the human mind -- I should need but one book of poetry to contain them all.

[A]dvocacy is an essential part of journalism - if we're not pushing to teach, to engage and to motivate with our reporting, then what's the use of writing it? I won't criticize Fox News for its advocacy, or even for its partisanship. I think both [are] fine for news organizations. Newspapers for generations have employed crusading editorial writers and op-ed columnists. My problems with Fox News are its lying and its bigotry. We need advocacy - advocacy for the world view that evidence matters, that it can't be brushed aside it if challenges a desired ideology, and that it shouldn't be selectively molded to fit that ideology. We need advocacy against granting public influence to voices that promote ideology over evidence and the protection of powerful friends over spreading the truth.

Pseudomenos.--the liar--The magnetic power exerted by patently threadbare ideologies is to be explained, beyond psychology, by the objectively determined decay of logical evidence as such. Things have come to a pass where lying sounds like truth, truth like lying. Each statement, each piece of news, each thought has been pre-formed by the centers of the culture industry. Whatever lacks the familiar trace of such pre-formation lacks credibility, the more so because the institutions of public opinion accompany what they send forth by a thousand factual proofs and all the plausibility that total power can lay hands on. Truth that opposes these pressures not only appears improbable, but is in addition too feeble to make any headway in competition with their highly-concentrated machinery of dissemination. . . Only the absolute lie now has any freedom to speak the truth. The confounding of truth and lies, making it almost impossible to maintain a distinction, and a labor of Sisyphus to hold on to the simplest piece of knowledge, marks the victory in the field of logical organization that lies crushed on that of battle. Lies have long legs, they are ahead of their time. The conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power not only suppresses truth as with earlier despotic orders, but has attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false, which the hirelings were in any case diligently working to abolish.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

..that was another lecture Bachmann would have dearly loved to give to these swiftly risen managers of the post-9/11 boom market in intelligence and allied trades... It warned them that however many of the latest spies' wonder toys they had in their cupboards, however many magic codes they broke and hot-signals chatter they listened to, and brilliant deductions they pulled out of the ether regarding the enemy's organizational structures, or lack of them, and internecine fights they had, and however many tame journalists were vying to trade their questionable gems of knowledge for slanted tip-offs and something for the back pocket, in the end it was the spurned imam, the love-crossed secret courier, the venal Pakistani defense scientist, the middle-ranking Iranian military officer who's been passed over for promotion, the lonely sleeper who can sleep alone no longer, who among them provide the hard base of knowledge without which all the rest is fodder for the truth benders, ideologues and politopaths who ruin the earth.

When I tell any truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those that do.

And this tattooing had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last. And this thought it must have been which suggested to Ahab that wild exclamation of his, when one morning turning away from surveying poor Queequeg--"Oh, devilish tantalization of the gods!"

Literature, from the very beginning, has had a single enemy, and that is the restriction of the expressed idea. It turns out, however, that freedom of expression sometimes presents a greater threat to an idea, because forbidden thoughts may circulate in secret, but what can be done when an important fact is lost in a flood of impostors, and the voice of truth becomes drowned out in an ungodly din? When that voice, though freely resounding, cannot be heard, because the technologies of information have led to a situation in which one can receive best the message of him who shouts the loudest, even when the most falsely?

[Sherlock Holmes:] Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth.

Thus the desire grows upon us to have done with half-statements and approximations; to cease from searching out the minute shades of human character, to enjoy the greater abstractness, the purer truth of fiction.

The Professor [Michael Emil]: Knowledge isn't truth. It's just mindless agreement. You agree with me, I agree with someone else -- we all have knowledge. We haven't come any closer to the truth. You can never understand anything by agreeing, by making definitions. Only by turning over the possibilities. That's called thinking. If I say I know, I stop thinking. As long as I keep thinking, I come to understand. That way, I might approach some truth.

All the seeming varieties of reasoning depend merely on the nature of the subject treated and on its greater or less complexity. But in all these cases, the human mind always works in the same way, with syllogisms; it cannot behave otherwise.

Just as man goes forward, in the natural movement of his body, only by putting one foot in front of the other, so in the natural movement of his mind, man goes forward only by putting one idea in front of another. In other words, the mind, like the body, needs a primary point of support. The body's point of support is the ground which the foot feels; the mind's point of support is the known, that is, a truth or a principle of which the mind is aware. Man can learn nothing except by going from the known to the unknown; but on the other hand, as science is not infused into man at birth, and as he knows only what he learns, we seem to be in a vicious circle, where man is condemned to inability to learn anything. He would be so, in fact, if his reason did not include a feeling for relations and for determinism, which are the criteria of truth; but in no case can he gain this truth or approach it, except through reasoning and experience.

It would be incorrect to say that deduction pertains only to mathematics and induction to the other sciences exclusively. Both forms of reasoning, investigating (inductive) and demonstrating (deductive), pertain to all possible sciences, because in all the sciences there are things that we do not know and other things that we know or think we know.

When mathematicians study subjects unfamiliar to them, they use induction, like physicists, chemists or physiologists.

Over those decades of historical documentary filmmaking, I have also come to the realization that history is not a fixed thing, a collection of precise dates, facts and events that add up to a quantifiable, certain, confidently known, truth. History is a mysterious and malleable thing, constantly changing, not just as new information emerges, but as our own interests, emotions and inclinations change. Each generation rediscovers and reexamines that part of its past that gives its present new meaning, new possibility and new power. The question becomes for us now--for you especially--what will we choose as our inspiration? Which distant events and long dead figures will provide us with the greatest help, the most coherent context, and the wisdom to go forward?

Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.

[A]t once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously -- I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason -- Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge. This pursued through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

...George W. Bush, clearly, is one of history's great confidence men. That is not meant in the huckster's sense... No, I mean it in the sense that he's a believer in the power of confidence. At a time when constituents are uneasy and enemies are probing for weaknesses, he clearly feels that unflinching confidence has an almost mystical power. It can all but create reality.

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live...We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience."

We are often told that we are incoherent, but into the word people try to put an insult that is rather hard for me to fathom. Everything is incoherent. . . . There is no logic. Only relative necessities discovered a posteriori, valid not in any exact sense but only as explanations.

The earliest English novels, from "Moll Flanders" (1722) to "Clarissa" (1748), were published anonymously, with titles that implied they were true stories. It took generations to establish the conventions of fiction sufficiently to allow readers to take pleasure in novels that were explicitly untrue.

"Interesting" is a kind of linguistic connective tissue. When introducing an idea, it's easier to say "interesting" than to think of an introduction that's simultaneously descriptive but not a spoiler. I hear interesting all the time at conferences when someone is introducing a speaker. I hear interesting on the radio, when a host introduces an upcoming interview. These flighty little protocols happen so rapidly that they transit almost below the level of conscious discourse, serving only to prime me to pay attention.

In practice, interesting is a synonym for entertaining.

...What's the result of society's increasing emphasis on entertainment over substance? Novelty and innovation are valued above rigour; boring truth loses out to flamboyant falsehoods. I see it in today's click-bait headlines, and even in the practice of science.

Proceeding with all caution into uncharted territory, one must nevertheless be aware that the conclusions one is reaching and the questions one is asking at a given stage of the analysis may be only stepping stones on the way to still more penetrating questions and an even more remarkable picture.

To speak of "reprocessing and selection" may only be a halfway point on the road toward thinking of the universe as Leibniz did, as a world of relationships, not a world of machinery.

Far from being brought into its present condition by "reprocessing" from earlier cycles, may the universe in some strange sense be "brought into being" by the participation of those who participate?

On this view the concept of "cycles" would even seem to be altogether wrong.

Instead the vital act is the act of participation. "Participator" is the incontrovertible new concept given by quantum mechanics: it strikes down the term "observer" of classical theory, the man who stands safely behind the thick glass wall and watches what goes on without taking part. It can't be done, quantum mechanics says.

Even with the lowly electron one must participate before one can give any meaning whatsoever to its position or its momentum. Is this firmly established result the tiny tip of a giant iceberg? Does the universe also derive its meaning from "participation"? Are we destined to return to the great concept of Leibniz, of "preestablished harmony" ("Leibniz logic loop"), before we can make the next great advance?

Google is the mothership and ideal type of a new economic logic based on fortune telling and selling, an ancient and eternally lucrative craft that has exploited the human confrontation with uncertainty from the beginning of the human story.

Paradoxically, the certainty of uncertainty is both an enduring source of anxiety and one of our most fruitful facts. It produced the universal need for social trust and cohesion, systems of social organization, familial bonding, and legitimate authority, the contract as formal recognition of reciprocal rights and obligations, and the theory and practice of what we call "free will." When we eliminate uncertainty, we forfeit the human replenishment that attaches to the challenge of asserting predictability in the face of an always-unknown future in favor of the blankness of perpetual compliance with someone else's plan.

In brief, the data here indicate that there is no such "thing" as a "game" existing "out there" in its own right which people merely "observe." The "game" "exists" for a person and is experienced by him only in so far as certain happenings have significances in terms of his purpose. Out of all the occurrences going on in the environment, a person selects those that have some significance for him from his own egocentric position in the total matrix.

If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against.
The struggle between "for" and "against" is the mind's worst disease.

The New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell was expert at writing profiles of non-celebrities: his sympathy for the subjects he chose seemed ensured by their lack of renown; they were just ordinary folks going about their trades or reminiscing. And what a splendid prose stylist he was! I would be tempted to propose him as a model for all to emulate, were it not for a few qualms. It is not simply that everyone's monologues in his profiles end up sounding like Joseph Mitchell, or the fictional nature of some accounts. More concerning, to me, is the universally benevolent, accepting tone of these profiles: he took everyone he interviewed at their word, which means he failed to consider the self-delusions, rationalizations, and outright lies, unconscious or otherwise, to which we earthlings fall prey. The most blatant case was Joe Gould, whose self-mythologizing account Mitchell swallowed hook, line, and sinker. When he finally corrected it years later, in "Joe Gould's Secret," he seemed so stunned by the discovery that his subjects were not necessarily to be trusted that that he never wrote a profile again. Now, me, I'm too interested in people's flaws, their potential for evil, the gap between self-presentation and inner reality, or the many ways we fool ourselves. Such negative-sounding preoccupations are not recommended for a long and healthy career in the composing of celebrity profiles.

  If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite.
  For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.

Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of truth.

"The Press, Watson, is a most valuable institution if you only know how to use it." [Holmes speaking to Watson after feeding a false story to the news papers.]

There's a phrase that Gandhians use a lot that translates as "speaking truth to power." I find myself very skeptical about that phrase; at the least, it's ambiguous, because certainly all of my former colleagues at RAND, or in the government, I think, would have thought of what they were doing, their professional lives, as "speaking truth to power." To be sure, they were speaking truth for power, and some of them were also writing lies for power, but they figured that that was the price they paid for the right they got, on government payroll or on government contract, to speak truth to power. And it certainly seemed to me, increasingly, that there was so much self-deception involved that I had to stand back and really think hard about it. About just what kind of truth you spoke to power when you were working for power, when you found your whole livelihood dependent on it, when you were constantly afraid of what power would do to you if you spoke the wrong truth.

In the networked public sphere, the goal of the powerful often is not to convince people of the truth of a particular narrative or to block a particular piece of information from getting out (that is increasingly difficult) but to produce resignation, cynicism, and a sense of disempowerment among the people.

This can be done in many ways, including inundating audiences with information, producing distractions to dilute their attention and focus, delegitimizing media that provide accurate information (whether credible mass media or online media) deliberately sowing confusion, fear, and doubt by aggressively questioning credibility (with or without evidence, since what matters is creating doubt, not proving a point), creating or claiming hoaxes, or generating harassment campaigns designed to make it harder for credible conduits of information to operate, especially on social media which tends to be harder for a government to control like mass media.

The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth. However elegant and memorable, brevity can never, in the nature of things, do justice to all the facts of a complex situation. On such a theme one can be brief only by omission and simplification. Omission and simplification help us to understand -- but help us, in many cases, to understand the wrong thing; for our comprehension may be only of the abbreviator's neatly formulated notions, not of the vast, ramifying reality from which these notions have been so arbitrarily abstracted.

But life is short and information endless: nobody has time for everything. In practice we are generally forced to choose between an unduly brief exposition and no exposition at all. Abbreviation is a necessary evil and the abbreviator's business is to make the best of a job which, though intrinsically bad, is still better than nothing. He must learn to simplify, but not to the point of falsification. He must learn to concentrate upon the essentials of a situation, but without ignoring too many of reality's qualifying side issues. In this way he may be able to tell, not indeed the whole truth (for the whole truth about almost any important subject is incompatible with brevity), but considerably more than the dangerous quarter-truths and half-truths which have always been the current coin of thought.

We know from experience that no one can adequately grasp the objective world in its full reality all on his own, because the world always shows and reveals itself to him from only one perspective, which corresponds to his standpoint in the world and is determined by it. If someone wants to see and experience the world as it "really" is, he can do so only by understanding it as something that is shared by many people, lies between them, separates and links them, showing itself differently to each and comprehensible only to the extent that many people can talk about it and exchange their opinions and perspectives with one another, over against one another. Only in the freedom of our speaking with one another does the world, as that about which we speak, emerge in its objectivity and visibility from all sides.

Fiction is Truth's elder sister. Obviously. No one in the world knew what truth was till somebody had told a story.

A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses.

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.

The mixture in itself was remarkable enough, because it spelled the end of the illusion that gullibility was a weakness of unsuspecting primitive souls and cynicism the vice of superior and refined minds.

Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.

The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

There is a celebrated definition of "bullshit" by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt, which is basically a disregard for whether what one is saying is true or not, as opposed to lying, when one knows it isn't true and is deliberately recounting a falsehood.

...Davis [Evan Davis, author of Post-Truth: Why We Have Reached Peak Bullshit and What We Can Do About It] wants to define bullshit much more broadly, as "any form of communication -- verbal or non-verbal -- that is not the clearest or most succinct statement of the sincere and reasonably held beliefs of the communicator". In that case, we all traffic in bullshit most of the time, and for very good reasons.

"Genuine frankness is not the norm but the exception," Davis points out, defending the circumlocutory speech of diplomats or doctors, of people offering sympathy or encouragement, and even of politicians in some circumstances. At one point, amusingly, he even defends a piece of flowery wine writing. "This is good gibberish," he judges, "because I think for the intended readers the material is well devised."

We often think, naively, that missing data are the primary impediments to intellectual progress -- just find the right facts and all problems will dissipate. But barriers are often deeper and more abstract in thought. We must have access to the right metaphor, not only the requisite information. Revolutionary thinkers are not, primarily, gatherers of facts, but weavers of new intellectual structures.

Important as it is to maintain a stable sense of what's true -- or at least a stable set of methods by which we can reliably vet truth claims -- facts have never been enough to unite discordant narratives about the way things are.

[Don Quixote] witnesses the same events as everyone else, but comes away with a completely different set of facts. He reasons soundly from what he sees, but his perception is radically different from how everyone else perceives....

Once Quixote's stories lead him to believe that the chain gang is more likely to be disguised victims of injustice than criminals and cons, the empirical fact of their chains reinforces, rather than undermines, his belief.

Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler--for the liar--than it really is, or ought to be.

In lying to others we end up lying to ourselves. We deny the importance of an event, or a person, and thus deprive ourselves of a part of our lives. Or we use one piece of the past or present to screen out another. Thus we lose faith even with our own lives.

Poets are used to skewing the facts, to turning reality on its head, to filtering the world through their curious pen--and even when it's stout Cortez, and not Balboa, on the peak in Darien, we're still moved by the nameless force of wonder. And yet there's something essentially truthful about poetic language, in its quest for precision, in the immediacy of its effect. If poets tell the truth but tell it slant, what does this mean for our words, and when can we rely on them, whether in poetry or outside it, as expressing truth?

In 1848, the Fox family, residing in upstate New York, grew increasingly frightened by inexplicable noises in the house they were renting. One night, though, daughter Kate noticed a pattern to the sounds. So, on an impulse, the girl shouted out, "Here, Mister Splitfoot, do as I do!" She then snapped her fingers twice "and two raps immediately followed, apparently out of thin air." When sister Margaret clapped her hands four times, "four raps immediately followed." A still shaken but now intrigued Mrs. Fox took up the game--"How old is my daughter Margaret?"--and back came 14 raps. "How old is Kate?" Twelve raps.

After the Fox family finally moved, the mysterious noises followed them to their new home. Eventually, Kate and Margaret, and later their much older sister Leah, acquiesced in their destiny as mediums. But were they really human doorways to the spirit world? Late in life, Margaret confessed that everything had been faked, even demonstrating how she produced the rapping sounds by cracking her big toe. That should have settled the matter but, not long before she died, Margaret firmly recanted her recantation, now asserting that she'd been bribed by nonbelievers. As jesting Pilate famously asked, "What is truth?"

The truth about telling the truth is that it does not come easy for anyone. It's not natural or organic. The natural thing to do is tell people what they want to hear. That's what makes everybody feel good... at least for the moment. Telling the truth, on the other hand, is hard work and requires skill.

Feste. To see this age! A sentence is
but a cheveril glove to a good wit: how quickly the
wrong side may be turned outward!

Feste. words are grown so false, I am loath to prove
reason with them.

Feste. I am indeed not
her fool, but her corrupter of words.

President Donald Trump and his minions appear to have learned the lesson backwards or upside down: If you have a real wolf that you want to hide, then your best bet is to cry wolf until people wouldn't know a real wolf even if it was staring them in the face.

Our feelings ceaselessly generate narratives, contes moraux, about the world, and we become their prisoners. We make things good and bad, desirable and not, meaningful and trivial. ...Meditation shows us how anything can be emptied of the story we tell about it ...All the states of equanimity come through the realization that things aren't what we thought they were

Is it fair to object that most of us take quantum physics on faith, too? Well, we don't take it on faith. We take it on trust, a very different thing.

There are no facts, only interpretations.

While Nietzsche's quote that 'there are no eternal facts' has been appropriated by relativists, this statement is entirely consistent with our Popperian approach to truth today: we hold on to truths before new evidence comes along to prove otherwise....

Nietzsche was in the end a radical empiricist — a self-declared enemy of ideology, ideologues and people who cling dogmatically to systems, beliefs and '-isms'.

A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.

[When the three assistant directors of Rashomon told Kurosawa that they did not understand the script, Kurosawa responded with this]:

Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing. This script portrays such human beings—the kind who cannot survive without lies to make them feel they are better people than they really are. It even shows this sinful need for flattering falsehood going beyond the grave--even the character who dies cannot give up his lies when he speaks to the living through a medium. Egoism is a sin the human being carries with him from birth; it is the most difficult to redeem. This film is like a strange picture scroll that is unrolled and displayed by the ego. You say that you can't understand this script at all, but that is because the human heart itself is impossible to understand. If you focus on the impossibility of truly understanding human psychology and read the script one more time, I think you will grasp the point of it.

The way in which I think nonfiction tends to be dishonest most often isn't ... simply making up lies.... I think, actually, that happens very rarely. What happens much more often...is that the dishonesty comes through omission.

What part of the story do you not tell? So my mother was part of a large all-women's peace rally in September 2001 just before the bombing campaign in Afghanistan began, after the World Trade Center attacks, 9/11. And there were thousands of women protesting, and a small group of men came across and burned flags and chanted, "Death to America." And my mother saw on the news channel this small group of men creating a raucous. And the way these shots appeared it looked like it was all these men burning flags and shouting. And the fact is there's a lot of people around who assume that's what happened. That isn't a lie in the sense that, yes, those men did do that thing, but the omission of the fact that on that particular set of city streets, 95 percent of the people were actually part of a peace rally and 5 percent or 10 percent were part of this anti-American mob. If you don't say that, you've committed an enormous dishonesty.

The crisis we face about 'truth' and reliable facts is predicated less on the ability to get people to believe the wrong thing as it is on the ability to get people to doubt the right thing.

We ought to remember that religion uses language in quite a different way from science. The language of religion is more closely related to the language of poetry than to the language of science. True, we are inclined to think that science deals with information about objective facts, and poetry with subjective feelings. Hence we conclude that if religion does indeed deal with objective truths, it ought to adopt the same criteria of truth as science. But I myself find the division of the world into an objective and a subjective side much too arbitrary. The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won't get us very far.

That knowledge is problematic--difficult to establish, labile once created, often imprecise and always subject to the limitations of the human mind--is not the discovery of postmodernism. It is a foundational insight of the age of science, of fact and information, itself.... The point is not that facts do not exist, but that they are unstable (and are becoming more so as the pace of science quickens). Knowledge is always an attempt. Every fact was established by an argument--by observation and interpretation--and is susceptible to being overturned by a different one. A fact, you might say, is nothing more than a frozen argument, the place where a given line of investigation has come temporarily to rest.

The postmodernist argument that all truths are partial (and a function of one's perspective) led to the related argument that there are many legitimate ways to understand or represent an event. This both encouraged a more egalitarian discourse and made it possible for the voices of the previously disenfranchised to be heard. But it's also been exploited by those who want to make the case for offensive or debunked theories, or who want to equate things that cannot be equated. Creationists, for instance, called for teaching "intelligent design" alongside evolution in schools. "Teach both," some argued. Others said, "Teach the controversy."

[Ross knows] evolution is true in most everyday contexts. It is only in Phoebe's weird context that Ross does not know evolution is true....

Flat earthers are pulling the same trick. They're right that you don't know the earth is round. But they're only right in a context where testimonies of hundreds are disregarded, where widely accepted facts among the scientific community don't count, where photographic evidence is inadmissible, and so on....

...But in that context, nobody knows much at all and so this conclusion is simply unsurprising.

The spectacle is not a collection of images but a social relation among people mediated by images.

...we have underestimated the effect of the rise of advertising. We think it has meant an increase of untruthfulness. In fact it has meant a reshaping of our very concept of truth.

[T]he Cambridge spies did their greatest harm to Britain not during their clandestine espionage in 1934-51, but in their insidious propaganda victories over British government departments after 1951. The undermining of authority, the rejection of expertise, the suspicion of educational advantages, and the use of the words "elite" and "Establishment" as derogatory epithets transformed the social and political temper of Britain.

The orthodoxies of the past didn't change, or at least didn't change rapidly. In mediaeval Europe the Church dictated what you could believe, but at least it allowed you to retain the same beliefs from birth to death. It didn't tell you to believe one thing on Monday and another on Tuesday....

Now, with totalitarianism exactly the opposite is true. The peculiarity of the totalitarian state is that though it controls thought, it doesn't fix it. It sets up unquestionable dogmas and it alters them from day to day. It needs the dogmas because it needs absolute obedience from its subjects, but it can't avoid the changes, which are dictated by the needs of power politics. It declares itself infallible, and at the same time it attacks the very concept of objective truth.

The difference between life and the movies is that a script needs to make sense, and life doesn't.

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.

The anti-Semite has chosen hate because hate is a faith; at the outset he has chosen to devaluate words and reasons.... Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.

The irrational fullness of life has taught me never to discard anything, even when it goes against all our theories (so short-lived at best) or otherwise admits of no immediate explanation. It is of course disquieting, and one is not certain whether the compass is pointing true or not; but security, certitude, and peace do not lead to discoveries.

Truth is whatever the powerful want it to be, which is one of the fundamentals of authoritarianism. Might is right.

[E]ven if he told you it would not be the truth. At the very best a distorted memory of the truth as he knew it.

Indeed he knows not how to know
    who knows not also how to 'unknow.

Nietzsche's On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873) makes swift, excoriating work of language as a whole, but it exactly predicts the extravagant inanity of garbage language:

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms -- in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

He proposed (I'd argue) that we just give up on functional speech altogether -- drop the charade that our personal realities share a common language. Choosing to speak poetically (by which he meant intentionally calling things what they are not) was his ironic solution. Language is always a matter of intention. No two people could have less in common than when they are saying the same thing, one sincerely and one with snark. And so with every exchange, you have to acknowledge a reality where words like optionality and deliverable could be just as solid as blimp and pretzel. What happens if you ask a Megan or a Steph Korey or an Adam Neumann what they mean? I imagine a box with a series of false bottoms; you just keep falling deeper and deeper into gibberish. The meaningful threat of garbage language -- the reason it is not just annoying but malevolent -- is that it confirms delusion as an asset in the workplace.

He made Philip acknowledge that those South Germans whom he saw in the Jesuit church were every bit as firmly convinced of the truth of Roman Catholicism as he was of that of the Church of England, and from that he led him to admit that the Mahommedan and the Buddhist were convinced also of the truth of their respective religions. It looked as though knowing that you were right meant nothing; they all knew they were right.

If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out.

...any crime can be explained away perfectly logically if you deploy enough fantasy and mystification. But reasonable people don't believe in that kind of logic.

...at one time I made quite a little reputation for myself as a humorist by the simple process of telling the truth. It came as such a surprise to most people that they thought I was being funny.

Philosophy appears to concern itself only with the truth, but perhaps expresses only fantasies, while literature appears to concern itself only with fantasies, but perhaps it expresses the truth.

Nothing creates more misunderstanding of the results of scientific research than scientists' use of metaphors. It is not only the general public that they confuse, but their own understanding of nature that is led astray.

To truth only a brief celebration of victory is allowed between the two long periods during which it is condemned as paradoxical, or disparaged as trivial.

Sayash Kapoor and I call [AI] a bullshit generator, as have others as well. We mean this not in a normative sense but in a relatively precise sense. We mean that it is trained to produce plausible text. It is very good at being persuasive, but it's not trained to produce true statements. It often produces true statements as a side effect of being plausible and persuasive, but that is not the goal.

THE First and Father-cause of common Error, is, The common infirmity of Human Nature; of whose deceptible condition, although perhaps there should not need any other eviction, than the frequent Errors we shall our selves commit, even in the express declarement hereof: yet shall we illustrate the same from more infallible constitutions, and persons presumed as far from us in condition, as time, that is, our first and ingenerated forefathers. From whom as we derive our Being, and the several wounds of constitution; so, may we in some manner excuse our infirmities in the depravity of those parts, whose Traductions were pure in them, and their Originals but once removed from God. Who notwithstanding (if posterity may take leave to judg of the fact, as they are assured to suffer in the punishment) were grosly deceived, in their perfection; and so weakly deluded in the clarity of their understanding, that it hath left no small obscurity in ours, How error should gain upon them.

In the Pensées, Pascal observed that "there are two equally dangerous extremes: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason." With regard to language, we might say that there are two analogous extremes: to exclude the possibility that language can adequately express something truthful about the world, to admit only the truths language can convey.

The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are, because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary.

We should bear in mind that, in general, it is the object of our newspapers rather to create a sensation--to make a point--than to further the cause of truth. The latter end is only pursued when it seems coincident with the former.

The print which merely falls in with ordinary opinion (however well founded this opinion may be) earns for itself no credit with the mob. The mass of the people regard as profound only him who suggests pungent contradictions of the general idea.

In ratiocination, not less than in literature, it is the epigram which is the most immediately and the most universally appreciated. In both, it is of the lowest order of merit.